ART REVIEWS : Ace Is the Place for Lee Jaffe’s Social Concerns

Artist Lee Jaffe is the product of a wildly exotic blend of influences. Born and raised in New York where he grew up in a Jewish home, he began his career with an interest in Dada, Symbolist poetry and Conceptualism (Jaffe was a student in the late ‘60s, when Conceptualism was a big part of the art-school curriculum). He next busied himself with film and music projects, then in 1972 met reggae legend Bob Marley and moved to Jamaica. He spent the next five years playing in Marley’s band the Wailers, producing records for various artists, and immersing himself in the Rastafarian philosophy. He even grew a head of dreads.

Jaffe’s tropical sojourn came to an end in 1977 when he returned to the United States and spent the next six years hammering out a method of artmaking suitable to his wide-ranging concerns. His first show, in 1983, was an expression of protest against the commodification of art (work of that period incorporated fur, gold leaf and dollar bills). The unholy marriage of art and commerce is no longer a central issue for him, but his work continues to be rooted in a sense of social conscience. Among the themes he explores in an exhibition of new work at Ace Gallery are racism, the environment, the function of danger and provocation, the psychology of social relations, and the exquisite gamesmanship of Conceptualism. It’s a pretty full dance card.

Rather than merely arranging artworks in a space, Jaffe attempts to activate and transform space itself, and the massive rooms at Ace provide an epic canvas for him. This show centers on seven installations that respectively involve sound, a laser beam, a sculpture that claps and spins, and a huge aquarium filled with exotic fish and built into a painting made of lead.

The fish piece, titled “Sea of Desire,” is delightfully outlandish. The aquarium is backed with a mirror (possibly alluding to the narcissism inherent in desire), and framed with a massive expanse of lead scribbled with personal ads culled from newspapers. The fluid purity of the water, the darting and drifting fish, and the lush lead surface telegraph the notion of desire surprisingly well--this is an intensely sensual piece.

Whereas individual pieces are consistent within themselves, Jaffe’s body of work viewed as a whole is rife with paradox. He combines found objects and low materials (a pair of dirty socks, a salami, a bull’s testicle) with elaborate fabrications and expensive handmade paper. He pays homage to obscure blues musicians in one piece, to avant-garde gurus Walter de Maria and John Cage in others. Nor does he seem particularly concerned with creating a connecting link between these various worlds--rather, he simply evokes them. The central weakness in this otherwise powerful work is that the elaborate machinery Jaffe employs threatens to upstage his ideas, which are often fragile and highly sophisticated. Rather than reflecting on the artist’s intentions, one is apt to get distracted musing on how they got these gargantuan artworks up the stairs and into the gallery.

Transcendental Squares: Also on view is a suite of new paintings by L.A. minimalist James Hayward. Hayward’s been painting monochromatic rectangles and squares for 15 years as a way of exploring what he describes as “automatic painting (or, painting done without interpretation during process).” His latest body of work is composed of colored square panels of varying size that are hung together in clusters of 3, 5, 9 or 15. In their straightforward uniformity, Hayward’s color swatches are evocative of carpet samples.

Each painting is completed in a single session using unmixed paint applied in short, expressive brush strokes. Paint is laid on so thick that the surfaces crack as they dry, and the resulting finish puts one in mind of the icing on a stale sheet cake. Like all Minimalists, Hayward is wrestling with the void--no easy task of course, and his unswerving commitment to the transcendental is laudable. Visually, however, his quest doesn’t make for terribly stimulating art. Perusing this series of paintings is like watching someone meditate.

More Minimal: On view in the entrance gallery is “American Masks and Markers,” small wall sculptures by New York artist Richard Nonas. Dense works of metal and wood, these geometric forms have the strange, portentous power of hieroglyphs. Trained as a social anthropologist, Nonas did extensive fieldwork in the Mexican desert, and his admiration for Mayan and Aztec decorative motifs can be felt in this work.

Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., to Feb . 2, (213) 935-4411. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday. Closed Sunday.

Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye: Unbeknown to most people in the L.A. art community, Jonathan Borofsky moved out of town last spring. One of the most gifted and internationally prominent artists in Southern California, Borofsky lived here for 13 years but maintained an extremely low profile on the local scene. Now he’s gone (to New England), but he left a few things to remember him by. First and foremost is his wonderful “Ballerina Clown,” the controversial sculpture installed at the corner of Main and Rose in Venice. And until Jan. 26, he can be seen in an exhibition of graphic work at the Glenn-Dash Gallery.

Hand-painted woodblock monotypes with collage, made this year at Gemini, the eight works on view are all variations on an image Borofsky calls “Man With a Briefcase.” Those who follow Borofsky’s work will recognize Briefcase Man as a familiar member of the artist’s family of alter egos that includes Running Man, Hammering Man and Flying Man. A composite of Magritte’s bowler-hatted burgher and the Fedora-clad Joseph Beuys, Briefcase Man is the most cryptic of Borofsky’s fictional players. The quest for psychological and physical freedom is central to Borofsky’s work, and it’s hard to tell how Briefcase Man--who seems an image of buttoned-down control--fits into his larger narrative. Here we see eight slightly different Briefcase Men (some are heavily embossed) floating in a field approximating the texture of wood grain. They make for a rather chilly army.

Also on view are six drawings dating from 1978 to the present. Executed on cheap notebook paper, these intimate interior maps combine doodles with notes the artist wrote to himself. Frenetic and rambling, they seem the product of a hyperactive mind trying to do 10 things at once. As with all Borofsky’s work, the drawings are assigned a number signifying their place in his sequence of production; the counting is the only clear through line in a jumbled jungle of thoughts. Glenn-Dash Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 874-5161, to Jan. 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Sky Lights: For more than 30 years, Jane Wilson has painted the fields, beaches and skies of Long Island, N.Y. A traditionalist who clearly admires the Dutch landscape style as well as Impressionism, she brings a distinctly American flavor to those venerated approaches to the study of light and space; there’s a haunted, melancholy quality to American light (Edward Hopper captured it masterfully), and Wilson’s paintings are illuminated by just such a light.

Born and raised on an Iowa farm, Wilson attributes her “spacial memory” to a childhood spent surrounded by vast expanses of earth and sky. Growing up feeling a spiritual connection with the earth--empty spaces in particular--Wilson intends that her paintings communicate the emotional implications of light, weather and earth, rather than what those things actually look like. This intention frees her to conjure a slightly enhanced version of nature, and the vivid colors she uses--glowing golds, rich purples--have a hallucinatory edge.

Wilson paints thin--she handles oil as if it were pastel chalk--and compositionally her work tends to be simple (her favored format is a low horizon line and a grand expanse of sky). She saves her juice for rendering the complexities of atmosphere, and it’s here that she really cuts loose. Smudging and rubbing color into subtly gradated rainbows, her landscapes sing with an unfettered, visionary beauty evocative of Turner and Blake. Constructed around a radiant center, her pictures pulsate with an intensity so fierce it’s almost deadly; in this, her work reminds one of Rothko.

The Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (213) 652-9850, to Jan. 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.