ART REVIEWS : Buzz Spector Reconfigures a Malevich Masterpiece

A stack of common postcards, an arrangement of odd-shaped books and a lectern made from stainless steel play off one another in Buzz Spector’s resonant exploration of the past’s relationship to the present. His installation at Roy Boyd Gallery unpacks the connections between art history and kitsch. By means of souvenirs, Spector dissects nostalgia. His deceptively insignificant objects return to the past not to re-establish their grandeur, but to generate meaning in the present.

The exhibition’s centerpiece consists of eight red books on the floor in front of a free-standing white wall, whose surface is interrupted by eight recessed compartments into which each book fits. The eight-foot wall corresponds proportionately to an abstract painting made in 1915 by the Russian avant-gardist Kasimir Malevich. The lengths and widths--but not the thicknesses--of the books are patterned after the eight red rectangles that punctuate his Suprematist composition.

Spector’s witty, oversized reconfiguration of a masterpiece acknowledges the futility of trying to recapture the original risk and excitement embodied by Malevich’s bold attempt to subsume history in a transcendent object. If the books were picked up and placed in their appropriate niches, some would be too thick and others too thin. The sculpture demonstrates that the past cannot be remade, that the idealized integrity of the picture-plane cannot be maintained.

By almost building an image from books, Spector literalizes the fact that we lack direct access to Malevich’s painting. He makes concrete the idea that we can’t even see the oft-reproduced image because of the words that surround it, filtering our vision and dissipating the art’s intensity. Literally larger-than-life, Spector’s rendition of the Malevich subverts its fetishized aura of unapproachability.

On the floor, the books occupy a degraded position. They appear vulnerable, violated and abject. If they represent the present’s place in relation to history, they claim that we live in a doubly fallen world, one of diminished expectations and lost possibilities.

Nonetheless, Spector never accepts the prevailing prejudice that contemporary art is only a faint echo of earlier achievements. His installation extracts from history the rebellious demand that the present be different. His books open onto uncountable blank pages, each a singular symbol of the purity of the moment’s potential, of a present not yet written over by the demands of the past.

Spector works in the space between facts and dreams--between history’s daunting authority and the present’s less respected but no less repressible needs. Another pair of pieces, titled “Red Sea” and “Red ‘C,’ ” mimics the form of his “Suprematism (With Eight Red Rectangles),” but with vintage and contemporary postcards.

On another wall, Spector has framed a 30-year-old picture of a cruise ship at sea and a cheap duplication of the same image in which he has painted the water red. On the floor he has laid out a grid of thousands of new reproductions, free for the taking. The work’s poignancy resides not in its attempt to recover the sentiments of the original sender’s story, but in the distance it injects in the present, as our desire for something other than the status quo.

By contrast, Spector’s slightly enlarged stainless-steel lectern stands in for the disgust we feel when others put words in our mouths by misrepresenting our interests. Where the absent speaker’s book belongs, Spector has placed a drain that empties into a plastic bucket. His piece casts the kind of speeches we hear during the presidential campaign as vomit and spittle, quickly cleaned up by faceless politicians as they switch positions with nauseating regularity.

As a group of discrete objects, Spector’s exhibition violates the discretion that usually accompanies politics and art history. By separating kitsch from cliches, his art insists that power doesn’t reside in official appearances, but in common sentiments obscured by such pretentious claims upon our pasts and our futures.

* Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-1210, through March 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Wilding’s Mysterious Perversity: Since her last exhibition here four years ago, British sculptor Alison Wilding has continued to infuse her elegant steel, copper, resin and plexiglass sculptures with a mysterious sense of perversity.

If her work from the late ‘80s was explicit in its collision of uncontrollable animal sexuality and the rigorous discipline required by a seasoned libertine, her five recent pieces at Asher/Faure Gallery more subtly run together physical pleasure and intellectual stimulation.

More restrained in their literal references to bodily fluids, orifices and cavities, Wilding’s new sculptures employ a sophisticated kind of abstraction. It avoids direct engagement with the viewer’s body, without dispensing with the importance of corporeal existence.

Wilding hides a profound sensuousness in hollow forms whose rigid and impenetrable surfaces initially appear to be coldly industrial. By flirting with invisibility, or suffusing the feel of flesh in the open spaces her objects embrace, she enlivens the otherwise empty environment in which her eccentrically minimal sculptures stand.

“Burned” consists of two 5 1/2-foot columns made from thick, twisted strands of copper wire that have been welded together. Wilding wrapped the innumerable, curling strings around wooden cylinders and then burned them away. The “shells” that remain are delicate in their almost lacy fragility. They’re also a bit nasty. They charge the gallery with a quietly electrifying energy.

“Temper” is Wilding’s largest and most powerful piece. Two sheets of black steel form a graceful barricade that bows out at its center to support a translucent cylinder of amber acrylic plastic; inside is balanced a long, off-center brass funnel that extends from the ceiling to the shadowy depths enveloped by the bolted sheets of steel.

Wilding’s menacing, center-less monument eschews even indirect references to flesh, but still makes one’s skin crawl. It occupies and dominates a space well beyond its scale. “Temper” identifies Wilding as a major figure in the world of sculpture, an inventive artist whose forms make intangible ideas extremely physical.

* Asher/Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, (310) 271-3665, through March 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Arneson on the Attack: Robert Arneson’s self-portraits at Dorothy Goldeen Gallery are farcical in the best sense of the term. You simply cannot tell if you should take them seriously or dismiss them as instances of flagrant stupidity. They’re either ridiculous shams served up by an artist who’s run out of ideas, or vicious mockeries of the demand that figurative sculpture commemorate something more than the artist’s own narcissistic exhibitionism.

In a way, Arneson’s life-size depictions of his own head kissing, licking, nibbling, biting and devouring another image of himself reveal the weird tension at the root of the ceramic sculptures he has exhibited since 1960. The Bay Area artist’s works have been lauded for elevating the lowly craft of ceramics to the sacrosanct realm of high art. They have never rested comfortably in this sphere, however, often showing resentment for being seen as serious sculpture.

Arneson’s self-portraits turn modern art’s celebrated self-reflexivity into a charade. His works baldly claim that the inner turmoil and self-doubt that come with being an artist are jokes. Arneson, however, needs “high art,” if only as an enemy. Without the ideas that accompany it, he’d have nothing to send up, make fun of or attack.

Four years ago he exhibited overstated imitations of Jackson Pollock’s dramatic life and tragic death. They seemed less like homages to the notoriously tormented artist than mockeries of his struggle with paint and fame. Likewise, his bust of San Francisco’s murdered Mayor George Moscone remains ambivalent. Some see its bullet holes, blood stains and imitative Twinkies to be tasteless assaults on the seriousness of state politics. Others see it as an honorable account of an absurd criminal event that tore a city in half because of its institutionalized homophobia.

The strength of Arneson’s art is its ability to occupy three positions at once. His best works insert the honest directness of craft production into the forthrightness of public monuments, and smuggle both into the world of museum sculpture, where nuance, subtlety and ambivalence supposedly count for everything.

His latest exhibition intensifies his attempt to play smart and dumb at once. Superficially self-deprecating, his sculptures put him in a degraded but central position. They make evident the desperate confusion that results when an artist both desires and despises his privileged position.

Adam Ross’ second solo show, also at Dorothy Goldeen, spectacularly marries the lushness of Renaissance realism to the detached coolness of our video era. His small but stunning paintings grip you with a visceral sense of poisonous beauty.

Every one of his images lures the viewer into a gorgeous world of intricate details and unfathomable passages from which there is no escape. These intensely impersonal paintings leave no room for breathing. Nor do they open an illusionistic space for free associations or touchy-feely projections.

Ross’ intoxicating--and toxic-looking--abstractions are some of the best being made today, in Los Angeles or New York. They purge from painting the idea that its visual incidents correspond to the artist’s “touch.” They obliterate the notion that this art records the gestures of a body and therefore traces the movements of the artist’s psyche.

Rather than falling into this outmoded notion of “authenticity” or insisting that abstraction replay a thuggish version of humanism, Ross orchestrates impressive arrays of accidents that bear a more distant relationship to their maker. The incredibly deliberate operations that accumulate to form the TV-like surfaces of his masterfully crafted images are random occurrences that take on the presence of inevitability--a type of becoming that constantly spirals back upon itself.

Made up of hyper-real, post-industrial colors that have been poured and sanded, squeegeed and effaced, Ross’ paintings catapult themselves--and their viewers--into a futuristic world in which the perfection of exquisite craftsmanship mutates into inhuman objectness.

* Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., Santa Monica, (310) 395-0222, through April 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.