ART REVIEWS : ‘Pharmacy’: The Chronicle of a Colossal Shift

In 1974, the sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark sawed a house in half.

Titled “Splitting,” the severed building was recorded in an extensive group of straightforward, black-and-white documentary photographs. In the six currently on view at Jan Kesner Gallery as part of an exceptionally insightful exhibition called “Pharmacy,” the two-story house is seen from several exterior vantage points.

From the front and back, the modest building appears perfectly normal, just like any of a thousand older houses on a thousand tree-lined streets in the northeastern United States. But from the sides, there is the strange and anomalous sight of a cleanly cut gash, which starts wide at the peak of the roof and continues, like a steadily narrowing crevice in a cliff, all the way down through the first floor.

You wonder what the startlingly bifurcated building might look like inside, its domestic heart surely riddled with slashes. Tilted precariously, as if poised to slip disastrously off its firm foundation, this “house divided” cannot possibly continue to stand for long.

At the very moment when a severely torn U.S. House of Representatives was initiating impeachment proceedings against a sitting President, an artist made an imposing work of art that gave dramatic form to a severe ache in the American psyche--a dull, persistent, head-splitting ache that had accumulated from years of grinding social strife in arenas ranging from civil rights to Vietnam. America’s house was deeply divided, its insides grievously ravaged. No more eloquent work of art than this emerged from that awful moment.

“Splitting” could of course be understood in a number of vibrant ways, including as a direct assault on restrictive symbols of conventional bourgeois life. Yet Matta-Clark’s sculpture and the photographs that document its existence (the house was subsequently demolished) are among the most resonant works from a colossal shift in the practice of making art that occurred in the late 1960s and the 1970s.

The exhibition at Jan Kesner Gallery distills the issue in a most provocative way. (I’m guessing, but this distillation may account for the show’s otherwise baffling, laboratory-like title.) “Pharmacy” is an insightfully chosen constellation of 31 works by 20 American artists, assembled for the occasion by artist Cliff Benjamin. With no pretense to comprehensiveness intended by the selection, its engaging subject is the myriad ways in which ostensibly “pure” painting and sculpture were usurped. Traditional mediums were directly challenged by numerous alternative ways of making art--such as sawing a building in two--while supposedly “extra-aesthetic” dimensions, including politics, assumed a new position of prominence.

In a famous short essay, the critic Harold Rosenberg aptly called this burgeoning activity the “de-definition of art.” Formalist aesthetics of the day piously claimed that truly great painting or sculpture must specialize in articulating its own unique properties. But such a mandarin pronouncement was suffocating for art, especially during an era whose highest aspirations came in struggles for social freedom.

Rosenberg was less than sympathetic to most of the new art that occasioned his essay, but he knew that one’s sense of art is continuous with his sense of society. Or perhaps I should say, with her sense of society. Feminists were instrumental in occasioning the shift. By dismantling formalist unity, artists meant to substitute the ideal of diversity.

In an effort to make the existing limitations of art viscerally felt, conventional ideas of painting and sculpture were turned toward situations utterly familiar to the world beyond the gallery. Take Matta-Clark’s suburban house, which also could be seen as a “carved sculpture” resting precariously atop the “pedestal” of its foundation.

Elsewhere, the human body itself was made the favored medium. Eleanor Antin recorded the progress of her strict, five-week diet with the 1972 “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture,” composed of a modernist grid of daily snapshots of her naked body. Carolee Schneeman’s photographs of herself in ritualized performance, collaged with archival pictures apparently taken from books, comprise an early feminist assertion of the antiquity of goddess imagery and of its modern relevance as a usefully alternative tradition. Laurie Anderson’s playfully distorted self-portrait was achieved through simple manipulation of a mirror, which arrives at faces reminiscent of both Cubist paintings and African masks.

As in Bruce Nauman’s 1970 studies for a series of holograms, common artistic practice didn’t exactly fit the human body. The photographic studies show him pinching and tugging on his lips in an effort to make his body do what a formalist painting was supposed to do: function as a physical manifestation of abstract speech. Colored a queasy, bilious green, Nauman’s pictures speak most eloquently of nausea.

Douglas Huebler’s 1975 “Variable Piece No. 506 / Tower of London Series” is most explicit (and very funny) in its challenges to formalist painting. As with photographer Aaron Siskind, who found formal equivalents for abstract paintings in photographs of weathered city walls, Huebler “found” ostensible portraits of the likes of Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More in photographic blow-ups of the stony fortifications of England’s most famous royal jail. You’re a prisoner of what you see, Huebler wryly suggested, and what you see depends on what you look for.

Although the work at Jan Kesner Gallery dates from 1965 to 1975, the exhibition could not be more topical. The knotted politics of the human body, from issues of abortion and sexual freedom to AIDS and the right to die, have now reached a boiling point. In the most recent episode, the good burghers of the city of Cincinnati have lately indicted the director of an art museum for displaying photographs the local police have declared to be impure. (The prison of perception is not just metaphoric.) “Pharmacy” chronicles activities that are in many ways historical antecedents illuminating present conflicts of grave significance.

The peculiar relationship between artistic form and inartistic medium is among the more interesting revelations of this exhibition. “Pharmacy” has been mounted at a gallery whose well-earned reputation has come from showing very fine work by 20th Century photographers. Everything in the present show utilizes photographs, too, but none was made by an artist one would remotely think of as a photographer.

Not one is conventionally beautiful. Matta-Clark’s blunt documents couldn’t be more alien to the conception of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images of Paris, or to Dorothea Lange’s of Depression-era America, or to Garry Winogrand’s shot-from-the-hip street photography. And those of Antin, Schneeman, Anderson or the rest wouldn’t be mistaken for what is usually called “fine art photography.”

In the relationship between form and medium, these works addressed their purportedly extra-aesthetic concerns in ways that were themselves outside the traditional boundaries of art. Like Matta-Clark, who split a house in two in a willfully destructive act of aesthetic vandalism, the photographs in this show demolished conventional canons of “artistic” uses of photography.

In the process, of course, they prepared the ground for new ones. Today, John Baldessari deftly uses inartistic photographs, plucked from mass-culture’s publicity mill, to make compositions of paradoxically impeccable aesthetic lineage. Among the many virtues of this ambitious gallery show, which includes a 1970 work by Baldessari, is the way it fills out some of the complex milieu within which his own widely influential work, presently the subject of an important retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, first emerged and subsequently blossomed.

At 164 N. La Brea Ave. through May 12. (213) 938-6834.