ART REVIEWS : Richard Jackson: Conceptual and Uncollectible

“Commercialism doesn’t interest me--it’s just too stupid,” comments artist Richard Jackson in explaining the extravagant anti-materialism of his work. Presently at mid-career, Jackson works in construction by day to finance elaborate installations that are virtually collector-proof; his work exists only for its exhibition period, then is destroyed.

The subject of a one-man show at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery through Dec. 19, Jackson came of age during the ‘60s, along with his buddy Bruce Nauman--whose ideas clearly affected him. The unfettered mysticism of Nauman isn’t quite so high-flown with Jackson, who does wry, site-specific installations that subvert painting while celebrating it. Jackson uses conventional art materials in unconventional ways--he once made 1,000 paintings, then stacked them in a gallery so that all the viewer could see was the ragged, stained edges of the canvases. He also uses stretched canvases as paintbrushes for massive expressionist paintings he executes directly on gallery walls.

Jackson’s work evidences an interest in systems that link him with Minimalism, and he tips his hat to Dada with the anarchic strain in his work. However, his strongest historical tie is with Conceptualism--Jackson’s work invariably emphasizes content over form.

In 1970 he constructed a free-standing maze made of painted canvases (his first work of this kind). A similar piece is the centerpiece of his current exhibition. A re-creation of an installation previously erected in Sacramento in 1987 and Houston in 1988, the untitled work is essentially a square maze. A narrow corridor runs around the inner perimeter of the square; bars on the inner wall of the corridor allow you to look into the empty chamber at the center of the maze. The outer wall comprises various hard-edge stripe paintings rendered in bright Op Art colors. Moving through the bars and stripes, one experiences a dizzying nausea comparable to the feeling induced by a strobe light.

In another room we find one of Jackson’s “wall paintings.” Thick blocks of primary color have been painted on the wall in a square; a small canvas attached to a wooden arm is fastened to the wall at the center of the square so that it functions like the hand of a clock. The canvas travels in a circle and smears the blocks of color into a gradated, circular rainbow.

Jackson intends, he says, that his work read as a protest against the commodification of art, and his rap is peppered with populist ideas. However, the set of art strategies he’s developed is rooted in a highly sophisticated grasp of the geometry of painting. It takes a fair amount of background to get the inferences in his work. On that score, he’s preaching the elitist art gospel he claims to be disrupting.

8525 Santa Monica Blvd ., West Hollywood.

The Feminine Mystique: In a series of recent works on view at the Earl McGrath Gallery in Hollywood, Robert Graham reprises his familiar and extremely popular method of art making. A classicist and connoisseur of the female form, Graham launched a highly lucrative career with miniature, impeccably modeled replicas of perfectly built young women. His latest parade of beauties takes the form of a series of drawings rendered in pencil or pastel, and a suite of 14 cast-bronze anatomical fragments that find Graham zeroing in on body sections rather than fashioning entire forms. Poised atop a forest of high-tech pedestals arranged in a grid, we find three heads, two torsos and nine pelvises.

Fragmenting the female form in this manner intensifies the element of fetishism that runs through all of Graham’s work, moreover, the precision with which his figures are rendered makes them seem especially vulnerable in their nakedness. Much is often made of the sensuality of Graham’s nudes, however, there’s something rather bloodless and clinical in the unrelenting perfection of these avant-garde dollies. Graham’s sculptures are compared with those by Degas, but whereas Degas’ ballerinas glow with a luminous, lyrical warmth, Graham’s figures are cold, unmistakably modern and slightly decadent in an austere way peculiar to the late 20th Century. His drawings aren’t quite so chilly--he sketches with an effortless, fluid touch, and the comparison with Degas is in fact quite apt when it comes to Graham’s graphic work.

454 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, to Dec. 6.

Big, Gooey Paintings: With his body of new work on view at the Koplin Gallery in Santa Monica to Dec. 29, artist Sam Gilliam is going to have a hard time shaking the specter of Frank Stella. The two artists seem to be plowing identical fields; both make spectacularly aggressive mixed-media wall works designed to invest painting with the dynamic three-dimensionality of sculpture. Though Gilliam’s current work is the logical outgrowth of his activities of the past decade, Stella is the better known of the two artists, so in a sense he beat Gilliam to the patent office. There are, however, significant differences between the two bodies of work; whereas Stella looks baroque, Gilliam seems a bit kitsch.

A longtime resident of Washington, D.C., Gilliam came into prominence during the ‘60s as part of that city’s school of color field painters that also included Gene Davis and Morris Louis. His early paintings were exuberant symphonies of stained and folded canvas, and the work on view at Koplin is basically a fatter version of his work of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Employing various plastic materials, Gilliam positions a jumble of flat circular disks slathered with a thick icing of brightly colored acrylic onto an ovoid-shaped base that sits flat to the wall. The results shriek with the bombast of corporate lobby art.

1438 Ninth St. , Santa Monica.