ART REVIEW : Foggy Focus Blurs Illusion and Imitation

There’s a fellow on the phone at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton. Looks like a businessman in that dark suit and those polished shoes. Guess he must be on hold, since his lips don’t move.

Oh--he’s part of the exhibit, for crying out loud. Must be one of those sculptures that’s supposed to look real. What do you think they make them out of? “Bronze and mixed media,” huh? What’ll they think of next!

Duane Hanson’s “Executive on Telephone (in Memory of William Weisman)” is fool-the-eye (or, in the French phrase, trompe l’oeil ) art. Its point is to trick the viewer into believing that an artist’s concoction is not just an imitation of life but the real thing.

Shows that feature such work are lots of fun, even for people with no deep interest in art. But the problem with “Trompe L’Oeil: The Magic of Deception,” on view to July 3, is that curator Norman Lloyd has hopelessly blurred the very significant distinctions between trompe l’oeil (an artistic approach that dates back to ancient Roman times) and other kinds of more-or-less imitative art made for utterly different reasons.

Some of these other pieces are plausible but ultimately unconvincing versions of real things. Others are sophisticated theoretical treatments of the “problem” of imitation. And still others have nothing at all to do with imitation.

In the exhibit, the Hanson piece is awkwardly grouped with Charles L. Daugherty’s life-size sculptures of a dog (“Karl’s Daisy”) and a pig (“De la Frontera”). If the dog is a plausible executive pet, the pig seems out of place.

More important, the “believability factor” in the Daugherty pieces is of a different order.

Hanson used fiberglass reinforced polyester resin to duplicate as closely as possible the texture, density and coloration of human skin (granted that the face looks rather waxy when viewed at close range). Daugherty applied paint and tiny colored-pencil lines to suggest the skin texture of the animals.

You can appreciate the painstaking work that went into the creation of these creatures, and you can ponder the intriguing distinctions between degrees of verisimilitude, but you never for a minute believe the animals are real.

Marilyn Levine’s “Flea Market Bag,” on the other hand, is an out-and-out eye-fooler, like the Hanson. Her slouching leather briefcase--the sort of thing you might find at a swap meet--has a worn, scratched surface that testifies to years of being stuffed and schlepped around. Surprise! There is not a bit of leather in it--it is made entirely of stoneware.

Other genuine trompe l’oeil pieces in the show include ceramic still lifes by Richard Shaw, Victor Spinsky and David Furman and Daniel Douke’s painted imitations of “found” metal scraps.

But a number of works in the show were not meant to fool anybody about anything.

Sherrie Levine makes exact copies of famous works of art--but as they appear in art book photographs. In “After Joan Miro,” the models she follows so slavishly are a trio of works (probably lithographs) by the Spanish master, famous for his “alphabet” of stars, moons and little creatures.

Levine doesn’t intend to fool anyone, to make forgeries or to join the ranks of those folks who set up their easels in front of the Old Masters in European museums. Rather, she means to call into question the uniqueness of art.

The works of art people see in art books are likely to be printed off-color or in the wrong size. Yet those images become the works of art in the minds of readers. Levine makes her copies out of a profound disillusionment with the notion of originality. Her intentionally unoriginal rip-offs of famous artists’ work reflect the dominance of the reproduced image in the dissemination of art as well as the notion that it is no longer possible to be original in art.

Ellsworth Kelly’s “Red Orange” is a fine piece but utterly wrong for this show. It is a huge, almost-triangular canvas painted the color of tomato soup, with two of its points lopped off at different angles. Although Kelly’s work is ultimately based on real-world observations, it is essentially a pristine meditation on the physical properties of shape and color.

Craig Cree Stone’s “On the Path of Becoming Those Things Remembered: Putting Rietveld on a Pedestal” looks like a piece of postmodern furniture. A little blue ledge sits on smartly notched, angled shapes set in a circular base, and everything rests on a snappily angled white cube.

This asymmetric design in wood is a homage to Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, the leading architect of the De Stijl group during the 1920s. He worked with unornamented cubic shapes and asymmetric compositions, and the group as a whole believed in the “purity” of primary colors.

Although the top of John Cederquist’s “Game Table” is real, its pseudo-doweled legs are painted designs on flat pieces of plywood. In “Chest of Drawers,” Cederquist has fashioned a “facade” of a dresser, complete with a pulled-out drawer, that hangs on the front of an irregular stack of boxes.

This isn’t real eye-foolery; it is a deliberate flipping back and forth between two and three dimensions, a witty contrast of the “real thing” with an artist’s very evident fabrication of the real thing.

Lloyd is certainly to be congratulated on snagging such a high proportion of worthy loans from museums, galleries and private collections.

But his premise for the show is so foggy that whatever educational effort he intended completely misfired. To say, as he does in his introductory notes for the catalogue, that “many artists focus on the conceptual content where the deception is used as a support element” is not only bad grammar, it is also confusing and irrelevant to the long-established meaning of trompe l’oeil. “Trompe L’Oeil: The Magic of Deception,” continues through July 3 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave. in Fullerton. Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. A donation of 50 cents to $1 is requested. Information: (714) 738-6595.