The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp

Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag stages Josh Agle’s work as more than a sequence of retro postcards; it presents a sustained aesthetic argument about pleasure, style, and the uneasy seductions of American postwar fantasy. La Luz de Jesus and Last Gasp have collected images that at first glance read as playful pastiche — bright chroma, chic silhouettes, tiki palms and tilted martinis — but a closer, slower viewing reveals a consistent set of formal and ideological concerns that make Shag a conspicuous chronicler of modern longing.

Visual language and mise-en-scène

Shag’s paintings operate in the register of tableau: each piece is a deliberately composed scene, framed like a still from a never-made mid-century film. His pictorial method privileges flat planes of saturated colour, a crisp contour line, and a geometry of negative space that simultaneously evokes commercial illustration and the poster art of the atomic age. These formal choices produce two effects. First, they flatten time — the viewer is never comfortably anchored in a particular decade but in the idea of “mid-century” as stylized memory. Second, by reducing spatial depth and shading, Shag foregrounds surfaces: fabrics, glass, lacquer, neon. Surfaces in his work do not hide; they perform.

The compositions often stage cinematic interaction: a cigarette held at three-quarter view, a woman in profile caught mid-smile, two men exchanging a look over an angular bar. The lighting is deliberately theatrical (neon-edge highlights, exaggerated shadows) so that every figure reads as an actor on an intimate set. This performative staging is part of the work’s charm and its critique: Shag gives us glamour as costume and dramatizes how identity is constructed through consumable signs.

Nostalgia, camp, and the politics of taste

From a theoretical standpoint, Shag’s oeuvre sits squarely in conversation with questions of nostalgia and camp. The work is knowingly theatrical — it invites delight in ornamentation and stylization — yet it rarely lapses into mere ironic detachment. In his best pieces there is a double movement: an affectionate reenactment of postwar leisure culture and a faintly disquieting awareness of how that leisure was structured (by gendered expectations, by exclusionary taste, by commodification). Where camp can sometimes be purely revelatory of bad taste, Shag uses camp as a mode of revaluation; the glittering surfaces make visible the ideological seams beneath.

This ambivalence is what keeps the images from being kitsch in the pejorative sense. Instead of flattening meaning into sentimental repetition, Shag’s pictures ask the viewer to enjoy while also being implicated in the enjoyment. The cocktail — recurring emblem and titular metaphor — becomes a device for thinking about intoxication in its many senses: sensory, cultural, ideological. It is pleasure as spectacle and as social technology.

Gender, desire, and the image of the Other

A frank scholarly engagement with this volume must confront how Shag represents gender and desire. Women in these images are often stylized: elegant, aloof, or coquettish in manners that recall advertising’s idealized silhouettes. Men are frequently suave, sometimes predatory, sometimes comically vain. There is a tension here between homage to visual archetypes and the risk of perpetuating objectifying tableaux. A generous reading treats these figures as enacted roles rather than transparent subjects — Shag stages the performance of gender rather than naturalizing it — but a critical reading must also register moments when the staging stops short of interrogation and slides back into fetishization.

Moreover, the book’s recurrent foregrounding of leisure spaces (lounges, poolside cabanas, tiki bars) invites scholarship about inclusion and exclusion: whose leisure is pictured and whose is absent? The idyll is invariably cosmopolitan and stylish, but rarely intersectional. The book thus offers fertile ground for further inquiry into how nostalgia can obscure histories of inequality even as it preserves visual pleasures.

Cultural context and intertextualities

Shag’s visual lexicon nods to film noir, pulp fiction, commercial mid-century illustration, tiki revival aesthetics, and the flat colour fields of Pop Art. These intertextual resonances operate not as mere quotation but as a bricolage that speaks to contemporary culture’s appetite for retro-savvy signifiers. In that sense, Bottomless Cocktail is also a cultural artifact of our own moment: it maps how the early 21st century repackages and consumes the visual memory of the 1950s–60s. Read through the lens of simulacra, Shag’s work stages copies that feel more real than remembered originals; the viewer’s memory is overwritten by an appealing, stylized echo.

Why the book matters

As a curated volume, Bottomless Cocktail does more than celebrate an artist who traffics in good taste and bright colours; it provides a compact field for debates about pleasure, performance, and the politics of style. Scholars of visual culture will find the collection a useful primary text for thinking about how nostalgia is manufactured and enjoyed; critics interested in gender studies will appreciate the invitation to interrogate representations of desire amid glossy surfaces; and general readers will find themselves willingly submerged in the intoxicating artifices Shag constructs.

If there is a final irony — appropriate for a book that takes its motif from endless libation — it is this: Bottomless Cocktail gives us abundant, repeatable pleasure while reminding us that pleasures are organized. The book is both convivial and cunning, an object that winks at the past while asking us, softly and insistently, to consider why we want to be transported there at all.