ART REVIEW : An Intelligent Foray Into One-Color Painting

The problem with conceptual-based art is that intriguing ideas can be boring to look at.

A case in point is Stephen Prina’s “Monochrome Painting” at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park (to Aug. 27). It’s an intellectual foray into one-color painting designed to comment on that movement and its luminaries. Unfortunately, it’s a mind game with a particularly wicked sense of humor, because in this context monochrome painting has no soul--only a pretense of meaning, emotion and cultural stature.

Prina’s installation consists of 14 paintings done in various sizes. Each is a blank cipher colored the identical glossy, vaguely iridescent dark green of pond algae. That’s it. Some are large, some quite tiny; the dimensions correspond to the sizes of actual monochrome paintings by artists such as Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman and the grandfather of nonobjective painting, Kasimir Malevich.

Understanding what’s going on doesn’t depend so much on seeing the paintings (they all look alike except for some incidentals in application) as it does in apprehending Prina’s overall point. But that point is multilayered and it’s interesting to note that paintings that are so clearly empty of content take reams of words to interpret.

The artist considers the 14 panels of green-colored linen on board to be a single work. Taking a page from mass production and artists like Sol LeWitt, who opt for products manufactured to specification over unique artist-made art objects, Prina’s canvases were executed by Champion Auto Body in Los Angeles. The body shop was given the dimensions and instructed simply to allow for some incident while avoiding a high degree of finish.

Green was chosen as the only still-unattached signature color and because it recalls the color of some archival photographs of Reinhardt’s Jewish Museum show. It is used here as another telling mark of mass production. Known commercially as Delstar acrylic enamel, it’s an unappetizing 1985 VW car paint called Papyrus Green Poly. That information, along with the serial number, is featured alongside the paintings and right under the name, date, materials and location of the master painting referred to by Prina’s canvas. All that massed information, given equal weight by the credits, far outweighs the color-saturated emptiness of the painting. The juxtaposition is an interesting poke at all the rhetoric that inevitably accompanies art reduced strictly to color.

This show, originated by the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, takes on so many sacred cows and subjects that it’s definitely not meant to be simply looked at and enjoyed--even if there were something to see. By its nature, the work takes a swipe at the current penchant for appropriating art history to validate and inform current art. Without the blind references to the original paintings, it would be impossible to make a connection between the old and new monochrome subjects. As it is, the only connection--a similarity of size--is a credibility strain.

For those to whom the blankness and purity of an abstract color field is something of a religious experience, Prina’s paintings are titled to correspond to the 14 Stations of the Cross. That way moving from painting to painting is a small ritualized pilgrimage. But it is only the words, not the paintings, that can be contemplated in this blank “group show” of monochrome painting, and that frustrates the entire venture.

The catalogue and hype accompanying this exhibit are as much a part of the work as the paintings themselves. Press releases are dense with polysyllabic art-speak, while the catalogue is strangely lacking in anything but painting-identification tags and curatorial credits. Yet it has the color-coordinated slickness of a corporate-backed major exhibition brochure. The paper is the same green as the paintings, minus the sheen. Inside, Prina’s paintings are “reproduced” as solid black squares and rectangles on white paper insets that look for all the world like poor quality Malevich reproductions or simply inky blank holes. The irony isn’t so much a catalogue’s attempt to reproduce work that defies reproduction as the complete absence of anything visual.

Despite “Monochrome Painting’s” wide range of issues and the clever way Prina can make less say more to the already art informed, it is still a dull visual experience. The blank green canvases dot the walls like shiny swatches cut from a shyster’s polyester suit. They say nothing, and their silence is overwhelmed by the gallery space. Alluding in an offhand manner to certain paintings, the exhibit co-opts the language of pure color but strips the originals of anything but a nominal contribution to the visual exploration of painting. All we are left with is their history encapsulated in the identification tags. Coupled with Prina’s additions, the references have little to offer but rhetoric, making nonobjective, monochrome painting seem like a moribund mind game.