ART REVIEWS : Works by Czechoslovakian Artists Are Framed in Irony

When art is pitted against news, it’s usually no contest. Art may have greater staying power, but news wins in the short run. That’s certainly the case in an exchange project, “Dialogue: Prague/Los Angles,” which brought Czech artists and their work to local galleries over the weekend.

The mere fact that these artists are in town after prolonged isolation is exhilarating news that outweighs curiosity about their work. The sight of the artists installing works at the Otis/Parsons Gallery and the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the sound of their struggles to make themselves understood puts a personal face on a historic moment, while their participation in a symposium, on Saturday at the museum, places their new artistic freedom in the ironic context of an increasingly repressive climate in the United States.

Another irony, voiced at the symposium, is that Czech freedom hasn’t been free of cost. Artist Ivan Kafka noted, for example, that “artists had peace, concentration, sometimes even good results” when “exhibitions were held anywhere but in exhibition spaces.”

Underground art has been “political by its mere existence” in Czechoslovakia, and people went to a great deal of trouble to see it when it was forbidden, artist Vladimir Merta said. But now “art is not very important and they don’t make much effort to see it.”

Do the artists long for the bad old days? Absolutely not, but these issues--and many others raised over the weekend--offer such substantive food for thought that they obscure the exhibitions, which have been billed as the main event of “Dialogue.”

News aside, the shows are as baffling as they are fascinating simply because they have arrived out of the blue. We have no way of knowing how the 11 selected Czech artists--said to be “emerging” figures--fit into Prague’s art scene or how the exhibited pieces fit into the artists’ overall work. Any attempt to interpret content is bound to be colored by the news from Eastern Europe as well as by stereotypical ideas about art created under stressful conditions.

One thing that’s clear is that these artists have not been working in a complete cultural vacuum. Their work has much in common with that of their American counterparts who will be exhibiting alongside them in a show opening on Friday at the Arroyo Arts Collective in Highland Park.

Another is that while the art is not overtly political, much of it deals with symbolism and coded languages. This is particularly obvious at the Santa Monica museum, where three artists have large installations. In Kafka’s “Obvious Uprising,” hidden electric fans periodically inflate seven striped wind socks, which rise like heroic rebels, then fall, flatten out and blend into a field of lifeless forms on a low platform. Merta’s three big paintings, called “Advertisement for Infinity,” are abstractions filled with circles or, in one case, sprinkled with pennies, but they also allude to conflicting notions of invigorating continuity and enervating repetition.

A wall of 72 drawings from Vladimir Kokolia’s “Big Cycle” presents anonymous nude figures in various states of duress and torture. One figure seems to suffer extreme pain when his finger is caught between pages of a closed book. Elsewhere, bodies are threaded on a pole, crushed, cut up or pulled into lumpy masses. The images are extremely disturbing, but the drawing is so deft and economical that we can’t stop looking.

At Otis/Parsons, these three artists are joined by eight others in a show of paintings, sculptures and installations. Here a furtive sort of urgency shrouds the work in secrecy. While Josef Zacek paints glowing stars and crosses in richly colored paintings charged with spiritual fire, several other artists seem to be preoccupied with social or political issues. Kokolia’s paintings might be taken for gentle abstractions if most of their titles didn’t include the word mice. Once this is known, the paintings can only be seen as pointed commentaries on masses of people who have no more value or individual identity than rodents.

Stefan Milkov’s clay figures are malformed, fetus-like beings, enclosed in restrictive capsules or burdened by symbols. Margita Titlova’s painted, pierced plywood “Monuments” seem to be stand-ins for troubled people as well as allusions to worlds of knowledge and ideas that have been stifled.

All this considered, “Dialogue” is a stimulating introduction to an entire sphere of art that is barely known here.

Otis/Parsons Gallery, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., Tue.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., to Aug. 18; Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, Wed.-Thur. 11 a.m.-8 p.m., Fri.-Sun. 11 a.m.-6 p.m., to July 15.