Tull Not Clowning Around With Subjects at Solo Show

FACES

“One of the great things about being an artist is that you have license to study absolutely anything you want. So I’m interested in the challenge of working with a completely banal subject,” says artist Dani Tull, 24, who opens his first L.A. solo show Saturday at La Brea Avenue’s Parker/Zanic Gallery.

As that subject, Tull has chosen a commercial image not very respected in art circles: the clown.

“I’d always been a painter, so one day a relative asked me to do a painting for her--a traditional clown painting. I was so insulted because I wanted to be a serious artist. I couldn’t believe she’d asked me to paint a clown. But then I got to thinking what a challenge it would be to paint the most banal subject and try to make it interesting.”

Tull began his clown series while completing his MFA at Stanford University. He says his professors were “really upset” with his selection of the simple subject matter.

“But I couldn’t listen to them, I just had to do what Dani Tull thought was art, and I did,” he says. “I do the work for myself. I don’t think of people coming to see it in a show when I’m working on it. I don’t do it for the gallery viewers. I do it for me.”

Tull said that his work refers back to his own childhood when circus clowns “scared the hell out of me.” And to this day, he admits, he is still “terrified” by them, even though he has amassed quite a collection through gifts from friends. So working on the series is quite cathartic, he says.

Tull strives to keep his art serious, however. Through his choice of materials, for instance, he aims to dispel the notion of clowns as happy symbols that can take away children’s worries.

Several of his paintings are done on silver leaf that is blotched with stains from motor oil or tar. In these works, he explains, the silver leaf represents a “pure, antiseptic” surface while the stains serve as “a septic, human residue,” such as urine or blood, that mars that world. It is over this background that his clowns are placed.

“The clown is like an ironic attempt at a Band-Aid. We think they will help, but they’re so threatening that they hardly heal anybody,” he says.

Still, Tull--who recently moved to Los Angeles from the Bay Area, where he had been showing in several alternative spaces--admits the work is risky.

“This work is kind of goofy in a lot of ways. But I hope people will take it seriously,” he says.

THE SCENE

The L.A. County Museum’s Art Rental & Sales Gallery, which has helped launch hundreds of contemporary artists over the last 37 years by showing and renting their works, is saluting LACMA’s 25th anniversary at its Wilshire Boulevard location with “Retrospective and Prospective,” featuring 11 veteran and 10 emerging artists.

The established artists, all of whom showed at the gallery at the dawn of their careers, are Lita Albuquerque, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Cliff Benjamin, D.J. Hall, Jim Morphesis, Ed Moses, Edward Ruscha, Ann Thornycroft, DeWain Valentine and Robert Walker.

The emerging artists are Larry Brooks, Wayne Hodge, Nancy Lawrence, Mary Monge, Robin Ryan, Patrik Ryane, Barry Michlin, Connie Mississippi, Mike Spica and Susan Venable.

“These are artists that we think have a very good chance of being the same class of names in the future as Lita Albuquerque, Ed Ruscha and DeWain Valentine,” said Lynne Hiller, gallery co-chairwoman. “We look at so much art; we think this is the very best that’s available.”

The show runs through March 28. The space, which features only emerging artists without exclusive gallery representation, is run by LACMA’s Art Museum Council.

L.A. Freewaves, the second regional celebration of independent video featuring 44 video screenings and exhibitions at diverse locations including the Long Beach Museum of Art, Onyx Video Cafe, Otis/Parsons Art Institute, Macondo Cultural Center, Angels Gate Cultural Center, Cal State Northridge and EZTV, begins Friday and runs through the month of March.

Works to be screened range from high-tech computer graphics to personal tapes made on consumer equipment by independent artists of emerging to internationally-recognized status. Panels, installations and performances involving video will be held at several sights to supplement the exhibitions and one-time viewings.

In addition, eight one-hour programs exploring issues such as ecology, women’s views, racism, stereotypes and lesbian/gay concerns will be cablecast at 10 p.m. on Mondays and Thursdays on 22 L.A. area cable systems.

An opening night program featuring videos by more than a dozen artists will be held Friday at the Museum of Contemporary Art at 7, 8:30 and 10 p.m. Admission is $7. For recorded information on various events: (213) 657-6558.

Site-specific installations by 13 emerging artists go on view today in “The Chapman Market Show” at 3465 W. 6th St.

The exhibition, funded by the L.A. Cultural Affairs Department and organized by L.A. Place Projects, features work created in response to the architecture and history of the 1928 Spanish Revival market that was considered to be Los Angeles’ first mini-mall. The works, created in a variety of media by artists including David Bunn, Ellen Birrell and Paul Boettcher, will be on view at the site through March 9.

Los Angeles-based sculptor Richard Oginz, whose work became popular after he received the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s prestigious Young Talent Award in 1979, has his first Los Angeles solo show in seven years at Ruth Bachofner Gallery, through March 30.

Oginz, 46, creates hand-constructed wood sculptures consisting of small-scale landscapes on wheeled platforms. Viewers are encouraged to operate the mechanical works, which are whimsical but address adult themes.

OVERHEARD

A tuxedoed man in glasses got quite a kick out of Otto Dix’s “Portrait of the Jeweler Karl Krall” during the black-tie opening reception for the L.A. County Museum of Art’s exhibition “ ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany.” After chuckling to himself for some moments over the portrait, which depicts the bald, red-faced jeweler assuming a feminine pose with hands on hips, belly in and chest out, the amused museum-goer yelled at his friends: “Hey, did you see this? Hitler was right about this guy--he’s nuts!” DEBUTS

San Francisco-based artist Anthony Aziz will have his first Los Angeles solo exhibition at the L.A. Center for Photographic Studies, Thursday through April 5. The show, called “Public Image/Private Sector: Rhetorical Strategies in a Time of Change,” addresses the representation of power through 12 life-size photographic portraits of corporate executives, both clothed and unclothed. Aziz has previously shown in Boston, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Portland and San Francisco.

St. Louis-based photographer Marshall Katzman opens his first Los Angeles show today at the L.A. Photography Center. “Fragments: Abstracts of the Urban Environment,” which runs through March 24, features large color prints described as “close-up sections of found, man-made objects, often in some partial state of decay or disarray.”

Other debut shows include the first Los Angeles exhibition for sculptor Michael Jenkins at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Santa Monica, Thursday through March 23; and the first solo show for L.A.-based painter Randy Leifer at Santa Monica’s Walker and Walker Gallery through March 16.