ART REVIEWS : Shedding Light on an Elusive Figure

“The Expressive Sculpture of Alvin Light” is not a major exhibition, but it is a welcome one. Neither prolific nor a frequent exhibitor, Light is an elusive figure in the history of Bay Area painting and sculpture. He held only eight solo shows during his lifetime, and following his untimely death (from lupus) in 1980, at the age of 48, his art largely disappeared from public view.

Organized by the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, and on view at the Laguna Art Museum, the show brings together 16 sculptures and 8 works on paper spanning 23 years. Typically, roots, branches and weathered driftwood are pieced together with milled, chopped and sawed lumber into improvisational sculptures. Spiral and helix shapes suggest ambiguous processes of organic growth into architectonic form.

Unfortunately, the exhibition organizers have isolated Light’s work within the context of Bay Area Abstract Expressionism. That effort misleads, for two reasons.

First, Light was of a much younger generation. He was barely 20 when he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts in 1951 to study painting, the very moment when abstraction’s prominence was being challenged by a new style of figurative art. When, after a hiatus for military service, Light returned to the school in 1955, even such formerly committed abstract painters as Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff had turned to a figurative mode.

Second, not until 1962, years after Abstract Expressionism had become a hallowed tradition, would he find his own stride as a sculptor.

The point is not that Abstract Expressionist principles had no meaning for Light’s art, merely that his sculpture wasn’t just the “translation” of a painterly mode into a sculptural one, as this show suggests. The slim catalogue is based on a conviction that Abstract Expressionism was the last truly “noble” modernist art. Alvin Light is sentimentally cast in the role of heir.

The fit is uncomfortable because Light was decidedly provincial in sensibility (however immensely gifted he certainly was). The show’s curator, Marc D’Estout, and the catalogue essayist, Charles Shere, respond in kind: Neither acknowledges developments outside the internal history of art in San Francisco. Light’s work, however, relies on accepted sculptural precedents.

The principle one was open-form sculpture. Conceived of slender masses of metal joined to create a kind of three-dimensional drawing in space, it transformed Cubist syntax from something solid and dense into lighter, airier structures. Pioneered by Picasso, modified in the 1930s by Julio Gonzalez and elaborated into a contemporary idiom by David Smith, it ranked as the most prominent form of American avant-garde sculpture during the 1950s.

The primary difference in Light’s work was his choice of material. In lieu of iron or steel, Light chose hardwood. In place of the oxyacetylene torch to join the linear elements, he used pegs, glue and laminates. Instead of an industrial poetry, he sought an organic one.

Light’s most engaging works are eccentric constructions that, as if signaling mutely to the viewer, erect precarious, frontal, upward-reaching forms. “Spring 1974” holds aloft a wood lintel, while an untitled 1980 sculpture raises a flag-like plane. Without being figurative, both exude a poignant, vaguely anthropomorphic feel--which couldn’t be more different from Abstract Expressionist art.

Laguna Art Museum: 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, (714) 494-6531, to March 24. Closed Monday.

Images Through a Viewfinder: In 15 black-and-white gelatin silver prints, Judy Fiskin continues her on-going project to explore the culturally ambiguous structure of art. Numbered among the photographs at Asher-Faure Gallery are some of the most compelling this gifted artist has made.

Fiskin’s now-familiar format--a black and white image, 2 3/4 inches square, crisply printed inside a much larger field of white--is crucial to the success of her enterprise. Commonly, we look through photographs, as if these ubiquitous images are transparent transcriptions of the world they describe. By contrast Fiskin’s format pulls you up close, nose to glass, to literally peer at an image residing on the surface.

This deft device frames the visual experience, rather than the picture. The spectator is put in a position parallel to that of the photographer at the time the photograph was taken: Suddenly, you’re conscious of looking at an image close-up and cut off, exactly as it was isolated through a camera’s viewfinder.

And what do you look at?

More art. Fiskin’s photographs show the bas-relief on a Wedgwood plate, a cameo of carved wood, a detail of a painting by the late Tony Greene and so on. Each is a constructed view of the world, like the silver print you’re looking at. The fiction within the photographic image echoes against the fiction of the photographic object.

The most beautifully resonant picture is that of the Wedgwood plate, which depicts a scene from the “Iliad.” A classical motif (the “Iliad”) is interpreted in a neo-classical form (Wedgwood) transcribed by the classic modern medium (photography). With the camera as the great leveler, exclusive distinctions between kitsch and high art collapse in significance. The tragic grandeur of the Homeric myth is deftly embedded within the historic narrative of image-making itself, including Fiskin’s own.

Asher-Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (213) 271-3665, to Saturday .