ART REVIEWS : ‘Constellations’: Yearbook of Adolescent Yearnings

“We are three sisters who are not sisters,” Gertrude Stein once announced in introducing characters in a magically resonant composition. The truth of her poetic contradiction has now been given startling visual evidence--for brothers and sisters alike--in remarkable new work by Mitchell Syrop.

In his mesmerizing new show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery--the artist’s first solo foray in Los Angeles in nearly four years--Syrop has included three uncanny trios of high school yearbook pictures of anonymous young women and men. Although unrelated by blood, each group could easily pass for triplets.

These “Constellations” are the smallest of 10 similar works in the show. The two largest pump up its sly procedure to dizzying scale: One wall-size grid of laser-printed photographs conjoins more than 300 pictures of high school boys, scavenged from yearbooks printed between 1968 and 1974, while another brings together nearly 500 contemporaneous pictures of high school girls.

Suspended by hooks from a grid of monofilament, the photographs are grouped so that when scanned horizontally and vertically, visual cues in one youthful face segue directly into the next. Sometimes the full similarity in the pairs of faces startles. More often, a shared detail does the connecting trick between them: dimples, thin lips, hairstyle, arched brows, fullness in the jaw, protruding ears--even an unfocused look in the eye, photographically coaxed for the ceremonial event of having a yearbook picture made.

Occasionally you have to look long and hard to find a link between adjacent faces, and sometimes you aren’t quite sure if you’re not just inventing one. (Habits of social typing begin to merge with physical reality.) But, sooner or later a connection does come into view--and off you go.

Visually you can slide from one end of the grid to the other, merrily connecting a fair-skinned blonde at the start to a swarthy brunette at the finish. The awkward look of the monofilament grid and hooks can be unsatisfying, but its makeshift quality also has an important effect: None of the portraits are pinned down to a single spot. All could conceivably find numerous places to fit into the scheme of things.

Syrop also enfolds more than meets the eye into his photographic plan. Scattered throughout this Postmodern “Family of Man” are numerous blank spaces--missing links in the collective gene pool. Their passive significance grows active upon the sudden realization that your own grinning visage might handily fill the gap.

Historically, Syrop’s Conceptual project is related to August Sander’s influential chronicle of social types in Weimar Germany, with clockwork images of American suburban adolescents filling in for Sander’s collapsing European social classes. The big difference is that, here, the artist hasn’t taken the photographs; in the convention of yearbook pictures, contemporary culture is, in effect, the photographer.

The era chronicled in these pictures is specific. Remarkably, Syrop began this work in 1974, just as Conceptual art was becoming an established form. (He was then an undergraduate art student at New York’s Pratt Institute.) He dropped the project for several years, briefly resuming work in 1978, the year of his matriculation from the graduate program at CalArts. A decade later, he returned to it in earnest.

The pictures therefore document a brief but pivotal moment in American life, beginning with the fateful 1968, and ending when Syrop began the project. As conventional yearbook pictures, they memorialize a hopeful yearning for the future--a future that, in the 17 years since the artist began, has now come to pass. When the possibility of finding yourself among its missing links becomes evident, you also are faced with the daunting prospect of finding your missing self today.

For Gertrude Stein, the sense of a written sentence came not from narrative logic, but from a scrutiny of words so lithe and limber that the reader would suddenly be cued into an acute awareness of his own perceptual powers. For Syrop, much the same occurs with pictures. In this remarkable new work he deftly draws your portrait, without ever having seen your face.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 652-9172, through May 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Fischinger Film: When the German artist Oskar Fischinger arrived in Los Angeles in 1936, having fled the rising Nazi terror, he found employment in the film industry. A hitherto successful filmmaker, he eventually worked at Paramount, MGM and Disney. Ultimately, however, the American studio system was unable to accommodate the particular aspirations of the European vanguard. The two were just too different.

Just how different can be seen in a remarkable film Fischinger began (but never completed) about two years before he emigrated to L.A. “Squares” (1934) was meant to be a brief, wholly abstract exploration into cinematic time and space. It was also meant to be played in movie theaters as a short--a kind of “Steamboat Willie” for the avant-garde.

At the Steve Turner Gallery, a videotaped version of a “sketch” for the planned two- to three-minute film is being shown, together with 25 tempera paintings on paper from which the sketch was made. Rather like animation cels, the small, brightly colored paintings were photographed sequentially in black and white; then, the film was overlaid with colored filters. The result, as seen in the videotape, is a flowing image of squares merging in and out of one another, and a feeling of aerial transport through long, corridor-like spaces.

In all, some 271 small paintings were made for the film. Because this short sequence was looped, and segments sometimes reversed, the same sequence can appear in different colors and directions, which yield different perceptual readings of scale and context. And, because the original paintings were done on horizontally rectangular paper, which mimics the shape of the screen, the largest squares seem visually to expand beyond the edges of the frame, engulfing the spectator’s space.

The experience of “Squares” is characterized by an odd sense of transparency, which is in keeping with the cinematic medium but ironic for imagery built from opaque paintings. Conceptually, the geometric abstractions of Kandinsky and the Delaunays are clear precedents. But, conceived specifically for the demands of an industrial society, Fischinger’s paintings depart in being beautifully crafted objects whose life was given spark by the machinery through which they were threaded.

* Steve Turner Gallery, 7220 Beverly Blvd., (213) 931-1185, through May 23. Closed Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.

The Missing Link: The 45 silk-screened canvases at Linda Cathcart Gallery are, in a way, the missing link in Jim Shaw’s three-part installation in “Helter Skelter,” the exhibition closing Sunday at the Temporary Contemporary. In fact, it’s too bad both parts weren’t shown together, so intricately interwoven are they.

With a text by writer Benjamin Weissman, “Horror A Vacui” is a pulp-novel tale in which three unrelated stories finally become entangled--to devastating effect. At Cathcart, the three stories are told in a room-filling sequence of square canvases, like an exploded comic strip.

At MOCA, these 45 panels are reduced to postage-stamp size in tiny squares dispersed across one large, white canvas; then, they’re enlarged to fill a second canvas edge-to-edge; finally, all 45 images are silkscreened one atop another on a single square canvas, resulting in an all-black picture.

Imagine the “fear of empty space” announced by the work’s title as being induced by the blank, white canvas or the blank, white art gallery that any artist is faced with filling. By the end, this image of light is an all-black picture of unreadable darkness, its fullness paradoxically as empty as at the start.

In between is a triple tale about a real estate agent who is a serial killer, a cancer patient who commits suicide and an eccentric scientist who is a murder victim. Through a clever twist of gruesome fate, all three come crashing together in a morbid finale. The last panel fades to deathly black.

While bearing a formal resemblance to Mike Kelley’s 1988 “Disembodied Militarism” paintings, based on “Sad Sack” cartoons, Shaw’s “Horror A Vacui” also approaches the mechanics of painting in a cinematic way. Its four parts comprise a kind of telescopic zoom that collapses not only space but narrative, pushing it so close to your face as to be unintelligible.

From the scientist’s habit of speaking in rhymes to the cancer diagnosis, the serial murders and the suicide, everything about the tangled stories is meant to be senseless--in the spirit of a “senseless tragedy.” The ensemble is effective as a metaphor for the media-saturated environment of the present, in which any blank space is an invitation for graffiti (either illegal or socially sanctioned, in the commercial form of advertising, because bought and paid for). As an articulation of the unspeakable violence also characterizing our environment, the banality of this particular evil is effectively asphyxiating.

* Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 451-1121, through May 19. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Fluid Drive: In a clever, witty show at Sue Spaid Fine Arts, Jacci Den Hartog’s new work swamps plaster figurines in poured puddles of synthetically colored plastic. Called “Fluid Dynamics,” it’s a materially based effort to jump-start critical imagination.

The poured puddles are reminiscent of the 1969 sculptures Lynda Benglis made by pouring multicolored streams of polyurethane directly onto the floor. The floor mats deftly mocked the vaunted heroism of New York School painting.

Den Hartog’s sculptures play with the romantic dreaminess of much image-based painting of the past decade. She plants a pair of plaster castles into one, turning the puddled color into an evocation of the Rhine River or an Alpine lake. And, a plaster pair of pants, crumpled down around ankles provided by some plaster sneakers, transforms another puddle into a scatological accident.

So much for artworld cliches of Teutonic misogyny and bad-boy posturing. Hampered only by a certain narrowness of range, Den Hartog stakes out provocative territory.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through Sunday.