ART REVIEWS : ‘Storms’: Another Kind of Flag Waving

One of the thorniest issues surrounding political art is that of specificity. How--and to what extent--should the circumstance, condition or personage under protest be represented? At what point does the work segue from art into reportage? Does this distinction in fact remain viable?

Hans Burkhardt’s new series of paintings, “Desert Storms,” responds to the recent Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and to the official U.S. and allied response. In the 30 works shown at Jack Rutberg Gallery, Burkhardt resolutely eschews any illustration of the events surrounding Operation Desert Storm in order to focus on a single symbol and a single idea--the American flag, and the ways in which its claims to patriotism are often used to sanction imperialism, violence and death.

The flag has, of course, been a prominent motif in contemporary art ever since Jasper Johns canonized it with his cheerfully red, white and blue simulacrum of the late-’50s. Like Johns, who conflated image with ground in order to challenge post-Renaissance systems of artistic representation, Burkhardt extends the image from edge to canvas edge.

But there the resemblance ends, for Burkhardt trades Johns’ deadpan style for a wrenchingly visceral expressionism, tossing out the regulation clusters of 50 resplendent stars to make way for tattered, varnish-encrusted squares of burlap, set against fields of thick, dark stripes.

If anything, Burkhardt’s damaged flags recall Anselm Kiefer’s ravaged landscapes, scarred by charred straw and matted dirt as Germany was scarred by the Nazi atrocities. Like Kiefer, Burkhardt suggests the inevitable dissolution of national symbols in the wake of state-sponsored violence. And like Kiefer, Burkhardt often errs on the side of bathos--witness the crosses of rope embedded in the burlap; the barbed wire cross of thorns and wooden cross affixed to the surface of “Lime Pit”; and the painted crucifix hammered dramatically onto the flag in “The Desert.”

Here Burkhardt abandons any pretext of specificity in order to embrace an eternal vision of pain and suffering. What is less overt, however, is how deeply the artist implicates himself in this ahistorical evocation of martyrdom: The hidden drama of these images seems to lie in the pale layers of richly gestural paint that valiantly assert themselves from behind the thick stripes/bars of black.

These lovingly painted passages want to insist on the continuing triumph of Abstract Expressionism, the style with which Burkhardt has been associated for more than 50 years, through the rise and fall of a succession of subsequent “isms.” What this work insists on instead is just how closely intertwined--here and elsewhere--are the realms of the personal and the political.

Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-5222. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through Nov. 30.

Language as Art: While most of her post-conceptual cohorts are busily injecting language into art to critique systems of representation, Nancy Dwyer--much like the concrete poets--uses language to draw pictures.

But where poets such as E.E. Cummings and John Hollander scatter words across the page to establish complex rhythms, shapes and patterns, Dwyer twines words around the borders of blank, green canvases to create pictorial vacuums, pictures of nothing--a banal, but still convincing metaphor for contemporary life.

Tracing the circumference of one painting is the tinny drone of a familiar and endlessly circular litany--”I’m not home leave a message after the beep I’ll get back to you”--spelled out in letters that are now hallucinatorialy close, now stutteringly distant. The image doubly signifies absence, first, in terms of the gaping hole at its center (this is literally an empty painting of nothing ), and second, in terms of the prerecorded, and then artistically transcribed message, twice removed from the “real”--it’s the voice of the one who is (ostensibly) not there.

“Can I Have It?” is the title of another of Dwyer’s wraparound paintings, which starts off as an ‘80s-style self-help cheer--”Can I Have It? Yes You Can! Can I Kick It? Yes You Can!”--and quickly devolves into ‘90s-style indulgence unto destruction: “Can I Eat It? Yes You Can! Can I Touch It? Yes You Can! Can I Kill It? Yes You Can!”

On the one hand, Dwyer’s work can be said to function purely on a linguistic level--what is of interest here, after all, are the ideas, expressed in a particularly noxious, media-inspired parlance. But like Jenny Holzer, who similarly adopts alternate voices in order to interrogate contemporary mores, Dwyer is acutely sensitive to medium and presentation, to the ways in which their skillful manipulation can produce effects far more powerful than words alone.

In this, Dwyer’s images unexpectedly wind their way around to (re)validating their own medium of painting; and for this--especially now--they bear careful watching.

Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (213) 451-1121. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through Nov. 16.

No Meaning: Ambiguity is enshrined as an aesthetic principle in “Hills Like White Elephants,” a frustrating, and for precisely that reason--that refusal to tie things up in a neat package we call “meaning”--eminently satisfying collaborative installation at Fred Hoffman.

What is foregrounded in this collection of paintings, found objects, assemblages and audiotapes by Werner Fiche, Vernon Fisher, M. Moon and Consuelo Tattoo is what is left out, what remains unsaid, the strange gaps, fissures, and inconsistencies hovering between what the eye sees and what the mind thinks it knows.

“Six Objects in Light” is the title of Fisher’s large painting of a bevy of spectral rabbits, neatly numbered from 1 to 4. Initially, one is diverted by the cleverness with which the artist mimics a photographic negative, white objects silhouetted against the blackened canvas.

But where are the other two objects? One scans the painting in vain for what the image makes clear cannot be found. With this, Fisher quietly suggests that when pictures and language tell contradictory stories, we place our trust not in what we see, but what we are told--especially when the talebearer is as authoritative as the institutionally validated artist.

The installation works hard to deconstruct this notion of the sanctified artist. “Hills Like White Elephants,” the show’s title piece, is a transcription of a passage from Hemingway’s eponymous story, “revised” by Tattoo and emblazoned upon the wall with all the dialogue deleted. Here, one artist’s integrity is assailed by another’s creative imperative; she rewrites his text and it becomes hers.

What is at issue, then, is what is no longer there, what history has consigned to the hazy space of memory. What is ultimately no longer there, the show insists, is a Modernist conception of personal style. That the artist is not an integral voice, but an irredeemably fragmented field is made clear by the fact that Fiche, Moon, Tattoo and Fisher are not separate individuals, but different aspects of the latter’s artistic persona. Artistic identity, Fisher seems to say, is a fantasy, and so, by extension, is our own identity as interpreters.

Fred Hoffman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (213) 394-4199. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through Nov. 16.