March 12, 2010|By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT |
Art Critic Watching "Avatar," it's hard not to be struck by the utter strangeness of a fantastically complex high-tech movie that worships fervently at nature's mysterious altar. Digital primitivism is a peculiar faith, especially with 3-D glasses.
Thirteen mostly recent, mostly large paintings by Mark Grotjahn at Blum & Poe knock that sort of faith upside the head. Emphatically handmade, with layer upon layer of pigment built up with brushes and palette knives on cardboard sheets affixed to canvas, they wear their secrets on their sleeve. Like all first-rate art, they're more mysterious for it.
The result is sumptuous and mesmerizing -- one of the most beautiful painting shows in recent memory. As with some earlier works, Grotjahn's obvious source for this body of work is Picasso's 1907 Cubist masterpiece, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Specifically he focuses on the ferocious women's lozenge-shaped eyes, linear scarification and mask-like bearing.
His paintings, some as large as 8 feet by 6 feet, look spontaneous but aren't. Color and gesture are orchestrated as symbols to be read as simply and directly as the letters in his name, which are also deployed as shapes painted as parts of the compositions. Sometimes those letters are even cut out of the cardboard and reversed, as if the artist's identity were empty space.
Picasso's penetrating, even accusatory eyes turned up in later art, including Paul Klee's whimsical 1928 "Cat and Bird," where a feathered creature flits like a delicate thought through a feline mind; Lee Mullican's knife-edge "sunspots" of the 1950s and after; and Jay DeFeo's big, 1970s graphite rendering, "Eyes," which suggests the spellbinding experience of a waking dream.
Grotjahn is nothing if not ambitious in invoking an artistic pantheon. His predecessors often invoked tribalism as something powerful but remote from industrial civilization, which needed to be recovered. Unlike them, however, Grotjahn makes paintings that refer to Modern art as if it were itself a totem.
Forget nature, these paintings say. A conscious experience of culture of any kind is what identifies our clan, and art is a material sign of spiritual kinship.
Grotjahn is mostly known for hard-edge color abstractions that juxtapose two slightly off-kilter vanishing points. Their vibrant, tactile surfaces deny the illusion of deep space that, during the Renaissance, vanishing points were invented to create. The recent paintings, plus one each from 2007 and 2008, involve another contradiction, this one built on primitive founding myths of Modern art.
Blum & Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-2062, through April 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.blumandpoe .com
Bridging two nutty worlds
In photographs and, more recently, films, Judy Fiskin has for more than 30 years looked into the deep, perhaps bottomless chasm between the art world and the rest of the world. Witty and poignant, her work succeeds in part because it never grants a privilege to one side over the other. She plainly lives in both, and the art world and the rest of the world are both revealed to be irrevocably nuts.
At Angles Gallery, "Guided Tour" is her latest film, an 11 1/2 -minute journey through a pedestrian exhibition of America's painting and sculpture that is almost entirely installed on city streets, in shopping centers, at neighborhood crafts fairs, in souvenir shops, on commercial plazas -- virtually anywhere that is not an art museum or commercial gallery. A few times the camera does slowly pan a typical "white cube" space, which signals that we are briefly inside a socially and culturally sanctioned art space.
But the inexplicable abstract art glimpsed in this unidentified museum (or gallery) primarily serves to make the other art outside the specialized precinct seem alien. Rarely does an ordinary bronze bust encountered on a city street appear to be equally as strange as a sculpture that consists of a row of giant concrete boxes, as happens here.
This is no small feat, since some of that art is signature work by celebrated artists -- Donald Judd (the concrete boxes), Richard Serra, even George Rickey. Shot almost entirely in black and white, which adds the requisite veneer of seriousness to its unavoidably comic undercurrent, the film has an anthropological edge -- coming of age in the exotic Samoa of daily life.
The soundtrack merges the earnest voices of two art museum docents leading a tour of unseen visitors -- a role that a viewer of Fiskin's film subtly assumes. The choice of volunteer docents for the voice-over is inspired, since it neatly bridges the gap between art and life so famously identified by Robert Rauschenberg as a rich source of cultural meaning.
