Local Heroes Who March to Their Own Beat

“I don’t exactly understand how anybody can do a show called ‘Different Drummers.’ I always thought all art was about people who go their own way,” said Robert Helm.

The Washington state artist was hanging around the preview of the Hirshhorn Museum exhibition of nine contemporary artists, which bears a title drawn from the writings of Henry David Thoreau and a song that was Linda Ronstadt’s first big hit.

Helm is tall and balding with a dark mustache. He looks like an outsider in his black jeans, T-shirt and boots. So does 87-year-old Louisiana sculptor Clyde Connell, who sat nearby with a frail, gracious Katharine Hepburn air. Both appear somewhat shy but talk a blue streak once they get started. Across the room, New Mexico sculptor Luis Jimenez was explaining his huge plexiglass “Sodbuster” to an earnest young critic from San Diego. Jimenez doesn’t actually look like a rodeo barker, but his colorful work gives him that aura.

Helm guided a visitor to his “Dining Car”--odd title for an image of a bird staring in an old wood-framed mirror. “I salvaged this wood from Robert Louis Stevenson’s schooner, Equator. It was just rotting away in dry dock on the coast. I think that adds something even if you don’t know it.”

Later Clyde Connell talked about her strange wood-and- papier-mache sculpture. She used to be an abstract expressionist painter with a good local reputation. Then her husband retired and they moved to the hinterlands.

“I decided I wanted to do something of my own, something about the South. Once when I was a little girl some of us children were out walking and we saw a black man lynched. We never told anybody about it for fear of getting in trouble, but I never forgot it.”

Clearly. Her work has the beat of both African fetish sculpture and instruments of torture.

Decidedly this was not your average preview full of poseurs spouting jargon. These artists are earthy geographic and mental outsiders whose work evolves from the most intense personal circumstances. Helm, 45, was in the capital for the first time and had arrived by train.

But what makes these artists different in a sphere that already specializes in being esoteric? Aside from staying away from the Big Apple if they are of a mind to, they would also appear to belong to a generation that is on the fade. Three of them--Alfred Jensen, Wallace Berman and Oyvind Fahlstrom--have already shuffled off to the tattoo of the funeral drum. Helm is the youngest of the rest. Can you believe that the reclusive Californian called “Jess,” whom we still think of as the upstart iconoclast maker of doctored comic strips like “Tricky Cad,” is 65? Sheesh.

They are different from other artists in their relative indifference to fame. None is a superstar of the caliber of, say, Frank Stella, and while no artist is indifferent to recognition, this lot insists on dictating terms rather than following the exigencies of fashion. They tend to be cult figures admired as local heroes or by broad-minded insiders the way H.C. Westermann used to be. Wonder why old H.C.’s not in the show?

OK, so they are unlike the uncommon herd, but are they alike in any way? Well, it’s easy to imagine a righteous formalist dismissing the lot as a pack of second-rate eccentrics, but it’s pretty tough to reconcile Jensen’s goopy metaphysical diagrams with Bruce Conner’s necrophiliac assemblage of dolls trailing cobwebs of old pantyhose.

You have to dig a little deeper to find common bedrock for both Fahlstrom’s lexicographic cartoon images and Berman’s enslaved rocks emblazoned with Hebrew letters. Actually, the show might have been titled “Obsession” if that didn’t sound so much like a perfume ad.

Complication is a hallmark of this work, whether it is Jimenez embroiled in sculpting every claw, rib and fur-scale on his howling wolf or Conner building up layers of collage that look like the natural accretions of eroded layers of posters on a fence.

Wound-up engagement gives the work a fetish-like aura but more importantly conveys minds that are indifferent to time or defiant of it. To be indifferent to time is to be resigned to death or concerned about larger matters of metaphysics, philosophy or alchemy.

Helm’s “Race” illustrates the point best. It is made of two small shadow boxes each containing a miniature sawhorse holding up a stick whittled down to the point of breaking. Above each hangs a rock in a leather pouch suspended on a thong. The “race” is with time, which Helm has already slowed down by working about 2,000 hours on each exquisitely detailed reliquary. Which thong will break first and when? Certainly not in our lifetime. So Helm has both accepted time and played a practical joke on it. He has planted a booby trap that will have a little laugh on mortality.

Helm’s recent work is slightly more Neo-Expressionist and Magritte-like, but when we see his picture of a vain bird staring in a mirror as it floats on a coffin-like box, it’s clear the artist’s preoccupations remain the same.

Jess paints wistful pastel-colored scenes that look like sweet antiseptic ‘30s children’s book illustrations. He brings out a surprisingly accurate sense of the metaphysical that lurks in the style by rendering them on top of mud-thick impastoes. Paint is surely not dry beneath the surface skin, so these paintings--like Helm’s boxes--will change with time, crackling like parched earth (which is, of course, what they are). Dust to dust and smiling the whole way.

Jensen’s diagrammatic abstractions will sustain the same decay, but where Jess gives us resigned nostalgia Jensen left cosmic thoughts on numerology and systematized mysticism--the occult.

A ‘60s-style sensibility unites these artists’ shared interest in matters sometimes seen as extra-artistic, flower-child thoughts, drop-out thoughts, counterculture thoughts. One might get into a polite wrangle, however, with curator Frank Getting over the extreme disjunction that includes artists as mystical as Jensen and as violently socially satirical as Peter Saul.

Saul’s rubbery sadomasochistic cartoons lampoon everything from the Vietnam War to a ride on the subway as part of a human ship of folly where everything is turning to guts and excrement. He has the sting of early Bob Dylan.

Jimenez started out as a terrific Pop-Myth comedian in work like “The American Dream” where a car copulates with an Amazon blonde. Later he turned to the mythic Southwest with depictions of heroic Indians at the end of the trail and gritty pioneers driving oxen to cleave the soil. Sometimes you can’t tell whether he’s being ironical about cliches or politically aggressive in work leaning to the condition of kitsch commemoratives on state capitol lawns. There’s some kind of conflict between artistic sophistication and subcultural fervor.

The thing that finally makes Getting’s visual argument OK--if almost as complex as the art--are those figures that act as bridges between the extremes. Clyde Connell’s fetish sculpture has a social subtext, Fahlstrom’s social satire leans to mysticism and Berman’s poetic involvement with life’s underbelly emanates a strong sense of moral outrage.

Ah, morality. That may be the real glue here. Artistically, it’s sticky stuff because righteousness so easily curdles into paranoia and piety into intolerance. Rigidity lurks just around the corner, but the risk is worth it. We’d be in a pretty mess without those who, as the great man said, step to the music that they hear, however measured or far away.

“Different Drummers” remains on view to Aug. 14 and will not, unfortunately, travel.