Art : Prize Winners That Look to a Losing Future

The ‘80s are on the fade and with them the startling epoch now known as the Reagan Era. It’s one of those times when you start looking over your shoulder to try to figure out what happened and squint ahead wondering if a new President and a century in its climactic decade will be as dramatic as they sound or just more of the same old fits and starts.

When I think about the ‘80s I get an image of an immense glass skyscraper festooned with classical motifs in onyx and gold. It juts up, disappearing into the clouds in comic-strip perspective. Way down on the sidewalk a tattered derelict huddles in a service doorway. You can’t tell the person’s race, gender or age because the creature is all one grimy color and rather far away.

It’s been a time of lugubrious exaggeration, opulent and smug in its born-again heartlessness. Those who pass for lucky in this perfumed purgatory move from one electronic pleasure dome to the next--the computer where the stock reports come in, the air-conditioned BMW that’s so quiet the stereo sounds as good as Carnegie Hall, the big-screen television that pulls 300 channels.

But why is it that the electronic genies bring nothing but bad news about shaky markets, coagulated traffic and all kinds of systems so overloaded that they barely move passengers, house citizens, care for the sick, incarcerate crooks?

There is this ominous feeling that everything is primed to go wrong in a big way.

Everywhere you hear that the art world has been annexed in an unfriendly takeover by Big Money. The official word is that art has been liberated from the stranglehold of boring, coercive styles like Minimalism and that these days every artist does his own thing, mirroring the democracy of a pluralistic society. The word on the street is that, in reality, there is a new mainstream. It is economically determined by the powerful and simple influence of what collectors buy.

The reason there is so much awful art around is because we’ve bumbled into a system where it doesn’t make any difference whether the work is good; what matters it whether it is purchased. Art has gotten to be like a monetary system. The bank notes, worthless in themselves, derive value from a consensus based on the amount of substance invested in them. Questions of historical relevance, aesthetic quality or expressive and formal originality are barely in the running.

This doesn’t mean that there are not artists out there trying to make good art and managing it with a fair degree of success. Some of them are even absorbed into the monetary mainstream, so don’t assume that it’s impossible to find fine work in a fashionable gallery or a sleek contemporary museum show.

The search for spiritual insight and visual revelation continues as usual--it’s just complicated by gluttonous consumerism that clouds the real article in the gooey cholesterol of fashion and greed.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s current showing of “Awards in the Visual Arts” (through July 17) represents a praiseworthy attempt to accord recognition to artists in mid-career, selected by their peers and only subject to as much of the pollution of mainstream trendiness as lodges in the brains of people who are supposed to know better.

For the last seven years the AVA has selected artists from 10 regions of the United States by asking for nominations from various art professionals around the country. As many as 500 candidates are then winnowed down by the official jury. This time the 10 were picked by LACMA’s curator of contemporary art, Howard Fox, plus critic Donald Kuspit, artist Howardena Pindell, Hirshhorn Museum curator Ned Rifkin and Grey Art Gallery director Thomas Sokolowski.

Selections are more worthy than startling. All the art falls into familiar categories. The AVA process does not set out to arrive at any kind of formal or thematic cohesion, so you won’t find one amid these various representatives of Neo-Expressionism, environmental installation and Post Modernist didacticism unless you try.

If you read the tea leaves for some common thread leading to an epiphany about the current spiritual set of the American artist, you might find him in various states of withdrawal, depression, anger or resignation. It all leads back to those ominous feelings of impending breakdown endemic in the culture.

Chicago artist Jim Lutes sticks in the mind’s eye as the show’s most original personal eccentric. His grubby little paintings recall a line from an old Natalie Wood movie that says the world is nothing but a garbage heap and people are the flies it attracts.

Lutes paints double images like Archimboldo wedded to Charles Bukowski. “Paradise Without a Match” shows us a spectral head whose eyes are a threadbare tire and a whiskey bottle, his mouth a black saw-toothed ashtray full of stale butts, his nose a hooded girl sitting disconsolately in her panties. It’s a pure image of depression that elides into fuming hostility in “The Consumer”--a monstrous blond baby with enough mouths for a dozen fangs and its eyes in its stomach.

Boston’s Clifton Peacock lives in a darker corner of the same cave in grim, mud-dark small paintings of androgynous nudes brooding in empty rooms. He gets off a Goyaesque quality of evil magic in “Trophy,” where an animal like a giant rat gnaws lovingly at a bloodied corpse.

An eerie schizophrenia informs the small-scale paintings of Micheal Nakoneczny, another Chicago artist. He combines the delicate lyricism of Paul Klee with the infantile aggression of early Dubuffet in curious street scenes whose themes are too complex to clearly decipher. They do, however, leave a feeling of someone walking alone and terrified through street-gang territory talking to themselves in a squeaky little-kid voice. “Oh, this is really very nice. I think these pictures are very pretty. No, I don’t see anybody in the alley with a razor.”

Los Angeles’ Mike Kelley is not at his best here. Eight objects--most often poster-size black-and-white drawings--thin out the usual bracing chaos of his complex installations. At that he’s still all over the place, swinging from the dinged-out mysticism of “Limpid Pool” to the religious masochism of “Little Side Cave.” Kelley is like an anarchist id run amok, catapulting impulses out of his subconscious with such abandon they manage to combine the narcissism of a child playing with his feces and the magical aspirations of an alchemist.

Andres Serrano’s 5-foot photographs have things to say about the elegance of violence and cool sadism. The New Yorker gets our horrified attention with a photograph of a dog hung with a noose round his neck. Images of cactuses and crucifix speak of ritual, religion and fetishism. He plays the language-structure game at its simplest in a solid red print that is just a solid red until we know the title is “Blood.”

Serrano’s detachment and curtness recall the old joke about the sadist and the masochist. The masochist says, “Oh, beat me, hurt me, humiliate me.” The sadist just says, “No.”

Cruelty turns to full-bore rage in 12-foot paintings by James Herbert. The artist lives in Athens, Ga., and paints in the tradition of everybody from Soutine to Karel Appel. The paintings first look clogged, chaotic and abstract, then reveal both a coherent understructure and subject matter--most often primal, paranoid heads. In “Dog Boy” a figure flickers through the smeared paint like a frenzied dancer before a primitive idol.

Vernon Fisher’s work presents itself as art-about-art. “Heart of Darkness” is a big, black gridded cube with a realistic landscape painted across one corner. Familiar didactic stuff putting down rational minimalism in favor of nature. The view softens in “Observing the Memory of Time,” a classical column painted with a deep mountain landscape.

In “Observing the Memory of Water” Fisher compares the rippled surface of the sea to wood grain. It’s nice. The Fort Worth artist escapes our world with the old longing for a gentle Arcadian past.

The environmental people here take the most poetic journeys in abandoning reality’s chilly magnificence. Jim Sanborn’s mind is not at home in Washington, so it rambles to a druidian plane where “All Things Have Turned to Stone” and two ancient tree trunks confront one another like embodiments of the male and female principles. Wooden divining rods fly between them, stopped in midair like frozen desire.

Roni Horn flees to a dark ages of austere magic. There is little of Brooklyn in her installation of leaning cast-iron poles with lumpy rectangular tops. They could be weapons waiting for some ritual Japanese combat or other instruments of divination in a forgotten castle of the Seventh Century.

David Ireland just stays home in San Francisco. His installation is the gentlest and most reassuring here. It wasn’t quite finished at a preview, but it consists of plaster wallboard walls riddled with jagged holes. Because light streams through them, the effect is that of a post-disaster place that is somehow beautiful.

Bits of Ireland’s own old house were prepared to be installed--weathered green wood moldings, a cupboard door, bits of sheet copper and lead weights. They could only increase the sensation of an art that says, “Look, the worst is over and what is left is lovely.”