ART REVIEWS : Lipski’s Poetry of Disorientation

The front and back covers to the catalogue for the exhibition “Donald Lipski: Poetic Sculpture” say a lot. One side pictures a sculpture made from an ordinary safety pin wrapped in twisted, purple rubber bands, like some new-wave fetish. The other shows a curved glass tube held by bulky metal clamps and filled with three dozen green apples in an indeterminate liquid, as if it were a lab experiment in biochemistry.

Devoid of writing, the covers give no clue as to which way is up or down, and the scale relationships between the two formally elegant sculptures are disorienting. It even takes a minute of turning the slim volume this way and that to figure out which cover is the front and which the back. Thus is Lipski’s peculiar brand of sculpture, which at its best induces a wide-eyed double take, appropriately announced.

The 12-year survey of the Chicago-born artist’s work was organized by the Freedman Gallery at Albright College in Reading, Pa., and is midway through a national tour. In the gallery at Otis/Parsons, about 50 assemblages are divided into four sections. “Gathering Dust” (1978-79) is a wall filled with hundreds of tiny, manipulated objects (such as the safety pin and rubber band) push-pinned in a grid pattern like butterflies on velvet.

In “Passing Time” (1980-81), the transformed objects have moved from small, fidgety items that suggest inventive means for coping with grinding anxiety to larger, often vaguely ominous objects--a child’s chair mummified in yards of masking tape, for instance, or a fat paintbrush whose handle is encrusted with brown rice.

“Building Steam” (1982-85), as the collective title of the third group implies, introduces an industrial edge in 16 objects, such as the base of an old-fashioned intercom surmounted by a crystal ball. Finally, the remaining recent works are independent sculptures, which include more monumental and installation-oriented pieces.

Perhaps the most common device in Lipski’s oeuvre is the wrapping of objects with tape, string, rubber, cloth, rope, shoelaces and such, which transforms them into metaphoric cocoons from which imagined creatures emerge in the spectator’s mind. Child’s play seems a recurrent theme in his art, which puts together ordinary objects in a manner that is neither traditionally Surrealist nor in line with established aims of assemblage art, but which obviously is related to both. Like a fort made by a kid out of tipped-over folding chairs and some old sheets (albeit in decidedly more peculiar terms than that), Lipski’s best assemblages can generate a shock of recognition that defies rational analysis or explanation.

A vivifying tension erupts among disparate objects that somehow magically fit together--a tiny mat woven from matches, a softball encased in a hanging metal sleeve, an altered musical instrument suspended from calipers. Insistent hybrids, his sculptures are weakest when a sensed narrative or descriptive purpose eradicates the clash among its parts and strongest when refusing a seamless purity of vision.

“Donald Lipski: Poetic Sculpture,” Otis/Parsons Art Gallery, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., to Jan. 19 .

Drawings as Tangible as Sculpture: Roni Horn’s 13 pairs of recent drawings, hung side by side (“Doubles”) or far apart on different walls (“Distant Doubles”), approach the medium as being something quite as tangible, substantive and complete as sculpture, the three-dimensional medium for which the New York-based artist is increasingly well known.

Each drawing in the pair features one or more simple shapes, such as a flat oval, a series of vertical lines or irregular squares. The paper is scored, as if the rectangular sheet had been assembled from disparate pieces, and faint pencil notations add to a sense of meticulous engineering. As an object, not an image, each drawing seems oddly industrial. The shapes themselves are made from a thick mixture of pure pigment (red, yellow, green or blue) and varnish, and it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the shape has been painted on the surface, or whether it has somehow been collaged onto it. Colored smudges and fingerprints underscore an aura of delicate fabrication.

Because the drawings are paired, you scan back and forth (and sometimes into different rooms) in an endless game of compare and contrast. Are the pairs identical? Similar? Different? At what point does similarity turn over into difference? Can extremely similar things also be utterly distinct? Which bit of information is privileged, which marginal, in answering the question?

Through doubling, Horn introduces memory into the experience of looking. Usually, the invocation of memory leads you out of a drawing, into the world the drawing represents or into past associations it evokes. Here, memory is tightly focused on the drawings themselves, leading you deeper into a process of close scrutiny of the object at hand. Rarely does simplicity cause such rich surprise as in these lovely works.

“Roni Horn: Drawings,” Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, to Dec. 22 .

Automatons Want to Make Contact: Computer technology has allowed for the creation of kinetic art with no mechanical moving parts, an otherwise dubious distinction that Alan Rath sometimes turns to provocative effect. The 11 sculptures in the Bay Area artist’s second solo show in Los Angeles employ computer-driven television imagery and sound to produce peculiar automatons. If those with moving pictures are initially arresting, those with moving audio speakers tend to hold attention longest.

“Hound” is a wooden crate on wheels, from which two aluminum trunks protrude; at the end of each a small TV screen features a digitalized picture of a nose, which sniffs the floor. “Mouth Off” is a somewhat similar configuration, with three images of chattering mouths. And “Looker” features eyes on a pair of stalks; the perpetually shifting eyes, not quite in sync with one another, suggest electronic dysfunction, as well as mental and emotional derangement.

The most compelling feature of Rath’s work is its manner of address. Disconcertingly, the sculptures appear as if they sense your presence in the room and are desperate to make contact.

Those that utilize sound take yet another step: They perform. “Bumper II” and the more complex “Transmitter” are composed of audio speakers mounted on tripods, rather like high-tech satellite dishes. Computer programs play rhythmic “songs” of moving air, a soft, dull thud accompanied by the pulsing movement of the speaker. A slow, steady sequence might be followed by a sudden flutter, which one easily translates as a regular heartbeat followed by pounding excitement, fear or energy. It’s not, of course.

“Alan Rath: Recent Sculpture,” Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 Ninth St., Santa Monica, to Dec. 29.

The Star That Sometimes Shines: Poor Jules Olitski. It can’t be easy to be the artist who was nominally announced a quarter-century ago as painting’s new messiah by the powerful critic Clement Greenberg, but whose career was soon eclipsed by the most important artistic watershed since Cubism. But such was Olitski’s fate, as Formalist painting was swept out the door by the Minimalist juggernaut.

With two stain paintings from 1964, two sprayed and splattered paintings from 1974, two expansive color-field paintings from 1981 and seven new paintings from 1990, this miniature survey means to make a case for Olitski’s art. It doesn’t persuade.

The halations of color in the two big color-field paintings are subtly sumptuous, but the four remaining historical works are pedestrian. As for the abundant new canvases, in which rainbow color (given dimension by black) is sprayed over thickly slathered layers of acrylic gel, the attempt to harness the pure artifice of painting to purported principles of nature results in the painterly equivalent of plastic flowers. They’re abysmal.

Far more compelling is the small tribute to the late Lydia Park Moore, widow of Bay Area Figurative painter David Park, in the rear gallery. A solid, if not superlative, painting of “Bathers” (1957) is joined by a selection of Park’s figure drawings and paintings on paper, which demonstrate his productive attraction to both Picasso and life-drawing. And for sheer seduction try the little still life of a comb and hairbrush, which also speaks volumes about the sources of Richard Diebenkorn’s art.

“Jules Olitski” and “David Park: A Tribute to Lydia Park Moore,” Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, to Dec. 29.