ART REVIEWS : Viewing the Mystical States of Marsden Hartley

Minor American master Marsden Hartley once described his art as an attempt to create “artistic expressions of mystical states,” and, as can be seen in a survey of his work at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Santa Monica, he tried to skin that cat several different ways. A relentlessly experimental painter who spent much of his life roaming Europe soaking up the revolutionary developments in art then occuring abroad, he developed a uniquely American synthesis of Expressionist, Cubist, Impressionist and Abstractionist ideas. By 1933--a decade before his death--he had arrived at his mature style, a robust-yet-sophisticated naturalism that verges on the primitive and alludes to every important art trend of the early 20th Century.

The first in-depth L.A. exhibition of Hartley’s art in almost 20 years, this museum-quality show includes drawings and paintings from 1908 to 1943. Though romantic and unabashedly sentimental in spots, it’s a curiously detached body of work that alludes only in the most oblique fashion to the events of Hartley’s life.

Hartley was born in Maine in 1877. He was 8 when poverty and the death of his mother made it impossible for his family to remain together, and this traumatic separation left a profound mark on him. Hartley’s fortunes improved in the following years when he succeeded in completing quite a bit of art schooling, then in 1909, Alfred Stieglitz of the famed 291 Gallery, gave him his first one-man show. That put him on equal footing with the big boys, and Hartley continued to rub elbows with the leading lights of the international creative community throughout his life (he was a favorite of Gertrude Stein’s).

The passage of time has made it hard to appreciate the radical moves Hartley made in these paintings, and they look pretty tame by current standards. Serene still lifes--of garlic, fish, Cezannesque fruit, cactus, sea shells--lush, ecstatic landscapes, a country church with Albert Pinkham Ryder clouds drifting through the sky above--it all looks fairly traditional. In fact, this was highly exploratory work that broke with convention in several respects, particularly in its approach to pictorial space.

What comes through more clearly than their quality of innovation, however, is that these are incredibly sweet paintings that believe in Modernism, and explore the twists and turns in its dogma with complete faith. In fact, one of the most attractive things about Hartley’s work is that it harks back to a time when art was a manageable proposition, a time when with diligence, one could truly know the field and have confidence in its importance. That’s a much trickier place to get to today.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 920 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Oct. 20.

The Paranoia of the ‘90s: Cliff Benjamin reflects on the paranoid climate of the ‘90s in “Corpus,” a Pence Gallery exhibition of drawings and sculpture exploring the politics of the body, specifically, the link between death and sensuality. Benjamin’s art suggests that the AIDS epidemic and America’s swing to the right have brought us to a point where sex has come to be equated with death and that we’re living in a period comparable to the Dark Ages; it’s hard to argue with him about that.

Benjamin has left the gallery dimly lit so as to better show off three neon sculptures that are the centerpiece of the show, and the darkened room has the hushed atmosphere of a church. The neon pieces hang flat to the wall and are comprised of circles of white light linked together so as to approximate human forms, one of which includes a single red ring representing a mutant cell.

The neon shares space with elegantly rendered drawings based on prints from the 12th- through the 15th Century, thus linking the new Dark Age with the old one. The drawings deal with ideas of hidden identity, repression and the allure of death, while a free-standing sculpture titled “Organ” is described by Benjamin as “a colon with an orifice at the top.” A disturbingly eloquent metaphor for disease, this horn shaped form is dripping with globs of yellow insulating foam that looks like pus.

This is the first foray into sculpture for Benjamin, who was previously known as a painter, and he sees it as the most optimistic body of work he’s done. He states that he views art as a means of working through fear toward hope, and that he uses light as a metaphor for the life force. There is great clarity and courage in this work, but it must be said that darkness gives hope a run for its money in “Corpus”; in fact, this show leaves you with the sense that you can almost smell the witches burning.

Also on view at Pence is a body of new work by painter Tom Knechtel whose last series was an homage to that unfairly maligned beast of folklore, the bat. This time Knechtel explores childhood, that wondrous, terrifying period in human life when one struggles to create a workable system for understanding the world.

Seminal L.A. punk band the Germs recorded a song called “Forming” that evoked the savage beauty of the mind as it moves from a state of incomprehension into a sophisticated organ capable of exquisite subtleties, and Knechtels’ surreal and slightly sinister interpretation of the child’s reality works similar turf. Marveling at the discovery of one’s own body, with one foot still in a dream state, the child is depicted by Knechtel as leading a primal, eroticized existence in an anthropomorphized realm where fish radiate light and a tree sprouts from the groin of a monkey.

Pence Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Oct. 20.

‘International Tribe of Youth’: Photographer Marsha Burns travels the world photographing what she refers to as “the international tribe of youth.” Playing up the clothing and accessories people choose to communicate their ideology, her large black and white portraits at the Andrea Ross Gallery depict young punks, a belly dancer, a gay couple, a young woman whose nude torso is draped with lengths of ammunition. Burns’ empathy for the non-conformist types she’s drawn to is clear, however, her work is rather derivative--Joel-Peter Witkin, Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn and Larry Clark have all been here before. Particularly weak is a series of portraits of subjects with masked faces who are bound with a variety of weirdly kinky devices. These impossibly silly pictures aren’t nearly as shocking as they intend to be.

Also on view is a body of staunchly traditional work by Trevor Southey that includes oil painting, drawings and etchings of landscapes, portraits, nudes, still lifes and cats.

Andrea Ross Gallery, 2110 Broadway, Santa Monica, to Oct. 13.