For nearly five decades the revered Californian artist Jim Shaw has worked as if he were composing an ongoing absurdist parable about the modern world, turning the ordinary detritus of American life into an unlikely kind of scripture, in which junk, scraps and refuse testify to ways of seeing otherwise abandoned by prescribed taste. Over that long career, he has accumulated a vast and idiosyncratic archive of objects and images that function like a dystopian cultural archive, and produced numerous images that unsettle moral certainties, oftentimes revealing the hidden grammars of longing and shame with a mixture of brash directness and cool ironic distance.

His practice then inhabits a space at the bleeding edge of taste, presenting hallucinatory frescoes in which familiar icons and myths become props for ridicule and displacement, with all of their supposed certainties unstitched and bizarrely reconfigured. In this rare conversation with FUTURISTIC DRAGON, he speaks without indulgence about the particular arithmetic of complexity he regards as beautiful, and the curious ethics of error – how a misstep, when exposed, can open up a space for new perception and radical reorientation. The account he gives is, however, neither apologetic nor celebratory, but a patient examination of how certain gestures in art unmask the ordinary, and how failure, once revealed, has unforeseen possibilities for renewal.