ART REVIEWS : Matt Mullican’s Clever but Static Project

I’ve always been uncomfortable with Matt Mullican’s project--with its authoritarianism, its solipsism, the surety underlying its cleverly designed but utterly static cosmology. Elaborated in a variety of media since the mid-1970s--oil-stick rubbings, bulletin boards, banners, posters, stained glass, carved limestone--Mullican’s system of perfect knowledge symbolizes things not just in the world, contained by solid borders and at least ostensibly knowable, but states as insistently amorphous as heaven, hell, God and the self.

Like fascism, Mullican’s is an overconfident scheme which fascinates by virtue of its ritualized order and endless circularity. Like the fascistic enterprise of structuralism, it dangles a scientistic lure--the transparency of meaning and the promise of total understanding. There is something implicitly brutal in all this, a mercilessness which permits nothing to remain unclassified or unaccounted-for. But that brutality is skillfully blunted and so the work becomes doubly insidious.

Mullican’s new work continues apace, the self-referentiality, however, becoming less and less dazzling and more and more suffocating. Here, everything comes exactly four feet wide and neatly arranged in pairs--two pairs of oil-stick rubbings, each derived from the familiar master plan/map of Mullican’s utopian cityscape; two Duratran light boxes displaying computer-generated imagery (a park, the waves); two large bulletin boards, both completely covered, and two wooden tables, one laden with strange, resinated rocks, the other with a blown-glass object resembling an oversized laboratory tube.

That object is, in fact, a representation of a human body, at least according to a series of drawings pinned onto one of the bulletin boards. Also affixed to the board are sketches diagraming everything else in the exhibition--down to its carefully wrought floor plan--lest we miss any of the intended meanings. With nothing left to chance and with everything doubling back onto and into itself, Mullican’s idealized universe emerges as a petrified sphere--spinning round its well-articulated axis, but no longer evolving.

The rocks resting on one of the two large tables warrant special mention. These translucent, heavily striated forms were fabricated via the latest advances in desktop manufacturing. With new computer-controlled technologies, a form can be generated--in layers of laser-fused thermoplastics--directly from a three-dimensional model without tooling. Virtual reality and its myriad systemics provide Mullican not only with a compelling new medium, but with a perfect analogue for his work. For in both versions of techno-utopia, all things fallible--the human touch, not least of all--are bracketed out to spin an illusion of plenitude, perfection and order.

Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery, 1630 17th St., Santa Monica, (310) 450-2010. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through Dec. 21.

Tears for Peers: In ancient Rome, there was a custom of collecting the emperor’s tears in order to demonstrate--for the sake of his skeptical subjects--the sovereign’s capacity for suffering.

In “Untitled (Tears),” Claudia Matzko collects drops of saline solution in the brass fonts not to exploit the material’s metaphorical significance--the suffering of the artist, art as religion, art’s investment in the body--but to create a visual conceit.

This is both the strength and the weakness of Matzko’s stunning minimal assemblages. Compelling on a formal level--tiny drop-filled containers patinated a deep turquoise-blue ringing the walls of the gallery, hundreds of optical lenses hanging at eye level from thin plastic threads, pebble-sized brass balls sewn onto fluttery silk tissue in vertical, horizontal and grid-like configurations--this work is strangely diffident on all others. Resisting any exploration of the figurative and/or the real-life resonances of its found materials, the work gets stuck in a trap of its own, very elegant making.

Seduced by exquisite objects--expensive silks, shiny brass--and mesmerized by reflective surfaces--mirrors, lenses, glass tubes, wall-hung squares of Varathane--the work seems to be narcissistically over-invested. No surprise--narcissism is endemic in all art practice (not to mention the practice of art criticism). Were Matzko to foreground this incompletely repressed subtext--an especially interesting prospect for art that presents itself as coolly minimal--her work might well become as interesting as it already looks.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733. Closes Saturday.

Deferred Meaning: Meaning is always deferred in Kay Rosen’s little linguistic paintings--put off until after the inversions, the puns, the false starts and the last round of hide and seek. Take one image of three solid black rectangles and two black circles set against a white background. It looks like a rather boring exercise in Minimalism until you read its title--”Porous.” Only then does the image reveal itself as a partially concealed word, as well as an illustration of that which the word signifies--a surface riddled with two small, round breathing holes.

As with any revelation, how certain can we be of its veracity? At what point does one such revelation stop leading to another?

Reading Rosen’s riddling paintings is a bit like playing a game show you think you’re too smart for; it seems farcically easy until you’re put on the spot. Sometimes, it’s “Wheel of Fortune,” with parts of words or phrases hidden behind black rectangles (as in “Porous”). Sometimes it’s “Jeopardy!,” in which the answer provided by Rosen signifies nothing until you know the question (as in the image that reads “Ab aB,” no schoolchild’s primer, but “A Beginning of a B Movie”). And sometimes, it’s “Concentration,” in which the sound or look of words is as significant as what they mean (as in “Eye Level,” wherein a perfectly palindromic lower-case “eye” is balanced between two “l’s”).

The pleasure of such play, when properly orchestrated, is not to be underestimated. But as every game-show aficionado knows, what’s key is the payoff. What Rosen offers at the end of the (punch)line is a deft disruption of language’s symbolic order, designed to undermine our faith in its ability to communicate with speed, clarity and unambiguity.

Here, meanings beckon to one another and multiply, playing semiotics off of phonetics and word off of image, only to find themselves hopelessly mired in contradiction. One can think of the work in terms of a feminist agenda, relating Rosen to artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, who similarly seek to expose the telling gaps within patriarchal ideologies such as language.

Or one can think of the gaps within the works themselves--areas that are suppressed or erased from view--as Rosen’s contribution to the continuing debate over censorship and the arts. This strategy is especially pointed in a work such as “Little Statuette,” in which all that is visible of the title phrase is a legion of lower-case “t’s,” not incidentally resembling delicate Latin crosses.

The point, however, is not to pin down a single, exclusive meaning. It is, as Rosen insists, to open out the notion of meaning--linguistic and pictorial--and to acknowledge it as no more fixed or concrete than an ever-expanding hall of mirrors.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733. Closes Saturday. The Body Relic: Miroslaw Balka’s extraordinary minimal sculptures are haunted by the artist’s

body. At once alienated by and inextricable from their rawly aestheticized surroundings, these roughly abraded steel forms suggest how powerfully what is absent can be present and how clearly what is whispered can be heard.

The rooms that contain this sparse collection of sculptural objects feel strangely empty. There is no color, no movement, no sound.

It is not until one begins to engage the works--circling them, running one’s fingers across the length of their scabrous surfaces, bending down to examine their sponge and salt-caked interiors--that they quite literally come into view, dematerializing as anonymous industrial inventory and rematerializing as traces of an evanescent body.

The body is a simple proposition: Something hard protects something soft. Balka’s sculptures follow in mind. Yet the steel carapaces shielding the salty, spongy underbellies are not resilient, but rotting. Like the troughs and coffins they resemble, what they signify is not invulnerability, but decay. What they whisper of is the ineluctability of our mortality and what we hear in their presence are our own shallow breaths.

“My body cannot do everything I ask for” is the title of Balka’s installation. And indeed the body he conjures is only a relic of the archetypal ideal. But what the stress upon the body does here is lay bare the unconscious of Minimalism--its closeted anthropomorphism--as well as insist that a highly emotional art need not be typically expressive.

Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 847-4757. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Though Jan. 18.