ART REVIEWS : Ephemerality Is Essential in ‘Raw’ Exhibit

“Essentially Raw” is a smart selection of mostly under-known California artists whose works explore various forms of ephemerality. Co-curated by artist-writer Michael Anderson and gallery owner Sue Spaid, this fresh exhibition takes nature as a model for the ongoing transformations that constitute culture.

From the almost imperceptible chemical changes within cells and elements to the dramatic re-orderings of the world caused by earthquakes and floods, “Essentially Raw” begins its study of flux with an emphasis on natural processes. The radically divergent scales of these ongoing cycles--from microscopic to mammoth--boggle one’s imagination, but nevertheless hold together around the proposition, “Things fall apart.” Organic decay and physical breakdown thus form the background against which the eight artists in the exhibition construct their self-consciously transitory works.

By throwing aside any pretense toward permanence, these artists embrace fragility and guard against the risk of artistic arrogance. The best works in the show walk a tight rope between impermanence and irrelevance.

As a whole, “Essentially Raw” tends to downplay the regenerative aspects of the natural cycle, focusing instead on the eventual disintegration of every material and the disappearance of every form. Melancholy, however, never weighs down this optimistic exhibition. If the works in the show appear to be on the point of collapse, they never indulge nostalgia or wallow in other tender sentiments that fetishize loss. Instead, they seem confident that their transience is no tragedy, that they will be replaced, in the future, with other arrangements of unprecious materials more suited to an unforeseeable moment. Culture, the exhibition seems to claim, is as resilient as nature, its forms recyclable and adaptive.

Robert Gero’s “Salt Column With Carbon Sphere” is a vulnerable monument to nature’s elemental structure. A five-foot tower of crumbling salt which supports a basketball-sized sphere of powdery jet-black carbon, the column narrows at its bottom, intensifying its humble demonstration of the unstable balances that sustain life and include death.

Patrick Nickell’s triptych of thin slices of corrugated cardboard and small sheets of plastic resemble a stop-action dance of crystals taking shape. Their restless, odd geometry suggests that they are animate natural forms unwilling to settle into any kind of static arrangement, preferring instead the carefree shifts of whim.

Lynn Aldrich takes this reversible movement into the kitchen. “Waxing and Waning” consists of more then two dozen strips of ordinary wax paper gracefully hanging between two plastic dispensers, each mounted on an adjoining wall. Her ghostly send-up of Robert Morris’s seminal felt pieces speaks of the invisibility of domestic labor and the life-sustaining powers hidden in this endeavor to serve.

Dawn Fryling also plays with art history and femininity, but without the haunting elegance that gives Aldrich’s work its subtle effectiveness. Her eight wooden shelves covered with neat heaps of flour mock the supposed intransigent order of Minimalism’s constitutive forms. They also symbolically clean-up the messes made by the post-Minimalists, specifically Barry Le Va, whose installations, in the sixties, consisted of flour dispersed all over the gallery’s floor. The conservativism of Fryling’s superficially ephemeral wall sculpture lies in its fixation on art history’s established forms.

Likewise, the curators’ inclusion of Richard Tuttle reveals a conservative streak within their otherwise present-oriented exhibition. Unlike the other artists, Tuttle does not reside in California, does not belong to their generation, does not suffer from under-recognition, and did not create a new work for the show. His whimsical painted cardboard and paper wall sculpture is presented as an art historical precursor--to grant legitimacy to the less-known works on display. The curators’ desire to establish this sort of historical lineage is inconsistent with their show’s focus on ephemerality, on the need to recreate, for the moment, one’s own cultural forms.

The remaining artists in “Essentially Raw” form the show’s urban-industrial contingent. Steve Appleton’s “Severance (6th & Broadway)” is a three-dimensional collage made from chunks of a building destroyed in the process of urban development. Kevin Pasnik’s “Pull” represents the effect of his physical labor: five strips of galvanized steel dangle, like the limbs of a giant, mechanical insect, from the wall. And Steve De Groodt’s “Vacation Package” combines metal screens with lithographed advertisements in the shape of a New Guinea nose-ornament to suggest the permeability of all cultural forms. In an environment of constant change. “Essentially Raw” proposes that the capacity to deal generously with mutation gives culture its flexibility and resonance.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd, (213) 935-6153, to Aug. 25. Closed Mondays.

Activist Art: The collaborative tandem of Kerr & Malley uses anonymity as a weapon in their struggle to illuminate instances of women’s oppression. “Just Call Jane,” their latest installation, addresses the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, in Rust vs. Sullivan, to prohibit Public Health Service physicians from mentioning abortion to any pregnant woman seeking information about her options.

Kerr & Malley’s activist art combines historical research with contemporary facts to lead its viewers to a single, grim conclusion. Their work soberly proposes that unless radical changes are made, the future will hold not progress and improvement for women, but the same brutality and horror that typified the often ignored, but not too distant injustices of the past.

“Just Call Jane” refers to an illegal, underground abortion collective run by women in Chicago from 1969-73. Kerr & Malley contend that given this country’s current political climate, women cannot depend on the state to protect their right to control their own bodies. The artists project that women will once again have to take things into their own hands.

Kerr & Malley’s call for self-determination gains force in the most compelling part of their installation, the documentation of the deaths of eight women, between 1899 and 1936, from botched, illegal abortions. Eight stele-like markers make an “X” in the gallery. They refer to the 1970 “Title X” ruling that ensured--until Rust vs. Sullivan overturned this decision last May 23--that the possibility of abortion could be discussed in federally funded clinics.

On the front of these free-standing panels, Kerr & Malley have reproduced life-size photographs of themselves. On the images, they have superimposed enlargements of nineteenth century engravings depicting various medical procedures that look more like forms of torture than accepted treatments. The women artists have blurred their faces to downplay their individual identities and to suggest that their bodies can stand in for “Everywoman.” In a related attempt to use facelessness as a basis for political strength, the duo has stopped using their first names, instead referring to themselves as a law firm or some other anonymously authoritative corporation.

On the back of the panels, Kerr & Malley have transcribed, in their own handwriting, the “Dying Declarations” of the eight women they have chosen to feature in their art. Taken from the women as part of interrogations aimed at arresting abortionists these statements become, in the hands of Kerr & Malley, tragic documents of wasted lives. Most of them are compelling for their absolute resignation to death, and seemingly stoic acceptance of that fact. They haunt, however, because they also suggest that the women’s quietly objective reponses have nothing to do with their acceptance of “fate,” but with their interrogators’ inability to use them as anything more than as sources of information for their own limited investigations.

Like the work of these men, Kerr & Malley’s installation exploits the suffering of the victims it memorializes. Unlike their forefathers, however, the artists use these women with the intention of bringing such abuses to an end.

* Shea & Bornstein Gallery, 2114 Broadway, Santa Monica, (213) 452-4210, to Sept. 7. Closed Sundays-Mondays.

Toys in Bondage: The bodies of women come under a much different sort of scrutiny in an exhibition of 12 of David Levinthal’s large-format Polaroid prints. Where Kerr & Malley’s altered images deploy the rhetoric of truth in their de-aestheticized appeal to rationality, Levinthal’s staged photographs of toys emphasize artificiality in their romantic indulgence of fantasy.

Since 1972, when he was a graduate student at Yale, Levinthal has been photographing children’s toys. His projects include an elaborate re-creation of Hitler’s invasion of Russia, film noir scenarios shot with an SX-70 off a video monitor, and his most well-known images--24-inch-by-20-inch Polaroids of cowboys and Indians, spacemen and bathing beauties.

Levinthal’s most recent series focuses on tiny dolls of women engaged in acts of bondage. None of the toys wear clothes and most have their hands tied behind their backs. In several photos, pairs of figures act out scenes of domination and submission. In most, a lone doll appears in a dreamy, out-of-focus environment. The faces of the toys are almost always obscured, accentuating their anonymity and triggering fantasy’s free-floating movement.

This series makes explicit the weird tensions that have always lurked beneath the surfaces of Levinthal’s perverse work. The obvious fakery of his images appeals to a child’s ability to suspend disbelief. Their illicit subjects insist upon a troubled adult imagination. In Levinthal’s art, childhood innocence and adult knowledge thus intermingle in a dizzying dance of pleasure and its frustration, turning the allure of nostalgia into a bad, but irresistible dream.

* Jack Glenn Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 874-5161, to Aug. 31. Closed Sundays-Mondays.