ART/Cathy Curtis : Is There Less to Ott’s Work Than Meets the Eye? It’s Hard to Tell

Does art gain stature by being baffling? Viewers well may wonder about that in an era when a number of young painters--David Salle is probably the best-known--are turning out canvases peppered with peculiar juxtapositions of objects that don’t immediately make sense. Los Angeles artist Sabina Ott, whose paintings are featured in a small show at the Art Institute of Southern California through Dec. 30, is another member of the club.

At 33, Ott has had solo shows at galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. In 1986 she received a New Talent award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which pleased her (as she said in an interview) because it indicated that the museum curators understood her work.

Much of the time people have not understood, and it’s easy to see why. All of the six works on view here have a certain rebuslike quality to them: It’s hard to get away from the feeling that all you have to do is name the disparate objects that appear in them and you will understand what’s going on. But that doesn’t work, and the viewer is hard put to make sense of Ott’s vision. Must it be so elusive? Is there anything to be grasped here, or is this work a pointless tease?

Let’s take a look. In one untitled work from 1987, a short yellow chain forming an open circle straddles the boundary line between the left and right sides of the canvas. On the left side, a giant arm that seems to belong to a woman reaches around a couple of trees. On the right side, a black swan silhouette floats on a painterly off-white surface.

The painting is loose and sketchy: The knuckles on the woman’s hand, for example, are indicated by gauzy brown swipes of the brush. Whatever the theme of the work, it seems clear that Ott wants to call attention to the act of painting itself.

OK. But what could this theme be? Well, it could be about romance and its attendant dangers and pitfalls: Swans have been romantic images since the Middle Ages, when they were part of the standard equipment of courtly gardens of love, the private bowers where gentlemen wooed ladies. The chain is arranged to look like a bracelet. It might be simply an adornment, or possibly (and metaphorically) a manacle, binding a woman to a man who has given it to her as a gift.

The scale of the woman’s arm in comparison with the trees brings to mind Jonathan Swift’s character Lemuel Gulliver of “Gulliver’s Travels,” who feels like a giant when he visits the land of the 6-inch-tall Lilliputians. The Swift novel, however, is a religious and political satire. Is there a satirical point here?

And what’s the connection between the arm and the trees? The trees are bare; maybe the woman’s womb is barren? Or maybe the romance itself seems lifeless? Perhaps the ironic edge of the work is the distinction between the myths of romance and the reality?

Or maybe this analysis is completely wrong and the painting has nothing whatsoever to do with romance. Only Ott knows for sure, and we don’t want to ask her. If Ott’s art cannot stand on its own and communicate directly to us, without her coaching, it really isn’t worth our attention.

But then, you may ask, why doesn’t Ott make it easier for us to figure out what she’s after? Isn’t there a point at which poetic allusion becomes a self-indulgent game for the artist? Yes, there is. We have to have some signposts --images with broad cultural connotations--to give us a starting point. We have to be able to construct our own kind of logic out of the medley of details the artist gives us.

Ott does give us these signposts--some of the time. On the soft brown-and-gold rectangles of another work, “Illuminations No. 1,” she paints a dismembered hand positioned in a “blessing” gesture (aha, a signpost!), a grove of barren trees and an object that looks like . . . uh, maybe a turkey baster mounted on a barbecue grill? The obscurity of this image throws a pall over the painting. The mystery is too deep; the signposts are too few.

Another unclear aspect of her style is whether specific images are supposed to retain their meanings from painting to painting. The exhibition was organized to show how the same images crop up in different recent works. But does a barren tree in one work convey the same information as a barren tree in another? It’s hard to tell.

The other nagging difficulty with Ott’s work is that she seems to be clinging to an essentially old-fashioned, all-of-a-piece painterly style while combining disparate images in a contemporary way.

Today, when artists work in a deliberately disjunctive manner, their aim is generally to undermine the rules and expectations associated with painting. These artists take pains to neutralize their images (by using “found” photographs not taken for artistic purposes, say, or by combining a variety of styles in one painting). The point is to create images that talk back to the tight little world of art history--images that offer an ironic response to the time-honored enterprise of reproducing little pieces of reality in two dimensions.

But in Ott’s paintings, there is no distancing technique. She seems to want to have her cake and eat it too. And in fact the tendency of viewers--art professionals and others--is not to probe too deeply into such matters.

In the snobbish and insecure world of art, a premium often is put on things that are obscure. Surely they must be brilliant and we are fools not to understand them. Could it be that, despite a certain poetic resonance and an undeniable seriousness of purpose, Ott’s paintings have been overrated precisely because they are so hard to puzzle out?

“Sabina Ott” continues through Dec. 30 at the Ettinger Gallery, Art Institute of Southern California, 2222 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Hours: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Fridays, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. Admission: free. Information: (714) 497-3309.