O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Art Imitates Art in Exhibit at CSUF

After months of limping along with minor, mediocre and sometimes downright confused shows, the Main Art Gallery at Cal State Fullerton has produced a full-scale exhibit on a major topic, “(ART)2Art Appropriates Art,” about a controversial strain of contemporary art that incorporates--and sometimes consists of nothing else but--acknowledged copies of art made by other artists.

The show contains some sharp and savvy works by key artists. But in their educational videotape that plays in the gallery, and their catalogue essays, curators Nancy Linton and Phyllis A. Renswick blur and homogenize not only the considerable differences between these artists, but also the difference between appropriation as a cultural commentary specific to the late 20th Century and copying as a traditional working method of artists through the centuries. Happily, critic Peter Frank’s essay offers a more nuanced discussion of the subtleties of the work on view.

Linton and Renswick, both CSUF master of arts degree candidates in exhibition design and museum studies, have rounded up a group of artists ranging from Sherrie Levine--a key figure in the 1980s appropriation movement--to Roy Lichtenstein, who began borrowing motifs from famous artists in the ‘60s, when he was considered a Pop painter. The curators even include Mark Kostabi, whose simple-minded art usually is not mentioned in the same breath as that of seriously regarded appropriationists.

Each of these artists has a specific agenda. They all “borrow” well-known works of art for their own purposes: commentary on the conventions of the art world (Louise Lawler); a gesture of despair in the face of a culture that denies firsthand experience (Levine); an urge to reveal the underlying tactics buried beneath the glossy surface of the media (Gretchen Bender); a desire to subvert the unquestioning worship of an artist’s ineffable signature style (Mike Bidlo).

In some of this work, art by other artists is just part of the picture. Louise Lawler’s photograph of a Leger painting hanging in a collector’s home, above a row of ornate chairs decorated with profiled heads (“Three Women/Three Chairs”), reveals aspects of the way art is valued and related to other possessions. Gretchen Bender’s silk-screened images of well-known works of art that happen to be painted in black and white, and newspaper fashion photographs of black-and-white garments (Untitled, from the series, “The Pleasure Is Back”), are about the tendency of the media to create a mindless stream of equivalent images.

Other works in the show are deliberately slavish copies. Mike Bidlo’s re-creation of a Warhol installation of Brillo boxes from 1970 throws into relief the historical uniqueness of Warhol’s gesture and the impossibility of our ever recapturing its original aura. The precision-crafted reproductions of recent work by Lichtenstein, Warhol and Frank Stella that Sturtevant made in the mid-’60s were the gestures of a woman artist cutting some big-time male art heroes down to size, as if to say: “You may think you’ve latched onto some important ideas, but my idea is even more breathtakingly audacious.”

Still other artists modify certain aspects of the originals, for various reasons. Lichtenstein’s stylized lithographs after Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral were essentially art games, wrapping a memory of the art historical past in the abbreviated format of contemporary printing techniques. Levine’s watercolor copies of paintings by modern masters are two things at once--stale copies of objects grown familiar through constant reproduction and critical homage, and wry testimonies to the uniqueness of an artist’s (Levine’s) personal touch.

Linton’s catalogue essay and the videotape make a big case for the historical roots of appropriation. It’s as if she believes that a form of art often scorned by the general public as no more than plagiarism might gain more sympathizers if only the public realized that such all-time greats as Rubens, van Gogh and Picasso also copied compositions and figures from other works of art. Linton even presses into service suitably oracular quotations, from Sir Joshua Reynolds’ “Discourses” to the 18th-Century British Royal Academy, about the mental and spiritual benefits to be derived from copying art.

But there is a huge gulf between Old Master and modern artists’ use of visual “quotes” from other sources and the duplication of works of art by contemporary artists. The dividing line is a self-consciousness about the role of images in our lives--the belief that we no longer have “real” experience of the world anymore, that everything in our lives already has been freeze-dried, programmed and replayed by the media.

According to this point of view, our lives are scripted by sitcoms, by movies, by ad slogans and pop psychology books. Even an “original” work of art hanging in a museum has become the casual equivalent of the postcard reproduction we buy in the museum gift shop, the tiny reproduction in the art history book, the grainy reproduction in the newspaper, the glossy reproduction on the shopping bag. (The diminutive size of Richard Pettibone’s canvases is determined by the scale of art reproductions, which are frequently the first--and sometimes the only--way we come into contact with these works.)

When an artist of the past copied elements of a work of art by somebody else--when Rubens used Titian’s “Bacchanal With the Sleeping Ariadne” as a jumping-off point for his own composition, for example--it was an act of homage. (In classical Chinese painting, where the concept of originality had virtually no meaning, such homage was considered a primary function of the artist.) The cult of the artistic personality--in particular, the genius , the top of the food chain -- reached its apogee in the West during the 19th Century. A genius produced masterworks . Everything he touched (it was always a he) was assumed to be imbued with greatness.

But we no longer live in that world. Serious contemporary art has more to do with ideas than with the perfection of technique. The “genius” of an idea is not something that one can absorb simply by staring at the surface of a work of art. The notion that there is a single, ineffable standard by which all art must be evaluated has been replaced with the idea of a plurality of styles, approaches and ideologies.

Meanwhile, the rise of cheap methods of color art reproduction, broader public acquaintance with art (primarily via blockbuster shows at museums) and a society increasingly inundated with all kinds of images--mostly for a numbing variety of commercial products--has served as a great leveler.

Images--hugely enlarged, ridiculously miniaturized, still and moving--speed into our line of vision at a rapid, indiscriminate pace that renders them of equal value. We have superficially intimate acquaintance with the huge lips of some model in a fashion ad; we probably know the many faces of Madonna (whether we care or not) better than the one belonging to a relative living in a distant state.

Sure, most people who like art probably still believe in the primacy of the unique art “masterpiece.” But the object to which they really are relating often turns out to be a poster or even a printed-on-canvas reproduction (with simulated brush strokes) of the famous work--an object the “master” never saw or touched.

Contemporary art turned away decades ago from the notion of the “master’s touch.” Much so-called Minimal sculpture was cast by a foundry based on the artist’s instructions. Warhol made “paintings” that actually were mechanical reproductions (silk-screens) on canvas. Neo-Expressionist painting of the ‘70s and early ‘80s was a panting, sweaty attempt to return to emotion and personality in art, but all too often the emotion was fake and the personality was vapid.

Some artists today feel a great wistfulness for the notion of artistic uniqueness, for a time (perhaps imaginary) when art was less rigidly defined by the rules of the marketplace, the personalities of collectors, the relentlessly casual scrutiny of glossy magazines and the vocal needs of critics, curators and dealers. But when Kostabi inserts his faceless gray non-persons into the paintings of famous artists, the effect is just juvenile hero worship: “Look, Ma, I’m playing with the big boys.” Even Frank is rather vague and hasty in his praise of what he calls Kostabi’s “one-liners.”

Still, the thing about conceptual devices, be they one-liners or not, is that they tend to exhaust themselves pretty quickly. Somebody could come along and appropriate Levine’s appropriations of Mondrian, and maybe that work would be quite amusing or compelling to those in the know. But the obscurity of art-about-art is unfortunate; too often such work is little more than a private joke shared among intimates. The most important work the appropriationists do is to get us to look at the big picture, in particular, the subtle tyrannies imposed by a media culture.