ART REVIEW : Assessing the Current Vitality of Repetition

Claude Monet did it with 20 views of Rouen Cathedral. Andy Warhol did it with an endless series of identical Brillo boxes. John Coplans did it by repeatedly Xeroxing his own bare hands. All these artists have been fascinated by the implications of creating separate, finished works that share a deliberately repetitive form or structure.

In his elegant debut exhibition, “One of a Kind: Contemporary Serial Imagery” (to Jan. 15), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery director Edward Leffingwell presents the work of 11 artists--all current or former residents of Los Angeles--who work in a serial format.

Coplans-the-theorist casts a long, distinguished shadow across this show. Its catalogue reprints the brilliant essay from the former ArtForum magazine editor’s 1968 Pasadena Art Museum exhibition, “Serial Imagery.” This time out, however, the object is not to define a particular way of working but to point to its continued health as the tool of a wide range of sensibilities working in varied media.

John McCracken’s trio of free-standing, three-sided, 8-foot black “planks” look virtually identical. The naked eye is hard put to assess whether the acuteness of an angle on one piece is perhaps a smidgeon greater than on another. In fact, the side widths differ by a scant few inches, as if embodying a sly perceptual joke of the artist’s.

Twenty years ago, Coplans viewed Larry Bell as “the only sculptor of consequence to emerge in the ‘60s who deploys serial imagery” and celebrated him for his ability to “decode” the serial process while working so far from New York.

Contemplated from this point of view--a welcome corrective to the cliches of “light and space”--a trio of coated glass pieces Bell made in 1985 can be seen as fulfillments of a long-term master plan. The varying positions of the prismatic curves of color on the cubes are part of a continuously unfolding project exploring the infinite variations of perceptual information.

Richard Jackson’s environment-size piece, “Big Ideas,” comes out of a vastly different engagement with art and ideas. He paints identical-size canvases and assembles them in tall stacks that obscure all but the edges, goopy with bright dribbles of paint. In this enterprise, the materials of painting are forced into a deliberately uncharacteristic new role--as the building blocks of ephemeral, three-dimensional structures.

In her five “Room Service Paintings,” Pauline Stella Sanchez also does a number on painting, attaching large, lumpy, square gray canvases to steel armatures holding out different varieties of serving dishes. By multiplying the scattered eruptions of leaden, viscous paint and the mechanical offerings of unseen food, Sanchez creates an atmosphere of foiled expectations. Inexorable in their dumb repetition, these paintings make a mockery of viewer-seduction.

Mary Corse’s expansive canvases are all filled--except for the parenthesis of single bare strips running down each side--with a thin carpet of millions of winking glass microspheres. Each of her three untitled paintings offers a different perceptual twist: silvery gray with soft little explosions of white; charcoal gray with horizontal wave-like lines; yellowish-gray with patches of short, vertical “stubble.”

But, as Leffingwell writes, in each work “the moment the viewer perceives the pure reflection of the light that strikes a single, transparent grain of mineral silicate, Corse has evoked all similar experiences she has caused.”

In Coplans’ Xerox prints of his hands--part of the artist’s ongoing photographic exploration of his body--he arranges his fingers in various ways, using spacing, bunching and crossed-over digits to play with variations on the number 10. The ultimate extension of this series would seem to be governed primarily by the limits of his dexterity.

The rigor to which “One of a Kind” aspires might have been strengthened--and its intellectual independence buoyed--had Leffingwell attempted to analyze what it means to work in series in the artistic climate of the late ‘80s. Given such an eclectic group (the other artists in the show are Gail Barringer, Eric Orr, Leonard Seagal, Rena Small and Nicholas Wilder), one looks in vain for a cogent analysis of motives and theories.

But the unexpected--and frankly salutary--aspect of the show is the degree to which the relative quality of the works on view seems of less moment than seeing them in the light of a fresh and striking family resemblance.