ART REVIEW : Drawing Conclusions in ‘Abstract’

The world is full of regular people who say they would like to be artists. Asked why they don’t begin, they usually reply, “Because I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler.” These same folks are inclined to think that artists who make abstract art do so because they can’t draw either.

A visit to a couple of new exhibitions at the Claremont Colleges engage that issue, among others. “American Abstract Drawings,” an exhibition from the Arkansas Art Center on display at Pomona College’s Montgomery Art Gallery, includes 73 works by 62 artists. The show was put together as the center’s specialty by director Townsend Wolfe. Surprisingly urbane and selected with a connoisseur’s eye, it covers the spectrum from 1930 to 1987 and is said to be among the most important drawing collections in the country.

A concurrent show of monotypes by Adolph Gottlieb fits right into the theme of drawing.

These shows certainly will disabuse anyone who needs the lesson of the notion that abstract artists can’t draw. An untitled 1930 sheet by Arshile Gorky fulfills the classic definition of drawing as a representation of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface. Gorky represents odd biomorphic shapes that don’t exactly parallel anything we see in nature but he uses every trick of contour and shading in the artist’s quiver to make them appear to exist in space. So does Lee Bontecou, who draws like a visionary engineer.

The illusion of space is the essence of drawing. Abstract art’s great contribution is drawing our attention to the idea that there are more kinds of space and more ways of perceiving and representing it than were dreamed of by the Renaissance when every line in the world plummeted toward some fixed speck on the horizon as if the entire planet were on a bullet train to oblivion.

L.A.’s legendary Stanton MacDonald-Wright left us a “Contemplation” where galactic space is defined by flat forms that look a little like French curves floating in the cosmos. Hans Burkhardt seems to be sitting inside his own body cavity rendering the way our viscera feels when our minds are in agony. Mark Tobey’s mystical “Little World” gives new meaning to the cliche about seeing the microcosm in the macrocosm and vice versa. One of the most striking drawings on view looks like an abstract rendering of an Aubrey Beardsley composition with its elegantly dramatic contrast of black and white. Turns out to be by Richard Stankiewicz, best known as a junk sculptor.

Thanks to Einstein, the 20th Century found out that time and space are relative, not fixed. That makes it right that the century’s most representative artists should deal in spatial ambiguity. Franz Kline managed to be at once liquefied and architectonic. Philip Guston filled a sheet with funny little squiggles that do two things at once. They look like a tangle of crazed barbed wire and also create a flat surface so eroded it seems on the brink of implosion.

The guy who thinks he can’t make art because he can’t draw is right and wrong. If you make art you automatically draw, it’s just a question of doing it well or badly. The quality of painting and sculpture is finally determined by how it’s drawn. The only art that is generically badly drawn is photography.

A more faint-hearted collector might have stamped this compendium with the currently fashionable mush-mouthed label, “Works on Paper.” Taking it down to the nitty gritty keeps things clear. It’s important to recognize that all art is formed by the same grammar.

The intuition of ordinary people that somehow drawing equates with literacy is right. In the Orient, where calligraphy is so intimately related to pictorial art, it’s easy to see that the two forms grew out of one another. The Occident, with its passion for categories, put pictorial language in one pigeon-hole and printed language in another.

If you accept that distinction then Jenny Holzer’s exhibition isn’t art at all. Neither is a ton of conceptual word-works art. Holzer is a New York artist who was honored as the American representative at the most recent Venice Biennale. Now she’s on view at the Claremont Graduate School gallery in a show sponsored by Pitzer College. It’s made up of about 85 homilies, observations, cliches and exhortations lettered sign-painter style in black or red enamel on white metal grounds.

Thinking of this as drawing requires some mental gymnastics, but it’s worth it. Pictures enter our minds as images that we translate into words and ideas. Words enter our minds as a kind of code we translate into images and sensations. In this case all the images give us a sense of the workings of somebody else’s mind.

Holzer records all the banal little profundities we all have swimming around in our heads as when some irritating driver in front of us becomes a symbol of everything wrong with the world. The persona Holzer creates with this “Living” series often resembles the whacked-out TV commentator Rosanne Rosanna-Dana played by Gilda Radner on the old “Saturday Night Live.” She was inclined to get twigged off on compulsive rattles about people’s nostril hairs, body odors and nasty little habits. Holzer’s character is similarly preoccupied, particularly with the effects of early abuse on the later behavior of children and animals; advice about what to do in domestic crises like having your clothes catch fire; various forms of mental revenge like imagining your enemies getting ptomaine, and sentimental cliches about how having people love you, is money in the bank.

The image that emerges from all this is that of a fragile neurotic using every rationalization in the book to avoid facing the truth of a dangerous, threatening and utterly bizarre world. She has a few National Enquirer-type zingers about a two-headed man who hopes to get married after an operation and an old couple who are losing each other piecemeal in successive amputations. In the end, her mental language drawings look now terrified, now funny, like Hieronymus Bosch’s staged in the subway at midnight.

Montgomery Art Gallery, 333 N. College Way, to Feb. 16, closed Monday and Tuesday. (714) 621-8146.

West Gallery, The Claremont Graduate School, 251 East 10th St., to Feb. 14, closed weekends, (714) 621-8028.