ART REVIEW : 2 Artists Paddling Against Time & Tide

If you think crossing the English Channel can be rough passage, try being a mid-career artist paddling through the ‘80s. The decade has been dominated by the anorexic hysteria of Neo-Expressionism and the bulimic excesses of Post-Modernism. No matter what their shortfalls or dubious virtues, these styles cut historical moorings, leaving the art of the ‘70s adrift on the shoals of the past, looking as dated as gas stations with public toilets and attendants who cleaned the windshield.

Walking into two new exhibitions at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art is like passing through a time warp. The handsome, crisp lines of refrigerator-white galleries bespeak the orthodoxy of arts purification under Pope Clement (Greenberg) I. Who would have thought a dozen years back that the definition of Contemporary Art would change from a synonym for “the Art of the Present” to “Oh sure, that art they made for a while somewhere between Watergate and Jimmy Carter’s swan song in Tehran.” Oil-crisis art.

Anybody who doesn’t think the Reagan Era represented a whiplash disjuncture in the flow of time should think about that. It follows that Post-Modernism has been the art of the epoch’s glitz-and-greed syndrome, Neo-Expressionism the outraged cry of disenfranchised liberalism.

When the conservative riptide started its irresistible lunar outflow, battalions of worthy Minimalists, Processors and Earthworkers found their little canoes being tugged inexorably from the Bay of Success into the Sea of Obscurity. Two of them are on view in the staunch little cult cathedral in La Jolla until Oct. 2.

Jud Fine is trying to paddle against the tide without swamping his integrity. It ain’t easy. Fine, 44, is an L.A. artist who received the County Museum of Art’s Young Talent Award and went on to establish an international reputation, cracking the big time when he was included in West Germany’s Documenta 5 in 1972.

We’ve not had a deep look at him in some years, so this exhibit--organized by the ever-righteous Fellows of Contemporary Art--is a welcome chance to get caught up.

Jud Fine. Oh yeah, I remember him, I think.

Bamboo poles.

Oh, Fine--the guy who wraps the bamboo poles and leans them against the wall.

Fine was very much a part of the ‘70s sensibility that cast the artist in a portmanteau role combining aspects of tribal magician, anthropologist and archeologist. Fine wore the mantle easily as a former student of history and tribal culture.

His trademark poles came wrapped in silver foil, festooned with twine, cast in plastic, clad in metal or incised with wormy lines. The resulting effect combined a beautified form of civilized mod Minimalism with evocations of primitivism that resonated from African fetishes to Polynesian magical maps. Naturally, ecological concerns were in there too.

Poles and process objects of chicken wire and rock worked artistically but evidently did not suffice for Fine, who also produced various word-works which would have been hard to read even if they had been Dick and Jane books much less the crabbed and complex punctuation-aversion prose favored by the artist.

The ‘70s were full of artists with ideas too complex to be contained in traditional art forms. Robert Irwin took some of them and became a kind of philosophical landscape architect. Helen and Newton Harrison evolved into ecological reformers. Fine remains more conservative, attempting to come to grips with the neo-figurative art of the present.

Several recent works include life-size carved pigs in a style roughly reminiscent of Northwest Coast Indian art. One is gilded. It could be a mordant commentary on yuppie-ism. There is a muffled humorous Jasper Johnsian side to Fine. It also comes out in a work where real rocks are mixed with bolted-together plastic rocks.

He’s painting, too. “Annotation” is a big summing-up composition, like Johns’ “According to What.” But Fine only paints about as well as a Natural History Museum illustrator, so this amalgam of old motifs and new ostriches and skateboarders lacks authority.

When you add the unresolved complexity inherent in Fine’s art to its unresolved attempt at artistic rejuvenation, this becomes the survey of a real midlife crisis. On the upside, it looks like Jud Fine is too smart to be a Neo-Expressionist

As if that weren’t tough enough, imagine being a ‘70s artist appearing here for the first time, somehow creating the impression that maybe this art thinks we out here in the Wild West have never seen anything like it before. We have.

Briton Eric Snell scorches ordinary wooden objects, then presses them on paper so the heat and charcoal make sooty process drawings. You get the idea when you see a smudgy circle with a rack of burned coat hangers hanging nearby, or rows of parallels made with a burned wood rake.

Sometimes Snell uses whole branches to brand an image. The wood is used up in the process, so all that’s left of the object is a handful of ashes on the floor.

Snell’s art is very resolved and self-confident, as if the message that this is all over has not reached the sceptered isles or the artist is one of those who goes on doing his thing unaffected by changes in the aesthetic weather. The work is lovely in its one-liner way, but it joins Fine’s in leaving a wonder about what is going to happen to this sort of art and the system that supports it. It has fallen into a chronological hole where all you can do is wonder if history will redeem it.

What’s going to happen to all those nice white museums?

Maybe they can rent them out for weddings.