ART / Cathy Curtis : ‘Landscape as Thought’ Is a Non-Traditional View

Gorgeous landscape photographs sell glossy calendars and whet the appetites of armchair travelers. Beautiful vistas have motivated generations of landscape painters. But many contemporary artists no longer want to treat landscape as just another pretty face.

These artists find their inspiration in a specific environmental, metaphysical or psychological approach to landscape. Their work is not necessarily “pretty”--although it can be--and, like most significant contemporary art, it requires the viewer to do more than passively stare and admire.

“Landscape as Thought,” at Cal State Fullerton’s Main Art Gallery (through Oct. 11), offers an introduction to such non-traditional treatments of landscape with two distinctly different bodies of work by Lita Albuquerque and Richard Misrach. Albuquerque creates quasi-mystical pieces in nature or gallery settings; Misrach photographs evidence of the damage people have levied on once-pristine tracts of desert. Both artists’ work is superficially attractive--sometimes too attractive--but it is meant as a serious treatment of the complex relationship of human beings to the land they inhabit.

When Albuquerque works directly in nature, she usually makes cuts in the earth--geometric shapes or human silhouettes--and fills them with powdered blue, red and yellow pigment. On a Malibu cliff she has “drawn” a perpendicular blue line that joins with the ocean. In other works, colored pigments locate the shadows of such different objects as the moon and the tip of the Washington Monument.

In another piece, she sprinkled pigment on a group of rocks in the Mojave Desert that she had arranged like constellations. Still another piece involved a group of white-clad people, dancing under her direction, who produced a huge red-and-blue earth “drawing” of circles and a spiral.

Some viewers have found great poetry and presence in these pieces (represented in the exhibit with color photographs). Albuquerque says they are “about the place where inner and outer worlds meet.” Linked in a general way to ancient ritual practices, these activities also reflect the artist’s eccentric dream-images and speculative fancies.

Very much the New-Age mystic, she is fascinated by both astronomy and alchemy. One habit of hers--which she says she performs “at least 10 times a day”--is to visualize the Earth from a great distance, as if traveling down through the galaxies.

As Jan Butterfield’s catalogue essay relates, Albuquerque was utterly devastated after she had to move from an ocean-view studio to another one in Los Angeles. Eventually she came to see that her obsession with the horizon line was connected to her childhood in Tunisia. Fixed points of the earth were the main constants in her life then, as her parents were pursuing their lives at geographical and emotional removes.

There’s no question that her art stems from genuine feelings. But for this viewer, the hokey tone of her metaphysical beliefs and the materials she chooses to use are major stumbling blocks. As someone who loathes the numbing quality of New-Age music and edges away from people who start talking about higher states of consciousness, I fail to find the meaning in her work. And even if the colors of pigment she employs are historically associated with alchemy, as Butterfield writes, that’s not the connection a viewer is likely to make in this era of seductive advertising and conspicuous consumption.

The color-dusted rocks--which Albuquerque exhibited last year at a Los Angeles gallery--look too much like chichi window dressing; the earth drawings don’t (in photographs, at least) resonate with the authority and power of earthworks by such artists as the late Ana Mendieta. Albuquerque’s work seems to be asking us to play make-believe against our wills, pretending things we don’t feel.

Her gallery installation at Cal State Fullerton, “Spheres of Influence/Sphere of Influences,” consists of nine tall, rectangular, carefully lit pieces of corrugated cardboard covered with gold leaf that lean out from the walls. In the center of the room is a pale, round, porous rock. Lined up with the rock like a planet in orbit is a small gold ball.

These objects set up various shadow patterns that variously impinge on one another. The title of the work seems to refer both to that visible fact and to the unseen forces that objects in space exert on one another. But the whole thing seems at once too pedantic and too glitzy to make a serious point about anything, let alone the laws of the universe.

Misrach’s early strobe-lit color work from the late ‘70s introduced lush visions of tropical foliage glowing against the night sky. His work in this exhibit is at once completely different in theme and oddly similar in its sense of quiet, stillness and dislocation.

Believing that “there is no neutral landscape”--as he says in the audio-visual introduction to the exhibit--Misrach has since turned his attention to terrains in which the human presence has profoundly changed the course of nature. Although we may think of the desert as a vast, empty tract of land, Misrach brings us up to date with images of dirt-bike tracks, the sand-covered carcasses of animals that apparently were victims of nuclear testing, discarded beer bottles poking up like carbuncles, goof-offs pointing guns at each other, graffiti and raging fires.

Some of these images are quite beautiful--especially the fires, which drop gauzy veils of smoke over the landscape and add flickering orange accents to the desert’s muted colors. Views of the Salton Sea--an ancient dried-out lake in California that was flooded by an ill-managed irrigation project--have a dreamy, bleached-out look, as if time had been suspended. Often, even the derelict signs of an earlier human presence--TV antennas, clotheslines, gas pumps--have an abstract beauty, like so many graceful vertical brush strokes made by a master Chinese painter.

Without the images presenting out-and-out desecration--such as the use of a graffiti Crucifixion scene for target practice--Misrach’s message might be too subtle for the average viewer. But the fascination of this work lies precisely in the tension between the passive loveliness of certain of the images and the artist passions about the environment. It is one thing to make “political” art that shouts a message loud and clear. It is another to make art that lures the viewer with a surface of odd, dreamy beauty and waits for pained recognition to sink in. By the time you realize what you’re looking at, your guard is down and you’ve been charmed into attention.

“Landscape as Thought” remains through Oct. 11 at Cal State Fullerton’s Main Art Gallery. Hours are noon to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday (closed Saturday). Admission is free. Information: (714) 773-2037.