ART REVIEWS : Colescott’s Portraits of Racial Schizophrenia

Robert Colescott never has been a painter who pulled punches. He consistently takes ironic, disturbing jabs at historic American racial stereotypes and the hidden politics of exclusion. As usual, in these vividly graphic paintings at the Linda Cathcart Gallery in Santa Monica, Colescott renders his critical barbs in a glib, cartoonish style of figurative expression that is part comic book, part naive art and complete satire. That satire is so thoroughly in touch with the internal conflicts bred by cultural coercion that the result is a complex, but explicit, look at the workings of oppression.

Unlike earlier paintings which recast blacks into Western art, such as “George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware,” current work looks past the icons of art and history to the the everyday world. “School Days” gives us the educational arena of the college campus where black students act out stereotypical roles as football players, prostitutes and gang members. Sex and violent death are linked continually as blind justice weighs costs against health care, legal defense or opportunity and students try to juggle the Western world’s white ideals and their own black reality.

Colescott may bring an energetic, Mad magazine irreverence to all this, but the work’s implicit anguish surfaces immediately after the first half-smile. The artist stretches that reaction into a kind of portrait of racial schizophrenia. Figures are often racially fragmented or ambiguous. Whites are often a painterly brown around the edges and the reverse is also true. Colescott never resolves or clarifies these slips of identity leaving the viewer to sort out whose reality is being performed. The white or the black? The difficulty in knowing points to how tough it is to buck the dominant structure which shapes ideals, values and the individual’s identity.

Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Dec. 1.

Haunted by Memories: Norman Schwab’s paintings and sculpture are haunted spaces loaded with memories. Pulled together from the tatters of attics and the accumulation of basements they fairly breathe with the musty, dank air of rotting neglect. Related somewhat in form and physicality to Joseph Beuys’ fat and felt survival language, Schwab’s art evokes remembrance through objects.

Most of Schwab’s paintings or sculpture at Space Gallery in Wilshire Center suggest old windows or museum cases framing ghost town artifacts. They are ripe with sweet dustiness and generalized nostalgia. There is, however, something formulaic about many of these memento-strewn invocations of mortality. Some remnants begin to suggest blackened props from Hollywood disaster flicks.

But when the artist sets aside the “easy” remnants of fiery destruction and the faded photographs or old journals, the amassed suggestion of death heads somewhere beyond faux archeology. “Y” is a cross-shaped icon to life that whispers lovingly about bodily intimacies. “Mantelpiece” and “Split and Lean” use nature as a metaphor for the body to allow connections to regeneration and healing. On the surface Schwab’s pieces may be about death, but at their best they turn that occurrence into an assertion that human memory, faith, and nature’s cycles of regeneration all guarantee immortality.

Barbara Foster’s delicately colored photogravure-lithographs of defunct Arizona mine and smelter buildings are loving tributes to the grime of industry and the wearing grit of time. Color seems to seep slowly into each image, bathing the abandoned rooms, catwalks and pipes with a soft patina that contrasts gently with much of the architecture’s strong geometry. Adding to the romance of the imagery is the incendiary glow of strong sunlight which seems to burn in the building like a ghostly flame from the old smelter ovens. The effect is subtly haunting even if all that softness does lend a remote unreality.

In a large adjoining temporary gallery guest curator Josine Ianco-Starrels makes good use of the wonderfully open space to present “Some Recent Sculpture” by 17 local and national sculptors. It’s a worthwhile corralling of assemblage based artists who share Starrels’ appreciation for pure form and found materials.

Noteworthy are Ron Pippin’s fantasy soldier martyrs dripping with medals and sprouting wings; Bruce H. Brodie’s two untitled installations that make solitude a timeless, desperate experience and Scott Younker’s funny but unforgettable barbed wire, cowboy sculpture with collected red-neck ruminations.

Space Gallery, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., Wilshire Center, to Nov. 24.

Weeds on the Wall: In 1989 Vincent Shine made large, pure-form of sculpture that alluded to everyday objects like pianos and teapots. They were shifted subtly to avoid becoming a complete representation. His current pieces are exact, tiny green plant seedlings pinned to the wall or enshrined on tall pedestals. These are representations so perfectly contrived--delicate, thread white roots and all--that it’s only the impossibility of their being real, and the long list of plastics that make up the materials, that knocks them conceptually out of the ring.

Shine’s pieces at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Santa Monica closely mirror nature. Yet dangling on the wall or dancing on myriad roots, their presentation repeatedly demands that the viewer acknowledge the artificiality of the work. This is part of the artist’s tactic for getting the viewer involved in the process of assigning the work its meaning. Coupled with the paring of identical weeds on the wall so that right and left offer a stereoscopic view of the same “living” object Shine pushes hard on the futility of observation.

Shine’s choice for faux seedlings isn’t the random decision such innocuous plants might suggest. Duckweed, for instance, is currently hailed by environmentalists as an urban water treatment “savior.”

Along with Shine’s papyrus sprouts these plants are symbolically loaded objects closely tied to the human capacity to recognize things as useful. But the underlying irony here is that appearances can’t be trusted. The work makes you think hard about issues of “usefulness,” deforestation and the objectification of nature.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 920 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to Dec. 1.