ART REVIEWS : ‘nonrePRESENTATION’: It’s Enough to Make You unEASY

Suppose you decided to visit a remote outpost in a country whose language was utterly foreign to you. If you hired a guide, you’d surely want this person to be able to communicate with you, even if only in rudimentary sign language.

For most viewers, conceptual art is about as “foreign” as art gets. It’s one thing for a commercial gallery exhibit to murmur inscrutably to a coterie of knowledgeable followers. But a community gallery is obliged to be as welcoming to the curious but uninformed passer-by as to the specialist.

The current exhibit at Security Pacific Corporation Gallery at the Plaza, “nonrePRESENTATION,” contains work by nine American artists under 40. Each has come up with different solutions to the tricky and bizarre-sounding problem of making art that doesn’t represent something else.

As usual, the gallery has provided an illustrated free brochure (in fact, this one was snappily designed by artist Buzz Spector). But the viewer who turns to it for elucidation is in for a long struggle. The knotty discourse by essayist Colin Gardner reads like a graduate seminar paper. Sentences bulge with multiple ideas that need to be unpacked, smoothed out and explained at length. This is high-level apple-polishing, not public communication.

Even the placement of the wall labels--at great distances from the works--looks as though it’s designed to frustrate the viewer. “You don’t understand anything,” these far-away labels seem to say, “and we’re not going to make your life any easier.”

In his forward to the catalogue, guest curator Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe introduces a tantalizing notion: Only nonrepresentational art actually exists in the present moment, because it doesn’t refer to a thing that has existed before. Well, OK, but just what would it mean to make something that isn’t a direct representation of something else?

Well, consider James Hyde’s “Toss.” It’s a three-dimensional grid made of notched sheets of glass that leans against the wall. Next to it, a folded cloth rests on a granite block. The grid is a reference to the organizational system of a painting. The cloth is the canvas surface of a painting, seen at off-duty, as it were, when it is not obliged to stretch out and hold paint.

Or take Fandra Chang’s untitled piece, a meeting ground for a series of repetitious strategies. She gouges out portions of a narrow strip of wood to make a three-dimensional fake “wood grain” pattern, and attaches a strip of transparent fabric printed with a wood grain design. Chang does her damnedest to make a real piece of wood seem less than real--inadequate, in fact, and in need of cosmetic surgery to fill in its deficiencies.

Peter Halley’s “Stimulus Shield” is a partially textured, seemingly abstract painting executed in Day-Glo colors. It drags down the once mystical and noble creation of abstract imagery (think of Mondrian or Barnett Newman) into the realm of the cut-rate here-and-now, with its references to electronic circuitry and stucco walls in cheap housing. The painting is both a dumb-looking abstraction and the image of a dumb world, and it refuses to be pinned down to one reference or the other.

Other work in the exhibit is by Mary Boochever, Fred Fehlau, Christian Haub, Liz Larner, Linda Roush and Carole Seborovski. The curatorial line of thought that unites them is a plausible one, but the work necessary to decipher it is much more than all but the most intrepid browsers will care to attempt on their own.

Security Pacific Corp. Gallery at the Plaza, 333 S. Hope St., to June 18). Balla Breaks the Futurist Mold: Heady with the promise of airplanes and motor cars and wireless communication, the Italian Futurist artists of the early 20th Century sought to capture the speed of modern life in Cubist-inspired works.

But unlike his theoretically inclined colleague, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla was a lyrical soul, more interested in color, light and rhythm than the harsh velocity of the machine age. In fact, there isn’t a train or a plane or even a bicycle to be seen in an exhibit of Balla’s sculptures, produced in small editions in 1967--nine years after his death-- from his rare originals of 1913-21.

Small calligraphic wire pieces of dancers simultaneously trace their silhouettes and the patterns of movement they create. “Danza Serpentina” (Serpentine Dance) and “Danse du Feu” (Fire Dance)--a concoction of flattened spirals, airy curves and zigzags--are particularly intriguing because those are also the titles of works by the American modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller, whose act consisted of manipulating lengths of silk under changing light effects. Fuller performed at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, the year Balla sojourned in Paris.

An amusing painted wood lamp that hangs from the ceiling and emits slanting blue “rays” of light has a Dada quality, as do sculptures in the shape of the number 2.

But the wood cactus sculptures are the centerpieces of the show: simple, repetitive shapes painted bright yellow, orange and green, and notched together to make a fanciful succulents in “grande” and “piccolo” sizes. Disarmingly contemporary, they wouldn’t look out of place in a Southern California design showroom. Why this Roman was so intrigued by a desert plant remains a tantalizing mystery.

A painter of vivid abstractions and a designer of stage sets and furniture, Balla lived in a house decorated like a Pucci design gone amok. “Silence is velvet, words are of all colors,” was one of his peculiar epigrams. Maybe the time is ripe for a full-scale look at the artist’s life and work.

Fiorella Urbinati Gallery, 8818 Melrose Ave., to July 11). Life and Death in the Bay City: Nayland Blake’s “Punch Agonistes” is a series of works in various media that switches from mood to mood as swiftly as an actor in a one-man stage show. Wry, sober, quizzical, unsavory, the pieces reflect different facets of the San Francisco artist’s view of life and death in the age of AIDS. The image of Punch, the humpbacked puppet figure, engaged in a struggle for his life provides the operative metaphor, although his glowering image appears only in one piece (“Kit No. 9: Overture”).

“Still Life” consists of a camera repeatedly panning over a still life of flowers and Christmas tree balls on a miniature TV. It’s a restless still life, see. Ha, ha. In “Queer for Days,” the title phrase and the artist’s name is printed on each of the gilt-cord-wrapped white boxes piled in a tasteful display and draped with a T-shirt that reads “queer.”

And now something for the literati: “Kit No. 10,” part of an ongoing series of morbid installations. This one incorporates vintage memento mori still life images with fragments of texts. In each one, a man finds himself suddenly in danger--from people, animals or unearthly creatures--but of course never from anything so dull and unmanly as a wasting disease.

There’s nasty stuff here too, fitted with coldly gleaming stainless steel. Stuff for the living--a sadomasochistic object--and stuff for the dead: “Transport No. 3,” a pair of plastic bins, one fitted with a drain, the other containing dirty hoses and sausage-like viscera. At last, the comedy is over.

Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery, 1634 17th St., Santa Monica, to June 2.