ART REVIEWS : Germany Between Wars: A New Aesthetic Order

War takes a heavy toll on every nation. World War I left Germany in tatters with factions of the left and right vying for control of the government. Left-wing experimental artists like those in the November Group were busy issuing manifestoes, trying to bind up the wounds with art and socialist idealism. There was a sense that the national turmoil was a winnowing fan and that order would eventually assert itself from the very core of the nation’s psyche.

“Neue Sachlichkeit Photography,” featuring German photographs from 1920-1940, is an interesting documentary photo-analysis of this fundamental belief in the German national will to order. The show provides an important context for a partial review of Karl Blossfeldt’s images of curling plant forms, which were intended as models for pure design, and for Wernier Mantz’s crisply geometric industrial architectures celebrating the beauty in systems. It also clarifies the cool objectivity of Alfred Ehrhardt’s patterned sand dunes and Hans Finsler’s perfectly defined clay pot. The artists assumed that order, not chaos, reflected the structure of the universe and this belief gives the photographs an almost religious zeal. The pictures are far removed from the principal of entropy that underlies much of Post-Modernism and makes the German’s faith in technological precision and scientific classification seem even more historically remote.

In a concurrent exhibition, Scottish painter Callum Innes’ turpentine dripped paintings on brown paper and canvas are typical of post-modernism’s fascination with dissolution. These spare but haunting abstractions are created as the artist drips solvent over horizontally painted grounds of thin pigment or daubs turpentine over small dots of color which then dissolve into runny pools. Gravity and erasure define the image.

There is a grave calm to Innes’ exploration that forms a sharp contrast to the German photographers’ almost fervently idealistic images of structure. The contrast has nothing to do with mediums, but everything to do with basic philosophic orientation. It’s wonderful when juxtapositions in an exhibit can make those kind of distinctions clear.

Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave. Ends today.

Measures of Life: Kenneth Goldsmith’s installation based on 1980 census data about life expectancy consists of 109 black and 109 white wooden paddles. Two dates have been cut through each paddle’s base to mark the birth and death years of unidentified people while the varying length of handles forms a rough graphing of the length of years around the gallery walls. Statistics are impersonal ciphers and these paddles are no less abstract. Though a paddle is something you can literally “get a handle on,” in Goldsmith’s hands it too is anonymous.

There is a direct relationship between this “Expectancy” piece and Goldsmith’s earlier “Crew” installation of 120 oars carved with A to Z descriptive adjectives like “abolitionist” and “activist.” Text (or in this case numbers) alters the object and transforms it into a human surrogate. It takes Kosuth’s object represented by its own definition a step further. Text becomes the ultimate abstraction capable of making one object represent another, without losing its original identity.

Connie Hatch’s installation, “Table for Two After Durer, Device for Precise Measurement with Compass and Ruler,” is a clever piece of feminist satire. By setting up a copy of Durer’s famous Renaissance grid device for precisely copying a model from life, Hatch attacks the notion of perspective objectivity and with it the male chauvinism that underlies much of Western art history. A bright light aimed at a focal point seen through the glass grid reveals not the round female nude of the original woodcut but two empty pillows and a glass brick mounted on the wall. Inside the brick is a quote from Durer’s 1521 journal, which notes that Master Gerard’s 18-year-old daughter had produced a marvelous illumination of the Savior. He concludes that it is a “miracle that a mere female should do so well.” It’s a pointed recollection that gains considerable weight when placed within the perceptual framework of art history.

Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica . Ends today.

Formalism Reconsidered: For an artist who has gone from a minimal, Rothko-esque approach to painting to stucco-thick, hyper-coloration and three-dimensionality, Ralph Humphrey is an amazingly consistent painter. His paintings may have changed a lot since 1954, but the formal problems have remained the same. It is clear from this retrospective that Humphrey is investigating painting by taking its formal properties apart and reconsidering each one. By turns he has gone from paintings that were soft, spatial stains of almost tangible liquid light onto paintings as solid as dried adobe. He has pushed the canvas-as-object from shallow relief flatness to the real three-dimensional depth of a window sill. He has run the gamut from atmospheric hues to color so dense it quite literally builds walls.

Over the years, the artist seems to have developed a winking playfulness about all this physical analysis. Where the earlier monochrome, shaped canvasses were clever but quite serious, the later real-space window paintings have a genuine silliness which adds to all the heavy theory a lively new element of down to earth enjoyment. Even as Humphrey transforms the painting-as-a-window into something less representational with his new monochrome green abstract works, he keeps the space and composition as evocative as a circus tune drifting through a nursery room window. That adds a comforting approachability to work that is trying almost scientifically to break down the boundaries between art’s illusions and reality.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, to Dec. 5.