COMMENTARY : Celebrity Art Exhibitions a Sign of Tough Times for Galleries

Is this any way to deal with a recession?

At the James Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica, actor and movie director Dennis Hopper recently showed abstract paintings that derived from Polaroid photographs of graffiti-covered walls. Several blocks away at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery, sculptor Don Gummer, who is married to multi-Oscared actress Meryl Streep, is having his debut exhibition in Los Angeles of bronze sculptures and drawings.

And across town in West Hollywood, the Earl McGrath Gallery is featuring a doubleheader: color photographs by pop singer Joni Mitchell and woodblock and screenprints by writer William S. Burroughs, whose name is on movie marquees all over town with the release of the film interpretation of his notorious novel, “Naked Lunch.”

What’s next? Daryl Hannah in a performance piece at LACE?

This sudden burst of shows by artists whose celebrity is linked not with his/her own work as a painter, sculptor or photographer, but with other endeavors in other fields, surely bespeaks the rather tough times in the art market at the moment. Perhaps these exhibitions will bring in temporary, tangential audiences from the moneyed realm of show business and entertainment, audiences who otherwise might not make the gallery rounds and acquire art. But that’s guesswork. What’s certain is that this approach cheapens the level of artistic quality in the current gallery scene, which cannot be good for anyone.

Celebrity in another field is surely no guarantee of failure as an artist. Burroughs has made art for a number of years; at Earl McGrath his suite of recent prints, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” may not set the world on fire, but it does have its charms. Printed texts about sloth, pride, lust and the rest are combined with pictorial images built up from mottled surfaces; skeletal faces and silhouettes of serpents, guns and masks emerge from the visual soup.

In fact, the text panels are typically stronger than their purely pictorial partners (the seven sins are represented as seven diptychs, one picture hanging with one text panel below, leaning against the wall). “Sin is the degradation of a natural instinct,” declares the first, its Victorian typeface standing against a pale, gestural ground. A Puritan moralist amid a swirl of finger-painted chaos is deftly conjured.

Hopper has been closely involved with artists in Los Angeles for 30 years, and his black-and-white photographs of the ‘60s art scene are gritty documents of that giddy and convulsive time. With his brilliant return to screen prominence a few years back in the David Lynch movie “Blue Velvet,” interest in Hopper’s past work took off. That cinematic rebirth coincided with the arrival of Los Angeles as an international powerhouse in art, thus suddenly granting wide exposure to those early documentary photographs.

As a painter, though, Hopper leaves a lot to be desired. The nine pictures in his solo debut (which closed Saturday at Corcoran) derive from square-format Polaroids he has made in the last five years; 33 of these were also on view. The photographs show details of common urban walls embellished with gang graffiti and tags, many of them covered over with blocks of muted color in a municipal effort to curb the blight. As a result, “outlaw” marking is covered over with a kind of “officially sanctioned” graffiti.

Hopper’s paintings, which are also square, simply transfer this photographic information into coarse paint on canvas. Sometimes the transfer is verbatim, sometimes the painted image is composed from bits and pieces scavenged from different photographs. Either way, the paintings are simply formalist exercises in pictorial composition and design. Mimicking the original walls in cleaned-up, portable formats, they accomplish a rather dismaying transformation of socially volatile subject matter into upscale consumer goods.

Like Hopper, Gummer is a formalist, albeit of a wholly academic kind. He has shown his sculpture in New York since 1977, but the exhibition at Daniel Weinberg is the 45-year-old artist’s first solo show at a gallery outside New York.

Gummer uses given forms from the celebrated history of modern sculpture and reassembles them into safely decorative compositions, ideal for the corporate boardroom. The shapes of Picasso’s famous Cubist “Glass of Absinthe” and “Guitar,” for example, are greatly enlarged, rendered in planes and rods that recall the techniques of Constructivism and open-form sculpture (pioneered by Picasso and Julio Gonzalez), and then cast in bronze.

As pedestals for his objects, Gummer employs abutted planes of steel, or cubes and stacks of stone and concrete. These are plainly meant to refer to a litany of sculptural precedents from the 20th Century, especially Minimalism and its relatives, including the work of Constantin Brancusi, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Richard Serra and Scott Burton.

Any wit, playful inventiveness or intellectual rigor that might be found in these disparate sources has been squeezed out of Gummer’s stolid assemblages, which seamlessly blend together Great Moments in Modern Art History. Attempting a simultaneity of diverse styles, the result is instead an inert essay in the importance of artistic pedigree.

Back at Earl McGrath, Mitchell’s 32 untitled photographs of the last two years recall the work of hobbyists and undergraduate art students. Her multiple-exposure C-prints overlay soulful self-portraits with (mostly) rural landscape images: a ramshackle barn, grain elevators, ferns, railroad tracks and the like. Plainly, they’re meant to be romantic visual equivalents of the artist’s memories, emotions or states of mind.

Mitchell’s and Hopper’s photographs convey an aura of naivete. Mitchell’s multiple exposures claim a familiar ancestry--think, for instance, of Frederick Sommer’s classic photographs from the ‘40s, such as his famous portrait of Max Ernst--which is why the technique is by now standard fare among amateurs and beginning students of photography. Hopper’s ruined, sign-covered walls were also a favored subject of photographers Minor White and, especially, Aaron Siskind in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and there was no shortage of discussion then about the relationships between their flattened pictures of primitive, man-made marks and the new American abstract painting.

There’s no way to tell from their pictures whether Hopper and Mitchell are aware of the long-established precedents for their art; regardless, they do nothing with the traditions they have (unconsciously?) inherited, except to replicate them. As with Gummer’s show, which is marked by a deadly academic knowingness, the aura of naivete can instead be located with some degree of certainty in the potential audience that these galleries now are courting. For that audience, which is expected to cross over from other fields, can’t be counted on to recognize the artistic redundancies on display before them.

* Don Gummer at Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0180, through Saturday; Joni Mitchell and William S. Burroughs at Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 652-9850, through Saturday.