Representing
L.A., Pictorial Currents in Contemporary Southern California Art’ at the Frye
Art Museum
Review by Alec Clayton originally
published in The Olympian January
12, 2001
It is no secret that contemporary art has
undergone a sea change over the past two to three decades, with the demise of
modernism and the re-emergence of figurative art in a myriad of guises.
Increasingly since the advent of Pop Art, we have seen more and more
landscape, still life and narrative art, a new emphasis on content centered on
political and cultural identity, and a rebirth of styles based on Renaissance
and Baroque painting and sculpture, Surrealism, Outsider art and
Neo-primitivism. This rampant
pluralism has broadened the horizons of contemporary art in exciting ways.
It has also opened the floodgates to an awful lot of trite, banal,
sentimental and gimmick laden art. At
the forefront of all of this have been a number of young artists working in
Southern California. Mostly in L.A.
"Representing LA, Pictorial Currents
in Contemporary Southern California Art," at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum is
the first group exhibition to explore the rich and varied representational
painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture produced by Southern California
artists from 1990 to 2000. The
exhibition, put together by guest curator Gordon Fuglie, director of Loyola
Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery in West LA, surveys the works of 70
Southern California artists working in a variety of representational or
realistic styles.
Works in this show are broken into
thematic sections” new portraiture, the image of the artist, imagining
selfhood, expressions of the body, the city, still life, landscape, narrative
strategies, and the spiritual realm. Still
life opens the show, and I think this is the weakest section.
Most of the paintings here seem to be warmed over versions of paintings
by either Janet Fish of William Baily, with the exception of Ron Rizk’s
whimsical and humorous visual pun “A Sight to Be Holed.”
The paintings in the city section are
more interesting, giving the viewer both beautiful and terrifying visions of the
modern urban landscape. James Doolin’s oil painting “Psychic” is a
hauntingly beautiful scene of alienation and perhaps hopeless hope.
On a dark and empty street stands an empty store devoted to psychic
readings, the light from its window reflecting on the wet street.
Standing high above this empty store is a blank billboard on tall scaffolding
lit with an eerie cerulean blue light against an orange sky.
The sense of loneliness and the electric colors in the dark of night make
of this image something to be remembered.
More interesting still are the sections
on narrative, the body, and identity — themes that overlap in many of these
sections. There is much cleverness
here, but I wonder if any of these clever works will have lasting value.
For example, Margaret Morgan’s “Portrait of Sigmund Freud as Feminine
Sexuality,” a small portrait of Freud drawn pubic hair glued to linen.
The fact that Freud is drawn with pubic hair resonates with his eroded
reputation and his emphasis on sex, but if it were not for the wall label nobody
would know what it was drawn with.
Throughout the exhibition are homages to
(or appropriations from) earlier artists. One
of the best of these is Ira Korman’s “Joylan (After Durer).”
This is a charcoal portrait of a young man with long hair and a leather
jacket based on Albrecht Durer’s self portrait as Christ.
Another painting with appropriated images is “Coming of Age” by Anita
Janosava. This large oil painting
depicts two pubescent girls standing in front of a tree as if in hiding from
something horrible (approaching adulthood?).
If it were not for their modern dress, these figures could have been
lifted directly from a Michelangelo fresco, most notably in the muscular legs
and the large feet firmly planted on the ground.
Slightly behind and to the right is another teenage girl who stands in a
physically impossible distorted position. The
tree trunk in front of which the main figures stand metamorphs into a strong and
menacing man with upraised hands, and in the background a herd of wild mustangs
gallops forward. This is a powerful
and enigmatic painting.
There are many more paintings and
sculptures in this show that deserve commentary, but space does not allow.
“Representing L.A.” is an encyclopedic exhibition that serves well as
a compendium of the many types of representative works that fall under the
rubric of postmodernism.
Thematically, most of these works are
intriguing; aesthetically, many of them just barely miss the mark. But that’s
my opinion, and I have to confess that my aesthetic sense comes from a different
era.