Aaron Young

Aaron Young's work explores the role of the stereotypical rebel, often collaborating with members of marginalized subcultures like motorcycle gangs, skateboarders, graffiti artists, and tattoo enthusiasts to create works that address issues of ideology, class, and identity. Inspired by the masters of the post-war avant-garde, such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Chris Burden, he often reinterprets their iconic gestures through spectacular—and often dangerous—performances that complicate the distinction between high art and popular culture. In the performance Arc Light (2008), Young drew on Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage's Automobile Tire Print (1951), in which Rauschenberg directed Cage to drive his car, its wheels covered in black paint, in a straight line over a roll of paper the artist placed in the street outside his Lower Manhattan studio, leaving behind a thick, black tread mark. In Young's version, the car is replaced by a team of motorcycle riders, who perform complex choreography over aluminum and plywood panels, with the burnt rubber of their tires merging with colored paint to create intricate patterns. Similarly, in Greeting Card 10a (2007), which borrows its title from an early Jackson Pollock work, Young translates Pollock's performative "action painting," by which the final painting traces the movements of the artist's body around the canvas, into a death-defying performance in which a team of motorcyclists moved around plywood panels coated in layers of wet paint.  

Young's was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and his work has been exhibited in solo shows at institutions such as Museo di Arte Contemporanea in Rome and Kunst-Werke in Berlin, as well as in group shows at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and MoMA PS1.