ART REVIEW : ‘NEWCOMERS’: A FAMILIAR STORY

The Municipal Art Gallery’s “Newcomers” exhibition has become an institution.

Established by Josine Ianco-Starrels during her 10-year tenure as director there and now continued by Marie de Alcuaz, the biennial show is viewed as a bridge between obscurity and recognition. But, like other exhibitions of the “introductions” genre, it’s a rickety structure that may dump more people back into the flood of little-known artists than it will transport to stardom.

Only the naive would imagine the situation to be otherwise, but only the terminally cynical refuse to entertain the hope that some astonishing unknown talent is lurking behind the next partition. Not in “Newcomers 1987.” There’s talent all right, but much of it has either been around long enough to seem established or it’s marginal.

Madden Harkness and Phyllis Green have progressed well beyond the newcomer level, both in accomplishment and notice. Harkness, who moved here from the Bay Area two years ago, draws lifelike nudes on large sheets of drafting film as if extracting light flesh from smoky caves. The deftly limned figures may tumble through space like leaves in a whirlwind or stand rigid like Adam and Eve, looking guilty or vulnerable. Essentially a classicist who invests her work with moral vision, Harkness is at her best here in a disturbing piece called “Los Desaparasidos,” depicting two reclining figures, one seeming to be trapped in a crate, the other lying on top of it.

Green, as always, makes quirky, attenuated sculpture that suggests figures in agitated motion. What’s new is her material: concrete, wood and steel instead of ceramic. And her palette has changed from jazzy bright glazes to matte gunmetal gray and white. In an installation of 16 works, Green seems to refine her vocabulary of stick figures while cultivating her taste for the awkwardness of the human condition.

Video-performance artist Ulysses S. Jenkins is no newcomer either, though two roughly 50-minute programs of his videotapes will introduce him to viewers who don’t follow video. While Margaret Honda seems a natural inclusion, her resume indicates she has already made a name for herself in San Diego. Her barbed wire constructions, based on restraints or protective devices (a shield, a hood, a muzzle and shin plates), couldn’t be worn without injury. Suspended in a darkened room with spotlights casting ominous shadows, they suggest a tenuous metaphorical marriage of safety and torture.

The exhibition presents a predictably disparate array of media and sensibilities in the work of 11 artists, reflecting the variety of art that’s waiting to be discovered. The center of the gallery is staged as an attention getter, however, with three groups of highly colored large-scale work gathered in a dominant cluster.

At its heart is Nicola Atkinson-Griffith’s ambitious installation, “The Drawing Room,” with “walls” of painted draperies surrounding a pattern-painted chair and screen. Why? Apparently for the love of decoration. Once we’ve walked through the theatrical environment, nothing makes us linger or reconsider. Though the piece is rather like a deserted stage set, it has no history and little to fuel the imagination.

Nancy Pierson, on the other hand, grabs you and thrusts you face to face with oversize, unhappy, middle-aged people in her room of oil-on-canvas portraits. Obviously no beginner, she does have a peculiar habit of calling inordinate attention to hairlines by illuminating the flesh that borders them. She also throws an occasional object--such as a blue bell--into a portrait for no apparent reason. Distractions aside, Pierson is startlingly good at turning mug shots into judgmental human presences.

The third part of the colorful centerpiece is composed of Karen Kitchel’s landscapes depicting a terrain that lies somewhere between toyland and the apocalypse. Almost lurid in color and quite stiffly painted, these acrylic paintings point out the thrill of an impending tornado and the fact that ordinary Midwestern scenes can look magical or demonic to an artist who filters childhood memories through a vivid imagination.

In peripheral galleries, the show rambles incoherently. Sandra Tasca’s pale photographs and computer-aided or -generated images of household objects ameliorate mechanical processes with a delicate touch, while Paul Carpenter seems to paint with a sledgehammer. His works have the look of thrift-shop rejects, which probably means they will be hot items any day now. He has tried out several styles during his short career, as we see in snatches of dreadful figurative expressionism, examples of facile, stylized self-portraiture and--most interesting--a wall of clumsy little paintings that muse on various subjects but generally appear self-indulgent.

While Carpenter’s work is just bad enough to plant doubts about his intentions, Deborah Marinoff’s reworked clothing seems nothing more than the crass-ification of Nancy Youdelman’s poetic sensibility. Youdelman has long been known for turning antique blouses, dresses and shoes into poignant manifestations of nostalgia by sandwiching clothing between shattered glass or puncturing it with hundreds of pins; Marinoff buries the original items in repulsive paints, gooey resins and glitter.

The point seems to be a feminist protest, trotted out in tawdry party dresses with tacked-on breasts that look like plastic-coated swirled yogurt. Unfortunately the work is so witless, derivative and--after 20-odd examples--repetitive that you end up feeling embarrassed for the artist.

Ten down, one to go, and that one remains anonymous by request. This artist has installed three curtained “chapels” that must be entered on hands and knees. The first two, called “Crucifixus” and “Pieta,” are dark except for barely illuminated statuary appropriate to those subjects. The third, “Resurrectio,” blazes with light and contains a cross, a rose and white drapery on a low table. Here we have religion as art. It could get old in a hurry, but at first encounter it’s surprisingly effective.