Boxing Without Brutality : Art: Lynn Schuette’s sensuous paintings never really embody the depth of her thinking on the sport.

One becomes intensely aware of one’s own skin while viewing Lynn Schuette’s new paintings at David Zapf Gallery. Skin protects--it is container, sheath and shield. Schuette’s painted figures lack that layer of self-consciousness, and their vulnerability adds to our own.

“Bloodstorm,” as the show is titled, focuses on the world of boxing, particularly its individual protagonists and the sexual and social politics of the sport. It is an odd choice of themes for Schuette, since her sensuous, graceful painting style conveys none of the brutality and violence innate to the sport. But she makes this series mildly compelling by using texts that address the pain and pathos of boxing next to her images, which speak largely of physical beauty.

She draws and paints her boxers with transparent skins, so their rippling muscles and sinuous sinews flutter like ribbons within the confines of their bodies. Many are shown individually, as martyrs, sacrifices to our society’s lust for violence. They raise their arms as if crucified, and they seem to soar through space like angels.

The memory of Joe Louis is invoked in image and text here, as an inspiring spirit to boxers and others. Schuette quotes from a text by Martin Luther King Jr., in which King tells of a young Negro given the death penalty. Upon being engulfed by poison gas, the young man calls out, “Save Me, Joe Louis! Save Me, Joe Louis!” Next to the quote hangs a painting showing Louis as an angel descending upon a fallen boxer.

Schuette names and memorializes other boxers, too, as well as actual bouts, but she renders them with priority to their generic physiology rather than any specific identifying features.

Though many men are identified, none are identifiable. Instead, Schuette’s scenarios within the ring, as well as her individual portraits, feel metaphorical. The men move about with a balletic grace, their physical bulk mediated by Schuette’s own fluid style of drawing. As a result, none of the horror of real physical combat emerges in this work.

Instead, the most disturbing aspects of the sport emerge in the short texts by various authors Schuette has paired with many of her paintings and drawings.

“Supported by a culture that values physicality and manliness, boxers pursue a sport at once scorned and glorified for its violence by a confused people who have prided themselves in civility and modernity but who cling to atavistic instincts,” reads one such text. Another validates the anger expressed by boxers as “a fully motivated and socially coherent impulse,” a response to the disenfranchised status of most who engage in the sport.

Schuette, the founder and director of Sushi, the downtown San Diego performance and gallery space, seems at once attracted and repulsed by boxing, but only some of that tension filters into her work. Pungent notions surface on occasion, but primarily through the texts: the idea that the boxers’ fighting provides the audience’s release, or that boxing is an exclusively male language that harks back to an “earlier era when the physical being was primary and the warrior’s masculinity its highest expression.”

Ultimately, Schuette’s work feels pulled in as many different directions as Schuette herself. She manages to glorify the individual fighters without sanctifying the sport, but her images never really embody the depth of her thinking on the subject of boxing.

Lynn Schuette’s “Bloodstorm” continues at the David Zapf Gallery, 2400 Kettner Blvd., through October 26. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday and by appointment (232-5004).

In contrast to the lush sensuality of Schuette’s work, Fred Lonidier’s is all substance and no style. The UC San Diego professor describes his no-frills work at Installation Gallery as “art for the recession,” and spare and poor it is.

The dauntingly flat array of photo-text panels--nearly 100 of them--bears the collective title “Welfare Is Poor Relief.” Lonidier’s theme: “Why the International Unions in the U.S. support welfare but our rank-and-file members hate it.”

Lonidier, long active in the labor union movement and somewhat peripherally in social documentary photography circles, addresses vital issues in the most lifeless of forms. Each of his panels has a pale gray background image or text overlaid by endless blocks of black type. Plain, snapshot-size photographs punctuate the text sporadically, but the ratio of text to image is severe. Within this complex and earnest appeal for social justice, Lonidier himself offers no relief and no real focus for the viewer.

The text panels cover each of Installation’s three gallery walls and are dense with excerpts from books and articles, as well as statements by members of local unions, most of them unemployed. Much of the testimony against the prevailing economic system--one writer calls it “capital punishment”--is far too involved and analytical to be fully absorbed in such quantity, especially in a gallery with no seating.

But Lonidier’s interviews with workers help bring the issues alive. A carpet salesman makes the poignant remark that in the three years since he’s lived in San Diego, the city “has found a home for 600 penguins. They imported 600 penguins, received the finest food, finest medical care and the finest environment,” while the unemployed lack adequate relief and the homeless lack shelters.

Lonidier’s photographs show men scavenging for food in garbage cans, pedestrians shooting sidelong glances at homeless people sleeping in doorways, as well as Labor Council meetings and the distribution of food to unemployed workers. Photographs dated from 1967 to the present demonstrate simply that the situation has changed little, if at all, in the past 25 years.

Since the slick style of Reagan-era politics is partly to blame for such inattention to domestic issues, it would be a doubly cruel blow to criticize Lonidier’s work for its very lack of slickness. What is needed here is not necessarily a glossy style, but simply a more engaging one, a more appropriate vehicle for evidence and arguments in support of fundamental human rights.

Fred Lonidier’s “Welfare Is Poor Relief” can be seen at Installation Gallery, 719 E St., through November 2. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

SILVA’S POIGNANT DRAWINGS

For all of their spunky patterning, Ernest Silva’s drawings exude a melancholic air. Their wooden scarecrows with patched clothing and jerky gestures feel sadly pensive. Even a volcano spews tears in Silva’s disarming drawings, on view through Nov. 17 at Java Coffeehouse/Gallery (837 G St.).

For this show, the artist has also painted directly on the wall with the same wobbly, reticent hand that gives his drawings their poignant, poetic presence.