Lost in the Crowd

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

Unrealized Aspirations

Tony Greene’s work is neither better nor worse than that of any number of other CalArts graduates who yearly emerge from what Robert Hughes once re-christened Walt Disney’s Academy for the Briefly New convinced that the intensity of their feelings, the righteousness of their politics and the sheer novelty of their ideas exempt them from having to trouble themselves with anything as crass as technique. The difference is that Greene died from AIDS last year, and while some may be prompted by his death to a reflexive canonization of his work, my visit to LACE to see “Sweet Oleander,” the posthumous retrospective assembled by Richard Hawkins, left me with no desire to join them.

Hyperbole hasn’t been spared in the effort to transform Greene’s molehill into a mountain. Hawkins, for instance, informs us that “They are, these paintings, admirable.” And not only admirable, but also “viciously postured and horrifyingly sincere.” How anything can be postured and sincere–let alone viciously postured and horrifyingly sincere–is beyond me. To understand something like that, you need the sort of mental elasticity available only to those who have freed themselves from the oppressive habit of making sense. LACE’s new director, Gwen Darien, for her part, believes that “through the use of crudely eloquent motifs painted atop photographic images of male torsos and taxidermied wildlife, Greene merged representations of the pathetic, the angry, the beautiful and the horrible into contemporary views of desire and mortality.” “The fully realized results,” she adds, ” . . . not only readjust the expectations of work that deals with AIDS, but push the accepted boundaries of painting into political and critical arenas.” As if anything resembling an accepted boundary around painting still exists.

These views and others like them are worth considering for at least two reasons. First, because the work itself is so poor that any attempt to review it amounts to a review of the creative efforts of the critics and writers responsible for its inflated reputation. Second, because these views reveal a common tendency to assume that the simple fact of an artist’s reference to such loaded issues as representation, sexuality, and AIDS is a significant contribution to the discourse surrounding them. Greene’s work is saturated with reference. In his Versailles installation at Fahey/Klein last year, most of which has found its way into the current show, he included eight brass plaques engraved with quotations from, among others, Proust, Gide, London and Cavafy. His habit of embroidering photographs with thick welts of paint echoes the tattooing upon the male bodies in the photographs themselves, and makes an allusion to illuminated manuscripts which, in turn, can be related to the exotic volumes in the library of Huysmans’s fictional decadent, Des Esseintes. To me, however, this wealth of reference communicates not Greene’s achievement but, rather, aspirations never realized. If Greene hoped to become a decadent in the French mold, he appears never to have grasped that decadence, literary or pictorial, is the product of hyper refinement and of artistic conventions ripened to the point of corruption. Far from being overrefined, Greene lacked even the rudiments of the painter’s craft. There is nothing “crudely eloquent” about his work. It’s just plain crude, and Greene appears to have had no particular choice in the matter—he simply didn’t know how to paint. Those brass plaques, engraved with the words of some of the most polished writers this side of modernity, serve merely to demonstrate the chasm between what Greene wanted to achieve and what he actually did achieve.

In time, Greene might have been able to close that gap. But it would have meant parting company with the current disdain for matters of form. At the very least, it would have entailed the development of some sensitivity about the handling of line and some appreciation of the subtle means by which feelings and intuitions infiltrate touch and communicate themselves through its nuances. It also would have entailed the disappointment of those of his contemporaries who were eager to encourage his gaucheries. I am thinking here of a remark by Liz Kotz that was included in a review (AW, 4/5/90) of Greene’s Fahey/Klein show: “Greene’s work emphasizes man’s alienation from nature and from sexuality and mocks the consequent estheticizing of both realms. It leaves us with a feeling of abjection and an overwhelming sense of loss.” Such thinking goes back at least as far as Rousseau. What it overlooks is that “man’s alienation from nature and sexuality” is, at bottom, the irreversible consequence of man’s acquisition of consciousness. More to the point, that the “estheticization” of nature and sexuality, which, from the utopian point of view is nothing more than a distraction from the more worthy and pressing task of overcoming alienation altogether, may well be the only available means that will allow us a measure of reconciliation with our hopelessly artificial selves. It is the impression that these means currently are in danger of being reduced to nought that causes us to come away from Greene’s work with a sense of loss.

Published: Artweek, August 1, 1991