Artist Aims at U.S. View of Gulf War

Most 20th-Century artists who have responded to the theme of war have condemned war rather than glorified it, a consequence, perhaps, of the inherent anti-Establishment bias of modern art. World War I spawned a school of European anti-aesthetic revolutionaries who called themselves Dadaists. World War II inspired the challenging, healing-oriented art of the German Joseph Beuys, among others. More recently, the Vietnam war acted as a catalyst for a tough, poignant series of work by American artist Terry Allen.

Even fresher in our minds is the Persian Gulf War, the subject of local artist Mario Uribe’s new work at the David Zapf Gallery. Uribe leaps radically from one style and approach to another in this show, titled “War Memorial,” but all of the paintings, drawings and constructions exude a fundamental sense of suffering. Anguish over the passivity and gullibility of the American public with regard to the war’s purpose and impact, frustration over the sanitized reportage of the war, contempt for the commercialization of the event and sadness over the loss of human life all surface in Uribe’s compelling and necessary work.

Though he uses a heavy hand at times, Uribe’s effort to challenge the American government’s monstrously powerful monopoly over war information by matching its tactics feels justified. In previous work, particularly his jarring, delicate series of charcoal drawings about the bombing of Hiroshima, Uribe has shown that he has a range of responses to the business of war. Here, as in the Hiroshima series, he gives his more poignant emotions a lighter touch.

The charcoal drawing, “Fool’s Gold (Direct Hit),” for example, fairly weeps with the pain of life lost in vain. It shows two fallen men, whose blood forms a pool of gold beside them.

Other works have a slick, snappy character that mimics the crisp graphics of the media’s war coverage. “Toll Free” shouts in splashy graphics the telephone numbers to be dialed to “Find out if your loved one is dead. CALL NOW--Toll Free!!”

“How I Learned to Stop the War (Every Night)” is simply a television remote control unit mounted on camouflage fabric and framed on the wall. A modest construction, it encapsulates well the true remoteness of the public from the horrors of the war, despite the constancy of television coverage.

Even more charged with anger is the construction “85% of the American People,” featuring a large black and white photo enlargement of a flock of sheep. A window cut in the image holds an electronic message board that spews a stream of terms, facts and figures associated with the war: President Bush’s proclamation that “we cannot afford not to go to war”; the statement that “the weather is right to fight a war”; the fact that the war’s initiation immediately sent the New York Stock Exchange up, and the euphemistic terms friendly fire and collateral damage .

Uribe’s memorial to the war is itself a battle--against ignorance, apathy and blind faith. When fighting an opponent as mighty as the U.S. government and as vast as the American public, it’s no wonder Uribe opts for direct blows rather than subtle swipes.

David Zapf Gallery, 2400 Kettner Blvd., through Dec. 7. Hours are 12-5 p.m. Friday and Saturday and by appointment (232-5004). At 7 p.m. Friday, Mario Uribe will deliver an informal lecture, followed by a performance by Kaz Tanahashi and a reading by Poets Reading Inc. from the book “Journal of the Gulf War: Poetry From Home.” The event is free and open to the public.

Let the paintings of Anton Christian accumulate in your visual memory, and you may end up with more than “Twenty-Eight Questions,” as the paintings are collectively titled. One might inquire of the poetic, highly sensual ensemble, for instance, how it manages to massage the senses so palpably, yet never really touch the soul. It is also worth asking why Christian’s small sketches are displayed among the large paintings when together they feel redundant instead of illuminating.

Christian, an Austrian painter, has dedicated this series of work, now at the San Diego State University Art Gallery, to the late Austrian poet Erich Fried. Books of Fried’s love poems are available in the gallery to supplement the yearning, imploring tone of the paintings. Christian’s series, painted in copious layers on tall sheets of deckle-edge paper, muse on a brief poem by Fried that asks such questions as “How can you become happy? . . . How will people fare? . . . What can I be and not be to you?”

A faithful adherent to the Romantic tradition in art, Christian paints the state of the human soul. He visualizes the personal, meditative search for answers, happiness, peace. He does this both figuratively and abstractly. A lone figure appears in many of the images, curled in self-protection, contemplating his own reflection or walking with his face buried in his hands. Another figure sprouts a tree limb from his chest; another supports a second figure, curled around the hips of the first.

In many images, however, Christian omits the figure in order to concentrate instead on pure texture and atmosphere. He calls these 28 works “Nightwater” paintings, but their amorphous, shifting surfaces suggest fire and air as well. The richly webbed and veiled paintings run hot and cold--one seems to burn the color of rich wheat, another has the cool dampness of a cell, warmed only by the intensely bright rays of light cascading in through a high window. Everywhere, Christian uses a palette of visceral power--the colors of blood, night sky, cool moss, fog, pomegranates, the moon’s reflection.

Enmeshed within these layers of pastel, shellac and acrylic paint are written texts by Christian and the poet Fried, little of which are legible, even to the reader of German. The writing, however, with its persistent rhythm, reinforces the investigative, meditative qualities of the images, though at times neither words nor images yield tangible interpretations.

Oddly, though, these paintings feel more like contrived dramas than spontaneous expressions of the soul. Part of the problem is due to their being displayed near their preliminary studies, which anticipate not only the exact images of the larger works, but often the very palette and brushwork to be used. By their very presence, these smaller studies lessen the immediacy of the larger works. They diffuse the power latent within the paintings, making them appear far more contained and resolved than the questions they pose.

San Diego State University Art Gallery, through Dec. 4. Hours are 12-4 p.m. Monday, Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday.