ART REVIEWS : ‘Living With AIDS’: Gentle Approach to Tough Subject

Art with a strong political, sociological or environmental message can be aggressive. Placed squarely in a public arena it can also be downright intimidating. But a rare sense of intimacy and delicacy pervades the California Museum of Science and Industry’s exhibition, “Living With AIDS--A Collaborative Reflection.” This is one of the few visual arts exhibitions getting the jump on the Los Angeles Festival’s official opening. Amid all the festival’s projected hoopla it sets an importantly ruminative mood.

The centerpiece to the exhibit is Kim Abeles’ round, memento-filled table and six chairs, “Found Voices (Dedicated to People With AIDS).” It’s the same satin-lined, dinner table-of-memories, crowned with a floating, transparent “ghost” seat that was so evocative last year in a show of the same name at Otis/Parson’s Art Gallery. That exhibit was denser, more visceral, filled with personal images of pain all choreographed around the incredible testimonial of the 16-ton, 14-acre NAMES Quilt installation. This show is less thundering, though the sense of urgency is no less compelling. Yet perhaps because there are fewer voices to listen to here, their stories, fears and lives stand out in sharper focus.

Sitting around Abeles’ table is like sitting down to dinner with family. Peter Bergman’s audio interviews with people who have AIDS provides the hum of conversation while the items preserved under glass by the table are the things you toy with mentally while the talk circles around you. It is a setting that paradoxically puts you at ease, even though the subject is one of life and death. In simple, no nonsense body language it brings its message home: We are all one family effected by AIDS.

In an adjoining space a disturbing video of interviews, made by Russell Moore on the road between New York and Los Angeles, powerfully encapsulates the national response to the AIDS epidemic. Facts are a tightly contained but vital part of this exhibition. One wall of bilingual information and a table of pamphlets cuts directly to the how and what of the disease. The show’s power comes because the artists, and those they worked with have courage and refuse to simply keep quiet. (California Museum of Science and Industry, 700 State Drive, Exposition Park, to Sept. 16).

Sounds of Silence: Another early entry in the L.A. Festival takes off from the “Pacific Rim” theme with the Zen-influenced art of sculptor Seiji Kunishima and the drawings of Mari Omori. It’s a quiet exhibition liltingly enriched with recorded sounds of waves rushing against a shore and gray pebbles strewn around the sculpture. Strangely, it’s a quiet that seems particularly self involved because both artists are concerned with tight systems of abstraction.

Kunishima takes solid rock and fractures it into cunning pieces that cling to their natural origins even while giving themselves over gracefully to the wholesale manipulations of the artist. For the most part these are not new works. The pieces span several years. Early references to seismic faults and slow petrifaction reflected in the clockless artistry of natural disruption now find corresponding resonance in the ability of water to shape stone over time.

Omori’s drawings turn graphite into a deep-gray sheen of multiple lines scraped into order by a tight structure of needle-fine grid lines.

The grids are filled with numbers or Japanese calligraphy strewn around the page in a pattern of highly controlled but random action. The effect is highly intellectual but alluring. (Beckstrand Gallery, Palos Verdes Art Center, 5504 W. Crestridge Road, to Sept. 29).