ART REVIEW : A Sculpture Show That Runs on Empty

Emptiness is the main ingredient of the new exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Called “OBJECTives: The New Sculpture,” it presents the work of eight contemporary European and American conceptual sculptors as notorious as Jeff Koons and as vaguely unfamiliar as Grenville Davey . Each has a sizeable room to himself but there isn’t much to see in any of them.

West Germany’s Katharina Fritsch presents nothing more that a shrouded spook staring at a pool of plastic blood. England’s Julian Opie shows metal boxes that look vaguely like display cases. Some will see little in Robert Gober’s place except an infant’s playpen. You get the idea.

In artistic terms this work is not new, rather a recombination of aspects of Minimalism and Duchampian Dada. Many a hard working citizen may be put off by the spareness, not to say paucity of the ensemble. “Hey! I’m not getting my money’s worth here. I paid to see an art exhibition and this looks like an abandoned junk store. Nothing left but some piles of old books and rows of plaster-shop sculpture.”

In truth the austerity is purposeful. Emptiness is the principal expressive vehicle that binds the artist’s aesthetic. Everybody knows emptiness implies abandonment, failure, loneliness. Remember the once-shocking film “Last Tango in Paris”? The characters played by Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider meet and have torrid sex. It somehow seems desperate and sad instead of erotic and delightful. A key reason for the downer sensation is Bernardo Bertolucci’s canny staging of the scene in, of course, a vacant apartment.

Empty’s empty the world over. Characterless closed space vacuums out our fantasies as we seek meaning in the void. We feel boxed in, anxious. Sensory deprivation fixates on the few objects present. We read meaning into them.

There are grounds for accusing this art of manipulating viewers with a tacky device. I’m not ready to argue with anybody who feels that way, but the fact is the trick works.

Besides, if the show is visually thin, the catalogue is downright elaborate. It’s a nice publication that signals the Newport valedictory of curator Paul Schimmel who is moving uptown as chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The catalogue is well illustrated and, thank goodness, shows a good bit of the artists’ other works in reproduction. With this sort of international room installation, you can go for years seeing one project at a time and never get a handle on the artist. Maybe that’s the idea.

Essays are loaded with bits of wisdom and enough artspeak to make one recall a museum’s obligation to interpret the work--presumably clearly--to the general public, but that’s a universal annoyance in the sphere. In the fashion of the day, essays are heavily ideological. Rosetta Brooks sees Annette Lemieux’s art as critical of present media-dominated culture even though her art is made up of precious old junk.

Lemieux is among the most interesting talents here partly because she shows enough individual objects to suggest she has more than one idea. Conceptualism suffers from one-liner syndrome. She likes puns such as “Domino Theory,” a swirl of fallen books suggesting both the downfall of reading and the historical flow of ideas. She’s inventive in “Above and Below” where books are clamped to resemble a globe of the earth atop a magisterial old desk. She’s lyric and sad in “Preservation” where a score for Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” is varnished to the top of an antique table. “Molding Minds,” with its phrenological plaster head and arcane shaping contraptions, confirms that she’s philosophically fascinated with the way our thoughts are sculpted by society. Contemporary as her inspiration may be, a quality of Proustian memory lingers.

Essayist Elizabeth Sussman sees Robert Gober’s art as concerned with feminism and racism. His stenciled wallpaper has a pattern picturing a Caucasian guy sleeping safely in his bed while a black man hangs lynched to a tree outside. But the ensemble is overridingly about childhood memory and nighttime terrors. The play pen stands in the middle of the room like a miniature cell. A man’s leg juts weirdly from the wall. A piece of plywood leaning nearby seems quite senseless unless we know that it was laboriously handmade by the artist--infinite complexity resolved into meaninglessness.

Jeff Koons is ironically famous for the shameless way he promotes himself and his work as commercial products. Essayist Peter Schjeldahl paints him as a caricaturist who lampoons artist, art and viewer equally. Makes him seem more interesting than his art does. Here that consists of nine kitsch sculptures rendered in stainless steel. Subjects range from a pompous Louis XIV through a ski-nosed Bob Hope and a couple of laughing dwarfs--a fisherman and a mermaid. The problem is the translation of plaster and porcelain into stainless steel does not transform the meaning of these souvenirs. They remain harmless objects of affection enjoyed by regular people with untrained eyes. Making fun of them seems snobbish and unkind.

Koons’ rendering of a Mylar bunny balloon is another matter. Its airheaded vacuity translates into a strange combination of oppressive weight and mirroring transparency that says something about the way people can project their vanity onto mere objects, lending them unwonted importance. It will surely survive as an icon.

Agreeably Old World-flavored art by two Europeans and Israel-born Haim Steinbach makes you wish the museum had shown other work by them. Steinbach presents a large low wood cabinet containing a Mme. Recamier psychiatrist’s couch on one side and a small coffin disgorging a skeleton on the other. There is a pervasive sense of artificiality about the wood and leather, making the skeleton seem the only authentic thing in the tableau. Is death, then, the only reality? It’s a mill-run memento mori , just a little more depressed.

Ditto for Fritsch’s “Ghost and a Pool of Blood.” Its fine sculptural presence deserves to be taken seriously, but the only variation on the standard theme is--once again--the patently fake blood cut from a sheet of red plastic. These artists seem obsessed with inauthenticity. But whose?

One semantic step leads to the illusionism of Juan Munoz. The Spaniard furnished his space with a ceremonial entrance topped by twin chimerical beasts. Once inside, the only other thing to look at is a great swath of floor painted with a fool-the-eye geometric pattern. Looks like Moorish Op art. Right. Life is a barbaric hallucination.

Catalogue illustrations suggest these artists can do better, but there is also a strong suspicion that much of the work derives an excess of meaning from the writing that creates its context. Sounds familiar. When the formalist ideas surrounding Minimalism crumbled, so did an amount of the art. Hard to say how much of this can survive a change in the aesthetic climate.

Speaking of context brings us to the two most Minimal of the artists.

They happen to be the British contingent and from the same school. Julian Opie’s boxes look like those industrial enigmas we run into out of context. We are sure we’d recognize them in place as vents or ducts or something. His are upright shallow metal boxes with glass covers and edge-glowing lights inside. They look like utilitarian objects trying to become art but unable to make up their mind to get on with it. Or vice versa.

Grenville Davey does something similar with neutral yellow shallow drums that exist in a half-world between exquisite purism and Oldenburg-style Pop versions of giant bottle caps or manhole covers. The pair broadcast differing vectors, but they cross at a point of discouraged indecision.

We have to be grateful to the museum for bringing us “Objectives” (to June 24). It’s an important bundle of information, but the news is that art mirrors the world’s malaise with its own.