She Likes Her Conceptual Art With a Flair for Intrigue and Inventiveness

To enter Sue Spaid Fine Art--which opened on Beverly Boulevard in June--you have to wend your way through the current installation by Los Angeles artist Thomas Hartman, which spreads across the entire floor. Amid a sinuous mass of electric cords are 15 white plaster duck derrieres--as if the birds were hiding their heads in the floor--cooled by 15 wildly oscillating fans.

The piece is “a comment on people who have attitudes and opinions about things--but they’re not explored,” Spaid said. The fans, she said, represent the comforts of our air-conditioned, two-car lifestyles. The artist believes that everyone’s a duck about something, she added.

As an art dealer, Sue Spaid has a predilection for conceptual art, in which the idea presented by a piece is a prime aesthetic component. Spaid is not terribly interested, however, in conceptual art for which the idea is all; nor does she care for that in which originality is downplayed in favor of so-called appropriation (the borrowing of existing art or media images).

Spaid likes her conceptual art to be experimental in its approach, inventive in its construction--and intriguing for the eye, not just the mind.

“I’m really interested in a better blend of style and content,” she said. “There’s a lot of art that’s conceptual but not visually interesting. If the art object isn’t any more fascinating than a catalogue, then I have a problem with it. The art object should be more interesting than its picture.”

For a recent show titled “C-ouch Pain-tings”, artist Carter Potter poured paint through and otherwise modified a series of eviscerated couches that were hung on the wall. And her upcoming November show--of photo realist pastel collages by Stephen Derrickson--is meant to subvert recent trends in photographic appropriation.

Another artist in Spaid’s stable is Jacci Den Hartog, whose work includes two-dimensional pieces made of cast rubber that she calls “rubber drawings.” Through the gallery, Den Hartog is also asking the public to donate items made of ivory; they will be incorporated into a piece protesting the slaughter of elephants, which is scheduled for an April show at the gallery.

Spaid--who has a longstanding interest in art, but who worked on Wall Street and earned a degree in philosophy while living in New York City--moved to Los Angeles a year ago. She picked Beverly Boulevard as a site for her gallery partly because of her attraction to its Art Deco and other older buildings.

Spaid also chose to keep somewhat unusual hours--the gallery is open from 1 to 9 p.m. Wednesdays through Sunday--so that it would be more readily accessible to those who work weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“I don’t just want rich people,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine who buys art at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday.”

The Thomas Hartman exhibit is on display through today at Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. (213) 935-6153. Open Wednesday through Sunday, 1 to 9 p.m.

ARTNOST: By now the lack of consumer products and even basic foodstuffs on the shelves of Soviet stores has been widely publicized. But since last spring, the Sherberg Gallery and a newly formed organization called Friends of Russian Art (FORA) have been working to remedy a lesser-known shortage: the lack of basic art supplies for Russian artists.

FORA is collecting funds and donated art supplies to send to Soviet artists who need them, said Michael Ayzenberg, owner of the Sherberg Gallery, which specializes in 20th-Century Soviet modern art. The gallery held a benefit exhibition this past summer for FORA, which has also approached local art-supply stores for help.

“We published an ad in a few Russian publications last spring, saying that this is to the attention of all artists that have any dream projects they would like to do but can’t because of lack of supplies,” Ayzenberg said. “We asked them to write about themselves and their projects.”

Ayzenberg said his representatives in the Soviet Union received thousands of responses, many requesting such apparently basic materials as canvas for a painting and a pack of oil paints.

Ayzenberg said that in a year or so, FORA hopes all the art produced with the donated supplies will be assembled in an exhibition that will tour six cities in the United States, along with Toronto and Tokyo.

“There are no such things as art supply stores in Russia,” said Ayzenberg, who moved from the Soviet Union to the United States 11 years ago and was a psychology major at UCLA, a law student and an investment banker before co-founding the Sherberg Gallery with artist Zinovy Shersher last year.

Ayzenberg says the gallery has paintings done on stretched potato sacking instead of canvas. “There are places where artists can get brushes, but it’s so limited,” he said. “I brought one artist to an art store here, and he didn’t know what the use was for three-quarters of the things in the store.”

Most Soviet artists, Ayzenberg said, have to try to get paint through connections or through the black market. Ironically, he noted, “They have real gold leaf in abundance. But not black paint, not brown paint.”

Under glasnost, Ayzenberg said, artists have the freedom to paint what they please. And the FORA effort has the support both of the Soviet artists’ union and of the Soviet Minister of Culture, Tair Salakov, according to Ayzenberg.

Does he see the art supply drive as political? “Of course it’s political,” he said. “But it’s not the point that I’m a Russian trying to help my compatriots--It’s the American public helping the Russian. It is one of the many things that will strengthen the political situation and ties--a very small fragment of a much larger picture.”

Friends of Russian Art (FORA), through the Sherberg Gallery, 665 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles. (213) 652-0814. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m to 6 p.m.

CHARACTER STUDY: Even before she took to dying her hair purple in the 1930s, Elise Cavanna Seeds Armitage Welton--known simply as Elise--was a strikingly colorful personality. She was more than 6 feet tall. She had studied dance with Isadora Duncan, performed with the Ziegfeld Follies, served as something of a straight woman for W. C. Fields. She was friendly with the photographer Edward Weston and with the poet E.E. Cummings. During World War II, she worked in an aircraft factory.

But Elise also was a pioneer in the Los Angeles art world--an important one who is ripe for rediscovery, according to a retrospective now at the Turner Dailey gallery.

“She was one of the very first abstract artists in L.A.,” said Victoria Dailey, co-owner of Turner Dailey. “While everyone else was painting eucalyptus trees, she was doing inventive abstractions.”

Elise, who died in 1963, exhibited geometric abstractions at the 1939 World’s Fair. Later, she moved in the direction of a more lyrically abstract painting. And in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she joined with artists Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg and Stephen Longstreet to show as a group called Functionists West. (A show of Lorser Feitelson’s work is on view at the Tobey C. Moss Gallery through Oct. 31.)

“Mainly, their philosophy was that interesting art was going on in the West, in addition to New York,” Dailey said. “But they had a hard time exhibiting here--there was a lot of resistance.”

Just by being herself, Elise apparently advanced the cause. “She was such a breath of new air--she really brought the modern movement to Los Angeles,” Dailey said. “Not just her art but her personality combined to make people notice.”

“Elise,” through Nov. 3 at Turner Dailey, 7220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. (213) 931-1185. Open Wednesday through Friday 11 a.m to 5 p.m. and Saturday noon to 5 p.m.