ART REVIEWS : An Affirmative Answer From John Baldessari

The exhibition of John Baldessari’s new work at Margo Leavin Gallery leads off with something rather startling: Installed opposite the gallery’s front door is a two-panel painting, 19 feet in length.

This big painting is a surprise because of its author, not its size. Baldessari’s mature career, currently surveyed in a 25-year retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, has been occupied with a contradictory dilemma: Without using paint, canvas or any of the other conventional tools used since the Renaissance, is it possible to make an art that is equivalent to painting?

For a media-dominated culture, this puzzle is more than theoretical. His early work posed the question, while the middle work set about rigorously rethinking the very nature of art itself. The later, widely embraced work has proffered an affirmative answer.

Baldessari’s achievement has been to act as midwife for a kind of “Everyman’s painting,” born of a union between venerable conventions common to the history of art and thoroughly modern images taken from mass media. Like Matisse making paper cutouts, he has since the 1980s wielded scissors to crop publicity stills scavenged from obscure movies, and to alter the focus of documentary or journalistic photographs clipped from newspapers and magazines. Enlarged and conjoined, these generic pictures have echoed all manner of traditions evident from 500 years of painting: 17th-Century still-lifes, academic history paintings, Baroque allegories, Regency portraits, Rococo architectural decorations, even 20th-Century abstraction.

At MOCA, this central aspect of Baldessari’s art is somewhat obscured by a less than judicious choice of work from the past decade. (Several superior works are absent, while the important “Vanitas” series is completely ignored.) Indeed, one of the 19 recent works at Leavin Gallery, several of which show Baldessari in top form, might well address the conflicted experience of having an important museum retrospective.

The diptych “Two Dwarfs” casts Diego Velazquez’s most poignant subject as a confrontation between an adult dwarf and a tap-dancing, Fred Astaire-like child got up in white tie and tails. The deceptively simple composition is a media reflection of a visually radical hall of mirrors first engineered for painting by Velazquez, which pushes into the present a complicated and today obscure relationship. In the democratic palace of contemporary culture, the identities of aristocratic patron and court entertainer are blurred. Which one is really privileged, which the jester?

“Two Dwarfs” is exceptional, as are three of Baldessari’s meditations on modern abstraction. The simplest features peasants on a promontory facing an organic black blob abutted by a blue square, tilted in the manner of Malevich. They’ve fallen to their knees, as if in a scene from a post-modern “Song of Bernadette,” astonished at the miracle of art’s redemptive vision.

In another, three people are transformed into a modernist holy trinity--they’re painted red, yellow and blue--and stand atop a tall, skinny, photographically manufactured desert mesa. Rather like the “zip” in a Barnett Newman painting, this vertical stripe splits a horizontal void at the composition’s middle. Baldessari pays homage to a modern icon, then upends its heavenward thrust with the figure of a gravity-bound mountain climber deftly leaping across the void.

The third work is a pungent essay on formalist painting, accomplished with a single altered photograph of Arctic explorers. The small but hardy band is daringly led by a kind of Clement Greenberg-figure, who voyages into the unknown: a field of colorful, brightly painted glacial fissures, dangerously arrayed against the white void of nature in a manner oddly reminiscent of a Morris Louis painting. Tentatively poking at the ice, “Clem” cautiously tests the figure-ground relationship that unreliably supports them. By a single cut of the god-like artist’s scissors, this pictorial gestalt could be forever altered.

With these precedents in mind, the show’s seemingly anomalous painting becomes a bit less startling. “Black and White Landscape With Torch” shows abutted images of cloudy smoke and steam, photo-mechanically reproduced in vinyl paint on canvas. One puffy cloud signals an apparently productive oil refinery, the other is a menacing sign of an apparently destructive conflagration (a small, red brushstroke acts as both igniting flame and photographically engulfed paint). The painting soon recalls Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of clouds, which he famously called “Equivalents.”

Although not as rich as other works in the show, this nominal painting does suggest how Baldessari’s vision can both obliterate and refine a host of possibilities for art. He seizes on the familiar, then opens it up to new meanings.

At Margo Leavin Gallery, 817 N. Hilldale Ave., to May 26; (213) 273-0603.

Impressive Debut: Jorge Pardo’s first solo gallery show is among the more impressive debuts of recent memory. The young sculptor is sometimes diffuse in his pursuits, but he’s tapped into a provocative arena in which tactile craft and material utility rub up against conceptual idea and aesthetic inutility. Occasionally, sparks fly.

Pardo makes mostly domestic tools: home-movie splicer, coffee pot, storage pallet, plywood sheet. Each is subtly altered. A walnut dish drainer has been disassembled and reassembled so that it can hold no dishes. One step of a fir ladder has been replaced with exotic bubinga wood, ruining its usefulness, while a nearby 2x4 of the same material would never be used as lumber. And a “Louisville Slugger” baseball bat is paired with an exact clone made from glossy, varnished cedar: Using one could bring glory; the other, only ruin.

What unites these seemingly disparate items is their association with the kitchen, garage, cellar--every area of the home except those in which works of art are typically displayed. Transformed by the gallery context, these objects also have been transformed by the artist. Pardo’s emphasis on handcraft yields a pristine surface ironically recalling the sleek, highly polished, machine-like finish of much Minimalist art of the 1960s. Yet, a poignant sense of loss, disconnectedness and absence is generated by the application of handcraft to familiar tools that, as sculptures, declare “Hands off!”

Duchamp’s legacy is evident here (as is a sometimes intrusive debt to Robert Gober). But Pardo’s shrewd insertion of pre-industrial craft into industrially made objects, which transforms them into fetishes for a post-industrial world, is all his own.

At Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 822 1/5 N. Hayworth Ave., to May 6; (213) 653-8980 .

Imaginative Flotsam: Something of the carnival freak-show infects Dana Duff’s pungent exhibition, which exudes the voyeuristic, odd allure of a “two-headed calf embalmed in jar” that, on closer inspection, turns out to be a Barnum-esque fraud assembled from rags, glass marbles, chicken bones and a gallon of unrecognizable goo. With Duff, however, the spellbinding quality of the fraudulence itself seems very much the point.

The centerpiece of her wittily titled show, “Odor di Femina,” is a suite of 11 glass fishbowls atop three chest-high tables. Each bowl is filled with a different fluid, sealed with a glass dinner plate and named for a flower whose image is decoratively etched into the glass. Floating about in the primordial ooze of oil and vinegar, bleach, Windex, hair gel, transmission fluid and such are assorted bits of flotsam: ribbons, beads, hair, a toy panda, piggy bank, feathers, an egg timer, etc.

Duff combines materials to eccentric, unexpected effect. In a medievalist manner recalling the work of Barbara Bloom, the show’s swooning title and alchemical aura are pointedly symbolist nods to Victorian poetics. But the embalmed flotsam of this weird science acts only as a mysterious agent for imaginative wandering, creating speculative creatures of the mind far more mutant than any two-headed calf. In Duff’s eloquent evocations of feminine nature, naturalness has nothing to do with it.

Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery, 1634 17th St., Santa Monica, to Saturday; (213) 450-2010 .