Curator Randal Davis, executive director of Sacramento’s Center for Contemporary Art, has seen fit to include something for everybody in this survey of new Los Angeles talent. A contrived catholicity of taste is in evidence here and, along with it, a knack, worthy of a mainstreeting politician, for appeasing every clamoring constituency. This prompts the thought that the day is not far off when curators can be dispensed with altogether and their duties taken over by computers programmed with the appropriate (and all too readily summarizable) set of au courant pieties.
A desire to cover all the bases, we must assume, is what accounts for the inclusion of specimens of the kind of abstract painting that serves as innocuous decoration in many a corporate lobby. I am referring to the work of Ovidio Federici and Holly Eichinger, both of whom seem to favor muddy tints and who employ them to produce the visual equivalent of New Age muzak. Eichinger uses vertical or horizontal bars to divide her canvases into unequal, close-valued rectangles. Federici covers his with elliptical tracks that conceivably could be related to Renaissance perspective studies of chalices, to the electron orbital clouds that surround the nuclei of atoms, or to the metal rings to be found in armillary spheres. Perhaps some conflation of the macro- and microcosmic is intended here–Federici has tided the three paintings in this show after the stars Deneb, Vega, Altair–but that merely burdens them with pretensions far too weighty for these underpowered vehicles. The same could be said of Darren Waterston’s tenebrous, neoromantic pastiches, which bear such tides as Sixteen Images For Private Devotion (which immediately raises the question: what are they doing on public display) and Alchemic Landscape Study No. 4. This is the sort of thing–along with seances, Rosicruciansim and pop Buddhism–that gives spirituality a bad name. Kate Savage’s fuzzy abstractions show that she is an artist of some promise. Like Waterson, she has an inclination to Romantic nature worship, but she also demonstrates an enthusiasm for mark-making which saves her work from the half-baked exoticism in which Waterson’s efforts are mired.
Taken together, these four artists—Federici, Eichinger, Waterson and Savage—appear to have been assigned the daunting task of arguing for the continued vitality of the spiritual in art. Somehow I find it hard to believe that this is the best that is available. What I suspect is that these were the choices of a curator whose lack of real interest in this area prompted him to select what are glib caricatures of the real thing.
The rest of the annuale is given over, with maybe one or two exceptions, to the by now obligatory mix of calculated disjunctiveness, kitsch, radical posturing, and neo-Dadaist posturing.
I don’t know why I never thought of this before—it’s really obvious—but it wasn’t until I was almost all the way through the show that I realized the extent to which postmodernist painting is really illustration. The thought occurred to me while I was in front of Susan Brenner’s paintings and it seemed to find confirmation when I returned to take a second look at Dani Tull’s.
Brenner’s paint-by-numbers look is the byproduct of what I take to be her utter indifference to issues other than the political. Apparently the sacrifice of painting is but a small thing when measured against the pressing need to broadcast feminist cliches. What does Brenner need so desperately to share with us? Well, The Reproduction of Hysteria shows a woman with her arms outstretched lying on her back on a hospital(?) bed. The outstretched arms apparently are to be read as an allusion to crucifixion and this, in turn, prompts us to recall the feminist thesis that hysteria is not so much an illness as it is an unconscious act of feminist protest, in the course of which women act out their victimization. Hysterics, according to this thesis, are involuntary feminists. The Surrealists, for their part, believed hysterics were involuntary Surrealists.
Whatever its drawbacks, hysteria is one condition that makes you feel, if not exactly wanted, then at least celebrated. Even so, compared to Brenner’s Posing, The Reproduction of Hysteria is a paragon of subtlety. A diptych, Posing depicts a smiling, made-up woman, painted in bright colors and wearing a white dress, looking at herself in a hand-held mirror (the accessory of Vanity), while next to her, painted in gray monochrome, we confront the figure of a woman whose expression and posture suggest that she is either mad or has just caught sight of a mouse. Make that a large sewer rat. Or a … well, never mind. The pendent half of the diptych shows a series of disembodied hands demonstrating what I must assume to be different ways to guide a knitting needle which, out of context, takes on the character of a stabbing instrument. (Another allusion to crucifixion?) If you remain in doubt as to what this one means, you can consult Beauty Secrets, which compares getting a facial to being the object of a degrading clinical demonstration (the endlessly suffering hysteric again).
Tull—technically at least—is a far more accomplished painter than Brenner, but the disjunctive strategy she favors–throwing together images both calculatingly banal and unrelated except by a shared disposability—seems to serve her purely as an excuse to indulge her gift for illustration. So why not drop the postmodernist shtick and just concentrate on painting?
After coming away from Brenner’s paintings, the other feminist statements in this show seem downright equivocal. Rubberized Lingerie/Human Hides, by Susan Hornbeak, is just that: I mean rubberized lingerie, a couple of dozen slips, rubberized and hung out on steel lines. It’s a neat and witty take on Eva Hesse’s love affair with latex. It’s also, I might add, the only significant piece of sculpture (or is that installation?) in the show.
The neo-Dadaist camp is represented by Jess Von der Ahe and Marcella Watton. The former likes to play around with paint-by-number kits. The latter makes slick photo-based constructions that combine, say, a jigsaw puzzleshaped fragment of a photograph of a liquor store sign with a plastic, green-haired monkey head smoking a cigarette (Holy Spirits). Is that neo-Dada? Commodity critique? Dumb art? Deconstruction? I don’t know and I don’t care. Somebody who hates art this much should stop making it.
I’ve kept the best for last. Michael Tidmus’s “From a Life: Selections Gay and Grave,” thirty small collages laid out in a grid, is the most engaging work in the show. It shares with the work of the late Tony Greene that decadent, homo-ecclesiastical quality which is the product of a combination of the faux antique tints achieved by varnishing and the florid, Latinate loquaciousness of the titling: each of the thirty pieces bear titles like Breath (Antean Enemy) or Cancer (Manifest Contrition). Greene’s great shortcoming, to my mind, was his weak drawing and the thinness of his imagery. Tidmus is more profligate. He piles the images on until he achieves a visual density that matches that of his textual references, which possess a kind of perfumed poetry of their own.
Also worthy of mention: Robert Kimmiller’s light modulators (assembled from grease-tarnished baking dishes, candles, an oil can, and a shovel head) and the eccentric, kitschy assemblages of Susan Kornfeld.
The overall impression, however, is one of almost unrelieved mediocrity. On the evidence assembled here, the bulk of contemporary artists appear to settle on art-making styles as casually as if they were choosing a club to hang out in or making a fashion statement. Style, in other words, has come to signify little more than affiliation. I am unable to draw any grand conclusion from this, but it seems worth noting.
LACE 6th Annuale through October 6 at LACE, 1804 Industrial St., Los Angeles.
Published: Artweek, October 3, 1991
Plastic Regime 