Margarita Cabrera

(UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery) Maquiladoras are assembly plants, typically but not exclusively sited across the border in Mexico by U.S. corporations, that take advantage of lax environmental controls and wages that may be one-sixth of what would be paid in the U.S. to produce clothing and appliances for export. The maquiladora workforce, which accounts for 17 percent of Mexico’s employed, consists largely of young, single women who work six-day weeks and must endure various levels of sexual harassment and intimidation in addition to generally poor working conditions.

These sweatshops produce close to half of Mexico’s total exports yet the bulk of the profits return to the U.S. as corporate earnings, a transnational circulation of capital that contrasts sharply with the restrictions placed on the cross-border circulation of humans. While American industry, with bipartisan blessing, has literally gone South (and East), taking with it countless manufacturing jobs, it is illegal immigration that has been demagogued as the leading threat to American jobs and prosperity. With the Arizona legislature—described by Ken Silverstein in a Harper’s article as “composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists, and cranks,” including a state senator who once denounced tress as a burden on the state’s water supply—leading the way, several states are devising new ways to harass undocumented workers and their children. The latest such development is a Republican-sponsored bill in Virginia that would ban the undocumented from attending public colleges and universities. At the same time, there has been an increased federal effort to militarize the border even as American agribusiness continues to rely on undocumented seasonal workers to keep costs down, the paradoxical effect of which has been to trap workers who would normally come and go with the harvests into staying put and becoming indigent.

It is against this background of the cynical disavowal of the structural dependence of the U.S. economy on disenfranchised labor that Margarita Cabrera’s first museum show on the West coast demands to be considered. The Mexican-born but now El Paso-based artist gained prominence around 2006 with a group of stitched-vinyl objects that referenced Oldenburg’s soft sculpture from the early ’60s but applied the technique to the remaking of consumer goods associated with the maquiladora economy and the cross-border human traffic. In addition to absurdly limp replicas of household appliances such coffeepots, toasters, blenders, vacuum cleaners, and slow cookers, Cabrera’s sewing machine also turned out versions of the backpacks and meager items carried by migrants on their clandestine crossings. As she gained confidence and grew more ambitious, she recreated a life-scale size VW Beetle and an H2 Hummer. The former, affectionately known as the vocho in Mexico, was over the course of a forty-year production run both a mainstay of the local auto industry and an affordable people’s car. The supermaxed Hummer, on the other hand, is a symbol of excess overlaid on top of an icon of imperial arrogance. In essence, Cabrera shifted the Pop object from a sign of the circulation of signs to a sign of the circulation of labor, capital, and power.

By the time she had made the Hummer, Cabrera had herself begun employing ex-maquiladora workers whose jobs had been shipped overseas to even lower-paid workers and in her later projects she continued the practice, thus in some ways becoming an enterprise that mirrored for critical purposes the maquiladora system of production. In 2007, with the help of a sewing workshop, she began producing potted cacti fabricated from border patrol uniforms for a project she titled Espacio entre Culturas (Space in Between). This was followed by the series Arbor de la Vida (Tree of Life), which, among other things recast a John Deere tractor as an oversized clay figurine encrusted with birds, flowers, and butterflies thus conflating the industrial with the folkloristic in a tribute to the disappearing artisanal methods displaced by Mexico’s belated industrialization. This ambivalently nostalgic, perhaps Benjaminian, gesture of leaping into the past to snatch a fading symbol and reinsert it into the present, continued over in The Craft of Resistance which consisted of a makeshift factory to produce in assembly-line production 2,500 copper monarch butterflies using traditional copper crafting techniques researched on a visit to Santa Clara del Cobre, in Michoacán.

The current exhibition at Sweeney includes selections from these projects, including a recreation of the Craft of Resistance assembly line and a swarm of 1,000 copper butterflies installed in the North Atrium Gallery, and two new works, Pulso y Martillo (Pulse and Hammer) and Florezca Board of Directors: Performance (Mesa directiva: performance). The former promises to be an extended performance/installation/sound piece featuring specially built wood platforms that will hold three-by-eight-foot, heavy gauge sheets of copper to be ritually beaten by performers during the opening reception on Saturday, February 5, 6-9 P.M., after which the beaten sheets will join the copper butterflies. The performance is meant to hammer home support for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act (the DREAM Act) currently stalled in Congress. This bill would provide certain students who arrived in the U.S. illegally as minors a chance to obtain conditional permanent residency if they complete two years in the military or two years in college. The Florezca performance, which will take place on Saturday, March 5, is billed as the first meeting of the board of directors of Florezca, Inc. which Cabrera conceptualizes as a multinational corporation for undocumented people.

What seems to be emerging as Cabrera’s art progresses is greater openness to an idea of collective, performative production that plugs into the flow of communal energy that Chicano art has accessed and sustained as a source of both dignity and joy. It is a little fire against the chill of rather bleak times.

Published: Artscene, February 2011

YaYa Chou and Katy Bowen

(Gallery Revisited, Silver Lake) Kitsch is empty calories for the soul: the saccharine junk food capitalism sells you as a substitute for community. The prototypical example is Disneyland, at whose entrance you pass through a Norman Rockwell-fantasy of a small town that the homogenizing ethos of corporate behemoths like Disney long ago made obsolete. Not that Disney invented kitsch. More than a decade before Disneyland opened, Tod Hackett, the artist protagonist in Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust, walks the streets of Hollywood observing office workers dressed as tennis players and shabby apartments done up as mosques, and introduces the reader to a vision of Los Angeles as an infernal theme park. (In my movie version, the artist hero would be Llyn Foulkes.)

Since the advent of pop, the fashionable response to kitsch has been irony. To me irony is like that recently newsworthy python that burst open while trying to swallow an alligator. As a mode of cultural critique, irony has proved that there is no way to put quotation marks around an entire culture from within that culture. Kitsch is all around us and Pop irony is now no more (if it ever was more) than a digestive aid that enables the hip to consume the unhip.

So ubiquitous is kitsch that to exclude any association with it at this point is to remove oneself from practically all contact with anything resembling a shared culture. For an artist that can be fatal (in a literal sense if you’re Mark Rothko). Another option, of course, is to revel in the stuff. And this is precisely what a number of younger artists, whose cultural memories are unburdened by nostalgia for anything that predated music videos, have been doing. Welcome to bubblegum art.

Or in the case of YaYa Chou, who is part of a two-woman show at Gallery Revisited titled “Consumerism and Product #1,” to gummi bear art. Chou’s most noteworthy object to date has been a chandelier made entirely of gummi bears. The other works in the show are a great deal more traditional, to the point of almost being Victorian. They consist of various types of appliqué work on small canvases. A representative work, Rosie, is an 18-inch tondo painted tea rose pink and embellished with painted roses and flowers whose petals are false fingernails. In the center, there is a fabric appliqué of a baby bear examining its paws. The whole thing has the exquisiteness of a keepsake. If there’s irony intended, it is subtle to the point of invisibility.

Katy Bowen’s work, also in the show, bears a superficial resemblance to Chou’s insofar as Bowen, like Chou, also uses hobbyist craft materials which she introduces into her paint-by-numbers-like landscapes in the form of felt-lined pits and pompom-stuffed occlusions that are at once abstract and vaguely suggestive of lesions. These disruptions mirror the outlines of the dominant shapes in the paintings but this simple, not to say simple-minded, relationship only accentuates their foreignness. The overall effect is of paintings afflicted with pastel acne. The artist thus managers to achieve deliberately the dorky hideousness that hobbyists usually only perpetrate unwittingly. Is this yet another exercise in affirming that bad taste is the new good taste? In which case, Bowen would just be another hipster grooving on kitsch. I think there’s more to it than that. I think Bowen is constructing a fictional hobbyist persona that reveals kitsch as the end product of trying to own the sublime.

This becomes clearer when these paintings are viewed in the context of the artist’s Quonset Hut Visitors Center Gift Shop project, which consists of an entire line of merchandise themed to a fictional historic site. Since the time Claes Oldenburg opened up his “store” of refabricated everyday objects, the store/gallery analogy (the complement of the factory/studio analogy associated with Warhol) has served Pop artists as a means for reframing everyday objects as art and art itself as commodity. Bowen’s tourist-trap gift store sharpens the analogy, drawing a parallel between art dealing and tourism, both of which exploit the belief that the sublime is consumable and collectable. In that sense, Bowen reveals something about kitsch that is easy to overlook. Kitsch is not a type of object. It is not a Precious Moments figurine or a tole painting. It is the degradation that attends all commodification. The crafty (in both senses) hideousness of her work is a representation of this degradation, so “normal” in a world where everything and everyone is merchandise, that it takes a poke in the eye to draw attention to it. But let’s not forget that in the context of the art world, a poke in the eye is also effective marketing.

Published: Artscene, April 2006

Marc Leuthold’s Good Form

Marc Leuthold’s ceramic wheels rotate through a kaleidoscopic range of associations. To begin with, they conjure up the potter’s wheel itself, though only their centers (sometimes) are thrown. They might also suggest turbine blades, torsioned fabric, ruffs, ruffled water, fingerprints, marine exoskeletons, and the solar disk, a range enhanced by the oddities of memory and emotional resonance peculiar to each individual viewer. In the end, however, though they might suggest all these things and others besides, they represent none of them. Rather than yield a singular meaning, they draw attention to the instability of association and the circular restlessness of obsession. They are abstract cogs designed to engage the senses and propel the machinery of the mind.

The recent history of abstraction in the visual arts is unfortunately the history of a misbegotten and destructive enterprise. Insofar as a legitimate distinction can be made between art and decoration, it can only be based on art’s long and fruitful association with narrative. Abstraction, on the other hand, has always lent itself to decoration if for no better reason than that decoration tends to demand repetition and repetition breeds simplification. The impetus toward abstraction in art came not from any desire to make art more decorative but rather from a need to expand the range of narratives that could be incorporated into painting and sculpture. Specifically, abstraction entered art in response to a demand for more expressive content. Nonetheless, as abstraction assumed ever “purer” and more radical forms, the loosening of the connection between art and narrative became a complete rupture. Indeed, the absence of even the slightest hint of narrative content in abstract art became a point of honor in the postwar period, a position that achieved its extreme in American minimalism, which sought to deny its objects any associational content whatsoever.

What was odd and finally untenable about this evacuation of narrative content from abstract art was the simultaneous attempt to deny the inherent decorativeness of the results. At the very moment when painting and sculpture became exclusively preoccupied with shape, color, and texture, the term “decorative” became the most feared of pejoratives. Such strident denial of the obvious burdened abstract form with a weight of meaning and spiritual pretension it was too frail to carry. The sublimity and drama that formerly derived from the combination of exalted subject and the theatrical genius of the artist now had to be carried solely by gesture and color. It was an impossible task that was to be a source of despair for any artist (Mark Rothko immediately comes to mind) who set out to rise to it.

Leuthold’s work illustrates how much more felicitous the results are when the inherently decorative nature of abstraction is openly recognized and made use of. In particular it reveals how repetition, which Minimalism employed as an instrument of boredom, can be reclaimed as an instrument of decorative nuance. In theory repetition should yield uniformity, and, if the tolerances are kept within a narrow enough range (as is the case in industrial fabrication), it does. But when room is left for “noise,” unforeseen variations become possible that give the finished product a unique signature. A pertinent example here would be the “abrash” effect found in some of the most prized oriental carpets-a slight dappling in an otherwise uniform color field caused by minor variations in the hue of the batches of dyed thread from which it is woven. This is the principle that Leuthold makes such adept use of in the carving of the flutes that give his wheels their organismic quality. Because it introduces into his work effects that suggest evanescence, it also endows his objects with a visual delicacy that surpasses their actual fragility.

While retaining the unitary form of Minimalist objects Leuthold’s wheels subtly “effeminize” it by turning it to purely decorative ends. Consonant with that inversion is the mimicry of that primordially functional object, the wheel, which here serves only to draw attention to these objects’ utter lack of function (and conversely to their archly aesthetic raison d’être). Equally consonant is the fussiness of their facture, which on occasion brings to mind the fussiness of a dressmaker making sure that the chiffon bunches just so. The shards take the preciousness of the wheels a step farther by introducing the melancholy sentimentality of the keepsake and the dandyish conceit of bestowing perfection on imperfect things. Taken together, these qualities completely subvert the macho brutality to which Minimalist objects typically aspire. But “subvert” may be too strong a word here, insofar as it implies malice and radical intent. The word creeps in only because modernism has so accustomed us to disdain decoration that the legitimate exploitation of the decorative possibilities latent in modernist form tends to seem like a transgression. Leuthold’s objects, however, are too graceful to be argumentative. It is their allure that speaks for them.

The one quality that distinguishes Leuthold’s work for me is its uncommon refinement, a quality ill at ease with the coarse expectations of a democratic age but all the more valuable as the residue of an aristocratic one. In the end, therefore, I do not associate his objects with any particular thing but with something more diffuse, a delicacy of taste that conjures up an entire fabulous kingdom founded on good form.

Published: Catalog essay accompanying “Marc Leuthold, Ceramics” at Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, from October 2 to November 14, 1999

Steve DeGroodt

(The Remba Gallery, West Hollywood) Grahame Clark in his book The Stone Age Hunters—like the materials that end up in Steve DeGroodt’s works, a thrift-store find—describes how when telephone poles appeared in the northern Australian bush, aborigines started stripping them of their glass insulators. They were not, as might be supposed, embarking upon a campaign of resistance against the intrusion of the white man. Rather, they had discovered a substitute for flint in the making of spearheads.

What makes this story worth re-telling is that it serves as a reminder of the potential for unforeseen use that lies in what may be (to some people) the most ubiquitous and forsaken materials. In the case of the Australian aborigines, the potential was functional, though absurdly so-they disrupted modern technology to build stone-age tools. In the case of DeGroodt and his transformation of things like discarded cardboard boxes, envelopes, and tattered clothing into oddly delicate constructions—objects to think with, to quote Levi-Strauss—we encounter an artist who by deliberately alienating himself from the functional connotations of the very humblest of objects has devised for them a second life as the elements of exquisite art objects.

DeGrood’s work is about, among other things, the beauty of making do, a despised recourse for most of us because of its association with poverty (the phrase “living out of a box” comes to mind in this context). Yet it is one the artist has developed into an archaeological means for salvaging contemporary artifacts.

So, for instance, in Nandi, a wall-mounted work in the current show, a lovely, vaporous veil of light-blue paint floats on the surface of a couple of long cardboard boxes stacked on each other in startling contrast to the orange-brown of their unpainted sides, one of which bears a wallpaper-like indigo flower print. Another work, Untitled #0412, consists of two, large, light-gray, inverted envelopes attached to the wall with pushpins. They function as a minimalist diptych activated by means of tiny plastic tabs and hole reinforcers strewn about their surface. A more explicitly Judd-like construction, GhazaI 418, groups four boxes wrapped in vibrant red fabric. Other, more loopy wall pieces constructed from thin plywood armatures wrapped with material recall the more boisterous constructions of Frank Stella. But again DeGroodt’s are a poor man’s version that remain attached to their cultural origins.

The various references in these works to Minimalist geometry and its residue of Constructivist hubris seem deliberate. They allow DeGroodt to rescue his objects from the amorphousness of the rubbish heap and at the same time set up a contrast between the flimsiness of his materials and the presence they attain as sculpture.
DeGroodt’s strategy ought to be familiar to his viewers because it is a fundamental component of the make-believe games we all play as children. Boys and girls know that in a pinch cardboard boxes will stand in as forts, dollhouses, furniture, parking garages and a lot more. In DeGroodt’s world they stand in for the more durable and imposing materials of high art. In the process of their absurdly ersatz performance, however, they actually become the real thing. And they send us back into the world looking for aesthetic joys we had previously overlooked.

Published: ArtScene, November 1998

Nancy Davidson

Nancy Davidson at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica July 19-August 23, 1997

Coming upon Nancy Davidson’s inflated objects during an afternoon of gallery hopping, I immediately assumed I was looking at the work of an Angeleno. The in-your-face tackiness of Davidson’s style brought to mind the Bette Midler character in Ruthless People. Surely, I thought, such a connoisseur of pneumatic brazenness must be a local, an illusion I was disabused of by her bio sheet, which tersely informed me that she was born in Chicago and lives in New York.

By using inflated weather balloons as the modular basis of her constructions, Davidson takes the idea of sculpture in the round to an extreme that is both absurdly comical and pregnant with all manner of allusions, not least to pregnancy itself. In the process, Davidson mirrors the fertility of her ebullient imagination in the ampleness of her forms.

The artist exhibited six works at Shoshana Wayne. By the time I saw the show one of them had ruptured and had been replaced by a Polaroid of the tattered remains. Even so, the remaining bodies seemed to fill the room to capacity. I do not think I exceed the vulgarity of the work itself when I say that the piece de resistance was, well, a real piece of ass.

Buttress consists of a floor-to-ceiling series of five units, each formed from twinned hot pink balloons strapped into some silvery material, which metamorphose from haltered breasts at the top to G-stringed buttocks at the bottom. The work re-does Judd’s stacked boxes in such a manner as to exploit both the cinematic possibilities of seriality and the latent gynomorphic suggestiveness of jutting shapes, thus restoring to the word “stacked” its vulgar physical connotation.

Unlike many feminist reconsiderations of Minimalist sculpture, Buttress evinces neither resentment nor envy nor the paradoxical dependence on the original that obsessive critiquing–feminist or otherwise–entails. Instead, it confidently asserts an unabashed female presence and functions as the most provocative of an ensemble of large, round forms whose exuberance introduces into the otherwise austere precincts of the white cube many of the things it was expressly designed to exclude.

In works like Netella (two yellow globes dressed up in fish net and displayed on a bed trimmed with black and yellow chiffon) and Budlette (a seven-foot-high steel-and-inflated-latex flower), Davidson cleverly exploits the parallel between the conventions of female display and those governing the display of art objects. But again, as with Buttress, she seems to delight in this parallel rather than contest it, thus bypassing the debilitating paradox inherent in the hackneyed feminist practice of constructing objects to critique objecthood. Free from the self-imposed restrictions of that academic genre, Davidson achieves something more subversive. Acknowledging her own enthusiasm for the female object, whose double meaning her objects treat as a hilarious pun, she suggests that the obsessions that underlie artmaking are not different from those which compel women to seek Stairmasters, plastic surgeons and fashion malls.

More Pop (and popping) than feminist, Davidson’s work reflects the supersession of the physical body by its image. Thus while the attributes of femininity that the artist has fixated on are identical to those which are prominent in Paleolithic figurines dating back some 27,000 years, her work records a profound change in the meaning accorded to those attributes. Unlike our distant ancestors, we largely fear fertility because its consequences–pregnancy and children–do not easily jibe with the quest for self-authorship, typically expressed as a need to feel “in charge.” Nevertheless, since we remain genetically programmed to respond to the attributes of fertility, we have been compelled to devise a way of worshiping, or flaunting, boobs and butts without invoking their former signification. Over time, they have become autonomous objects of fetishistic fascination; and it is as such that Davidson presents them. In this, she confronts her audience with a cultural fait accompli. The extent to which one finds the results amusing or shocking measures the degree of one’s alignment with or alienation from the present.

Published: Art & Text, February-April 1998

Jennifer Pastor at MOCA

Jennifer Pastor’s small exhibition of sculpture has at least one salutary effect: It demonstrates—by contrary example—how much of the rest of the art of this century has been an attempt to put a sublime face on an inherently trashy modernity. Pastor’s largely plastic objects, which one can easily imagine displayed in a department-store window, are shocking primarily because they are displayed in a museum whose once austere rooms are no longer the aesthetic sanctuaries—where one goes to forget what is so ubiquitous outside–they once were. As if to drive home this point, there are, adjoining the Pastor show, several large rooms hung with massive color-field paintings, including, appropriately, a couple by Rothko, an artist whose pursuits of the sublime ultimateely wrenched him from this life altogether. It is the indifference of this,juxtaposition—modernist pseudo-religiosity in one room, postmodernist pseudo-heresy in the next—that is telling, because it reveals the extent to which liberal institutions like contemporary-art museums have become “judgment-free”—which, as it happens, is also the extent to which museums now resemble upscale department stores.

No doubt it is some vestigial remnant of’ the need to imagine it is otherwise that causes critics to find traditional virtues—craft, beauty, artifice—in Pastor’s work. That her super–kitschy assemblage of fake Christmas trees, oversized Christmas baubles and plastic simulated water torrents is overtly and even aggressively artificial is beyond dispute; what’s murkier is the distinction between the status of these objects within and without the gallery. The kick is all in the context, and that means the work with the biggest kick is the trashiest. The more recent work, an installation of the theme of the four seasons consisting of a wall-mounted, cantilevered snowbound landscape with fir tree, four painted-copper and plastic cornstalks, oversize fiberglass sea shells and a six-inch wall-mounted moth fashioned mostly from hair, evinces “better” taste, but by comparison with the former work seems like a step back.

There is it tenuous connection between Pastor’s work and commodity-critique art. The difference is that commodity-critique was both hypocritical and unwittingly consoling to author and patron alike, in that it suggested that.both could somehow intellectually separate themselves from the world of commerce while mutually profiting from it. Pastor’s work withholds that consolation—it is made by an artist who seems to belong completely to the present. She makes the art we deserve.

Published: L..A Weekly, February 7-13, 1997

Marc Leuthold

Marc Leuthold’s ceramic sculptures recall the Duc Jean des Esseintes’s collection of plants in Huysmans’ A Rebours (Against Nature), about which this fictional connoisseur of the perverse and flagrantly artificial remarks with satisfaction that “not one of them looked real; it was as if cloth, paper, porcelain and metal had been lent by man to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities. Where she had not found it possible to imitate the work of human hands, she had been reduced to copying the membranes of animals’ organs, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the hideous splendors of their gangrened skin.” Leuthold’s similar predilections yield wheels, disks, cones and hemispheres whose disquieting organic reference is achieved without departure from geometric rigor and which like viruses appear to occupy an indeterminate space between animal and mineral. The wealth of nuance and allusion to be found in these beguilingly simple forms attest to the artist’s ability to turn Minimalist means to decadent ends, to make the obvious a source of the vaguely suggestive, and pure form a stimulus for impure thoughts.

Leuthold’s sculptures, ranging from a little over five feet in height to no more than three inches, included a number of works that are actually fragments of wheels shattered in engineered kiln accidents. The willful preciousness of these fabricated remnants offered additional evidence of their author’s hyperaestheticism and of his distant association with the eighteenth-century aristocratic cult of ruins, which foreshadowed the more self-conscious decadent movement at the end of the next century.

Although Leuthold has made and continues to make functional ware, most notably a series of exquisite, Sung-period-influenced tea bowls, Here vestigial references to function seemed to be intended primarily as a means of making blatant the artist’s perverse transgressions against function. In the case of the objects designated as “cones,” which can be conceived of as cups that have mutated into sphinctered orifices, the inversion of function takes on a sexual connotation.

“Marc Leuthold,” LongHouse Foundation, East Hampton, NY

Published: American Ceramics, Vol. 12, No.1, 1995

Ways of Looking

As I looked for the source of the odd melancholy that seemed to attach itself to the paintings of the Austrian-born Oscar Van Young, I realized that it emanated not from his iconography but from an unconsciously registered awareness that work by an artist such as Van Young–now in his late eighties–is like the autographed publicity photographs of faded movie stars that can be seen on the walls of certain restaurants and delis, vestiges of a culture that barely exists today. Time was a painter was a painter, not a hotshot, not an existential hero, and certainly not some smart-ass kid fresh out of art school with a formula for setting the world on fire–rather, someone who mastered the tricks of the trade and could apply them to the making of domestically proportioned pictures that were destined for the sitting rooms and dens of patrons who still thought of culture as a European export. The samples of work from Van Young’s long career include a small self-portrait of the artist as a sharp young man, three unremarkable figurative works, and some intriguing landscapes. Van Young’s style falls into that vague category called PostImpressionism, and while his figures (excluding the fine self-portrait) are too abstracted to serve as anything other than excuse for some pleasing color harmonies, the urban landscapes, when they are places where he has lived, like Chicago and Los Angeles, possess an eerie presence.

Hy Farber, the other senior artist here, designed logos for most of his life and took up sculpture after he retired. Unfortunately, there is such a thing as coming to art too late. Farber’s penchant for stylization, which must have served him well in his first career, transforms these attempts at “self-expression” into parodies of authentic feeling.

Ilee Kaplan’s woodblock prints, on the other hand, are the genuine article, and without doubt the strongest work in 4 Directions. They come from two series, one of which portrays nightclub habitués, the other devoted to scenes of family life. In each, Kaplan deftly avoids the bathos which can easily overwhelm such genre subjects, and the lack of sentimentality in her approach finds support in her tough, economical draftsmanship and her down-to-earth orchestration of color and texture.

The drawings and works on paper by Jack Zoltak recall R B. Kitaj. A triptych entitled Alterations came about as a response to the death of the artist’s father and, at the same time, is a commentary on the adaptability of those European Jewish immigrants who survived their early years in America by bringing their self-sufficient trades with them (the interior of a tailor’s shop is depicted in the central panel). Another group of drawings is devoted to scenes and faces observed in and around the Farmers’ Market in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. To my eye, these pieces, while interesting, have not yet coalesced into a substantial statement. But perhaps at some future date they will.

Published: Artweek, February 4, 1993

Herbert Ferber

(Manny Silverman Gallery, West Hollywood) Sculptors rarely achieve eminence as colorists, though not a few have been extraordinary draftsmen. Bold chromaticism, however, distinguishes a goodly portion of these 55 works on paper spanning a 40-year period in the career of the late, first-generation abstract expressionist sculptor Herbert Ferber. These examples bear out Sam Hunter’s contention in American Art of the 20th Century that in post-war New York there was a synthesis between the arts (particularly between painting and sculpture) that was reminiscent of a similar synthesis that occurred during the European Baroque.

Ferber’s development as an artist followed a path trodden by many of his contemporaries. Coming of age during the Depression, he began his career as a socially engaged figurative sculptor, with a predilection for harshly expressive, straining forms. There followed a transformation of these figures, over a period of approximately 15 years, into abstract curvilinear forms. This evolution suggests, as is frequently the case, that the artist’s youthful radicalism stemmed from a love of dynamism for its own sake (one can only reflect how many young contemporary artists will eventually make this discovery for themselves).

By 1945, the year with which this survey of his graphic output begins, Ferber’s sculpture had become wholly abstract. Like the work of many abstract expressionists-to-be. Ferber’s early forays into abstraction owed a heavy debt to surrealism. As his career progressed his work became more improvisational and less and less preoccupied with “mythic” themes. His method of working, apparently, was to start with a drawing, move on to a small model and thence to the full-sized work, modifying the original design as the change in scale demanded it–or as new ideas suggested themselves.

While the majority of the drawings in this survey are undoubtedly just such working studies, Ferber’s gifts as a colorist are most in evidence in drawings (in particular, a series undertaken in 1958) which seem to have little immediate relationship to sculpture. In these grid-like drawings Ferber appears to be trying to capture the physical presence of sculptural form exclusively through color, and without recourse to even a hint of volumetric rendering.

As a draftsman Ferber is not of the caliber of Henry Moore (whose Stonehenge lithographs and Elephant Skull etchings, spectacular feats of drawing both, are concurrently on display at thee Norton Simon Museum), but he is no slouch either. His involvement with drawing was both intense and lifelong. The Simon Museum, incidentally, possesses what may be the only publicly displayed sculpture by Ferber in Los Angeles County, a welded steel-plate construction titled Egremont II. This work reveals Ferber confidently orchestrating into a coherent, jazzy whole a most violently antagonistic collection of volumes and shapes. No drawing could possibly capture the improvisatory élan that goes into something like that, but what the drawings in this survey do reveal is the sensitivity that can underlie the most aggressively physical and even brutal works of art.

Published: ArtScene, May/June 1992

The Slow-Growth Alternative

0ne response to the vapid conceptualism that seized art during the past decade and transformed painting into a billboard for gimmicky Baudrilliardian one-liners has been a deliberate revival of organic motifs by those painters who continued to value the material, exploratory and, when you come right down to it, the painterly elements of the medium. The organic motif lends itself to this sort of use for a number of reasons. First, it alludes to slow growth and so can serve as an apt symbol for an intuitive (as opposed to an ideological) approach to painting and, furthermore, one that is rooted (felicitous word!) in the sensual and erotic properties of surface and pigment. And because organic growth is genetically directed, that is to say internally coded, it can also be symbolically employed to reaffirm painting’s (or sculpture’s) disparaged autonomy.

Craig Antrim (a painter) and Alan Firestone (a hewer of wood), two artists. whose work is currently mated at John Thomas Gallery, demonstrate both some of the virtues of this approach and some of the pitfalls.

Antrim’s motif is what he calls a “sprig,” a vertical line from which issue a number of highly stylized, geometric leaves. In one form or another, it shows up throughout the forty-two large and small works in this show. It is employed to best advantage in a group of twenty-eight small paintings crowded together on one wall of the gallery. The close grouping inevitably prompts a mental association with luxuriant growth and thus adds a metaphoric underpinning to the serial imagery. Antrim employs encaustic as well as acrylic and oil and tends to favor textures whose substantiality could be expected to complement his organic imagery by providing evidence of both the hand (which the sprig form distantly echoes) and of the material qualities of the paint itself. But of the small paintings, the two freshest, Untitled (#18) and Untitled (#35), are actually quite thinly painted and amount to little more than childlike drawings of flowers done in black, with a circle in red serving as a perfunctory disk. Perhaps they stand out because they are the only calligraphic pieces in the show. Elsewhere, Antrim either incises or heavily outlines his forms and, as a rule, these lack the spontaneity of the paintings I’ve just mentioned. After a while, it becomes clear that the artist should have taken a tip from Mother Nature. and allowed these works to gestate a little or even a lot longer. The large paintings especially seem for the most part like hasty attempts to fill in large areas of canvas. The exception is Natural Origin, a predominantly yellow-green painting in which the stiff sprig form has developed into a loose and animated network of lines.

Firestone’s sculpture, carved from laminated wood and embellished with encaustic and gesso, plays around with notions of interior and exterior. Smoothly finished seedpod- or cocoon-like forms are either lacerated or cut and opened to reveal a slightly ribbed interior discolored by material oozing from between the laminated strata. In a work titled Between Substance and Light (1991), a piece resembling a double wheel and made largely from translucent resin, the doubling of the wheel serves at once to make the piece free-standing and at the same time echoes the dual character of the material employed in its construction. These are sensitive, poetic pieces. Their only shortcoming, in my opinion, is that they’re neither small enough to be intimate nor large enough to be monumental, but instead occupy a rather awkward space in between.

Published: Artweek, October 3, 1991