Two German Artists’ Work a Tale of Spirit

Like many postwar German artists, Manfred Muller and Julia Lohmann strive for regeneration and renewal. They thirst for spirituality amid the violent wreckage of recent history.

Muller, born in 1950 in Dusseldorf, and Lohmann, born in 1951 in Dorsten, are joined in an often-stirring show at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery. Titled “Sculptural Installations,” the show was co-sponsored by the gallery and the Goethe Institute of Los Angeles, and curated by Mandeville Gallery director Gerry McAllister.

Muller and Lohmann now live in Dusseldorf. Both studied at the academy there, where the late Joseph Beuys preached a message of cultural healing to a generation of young artists through his work in performance, sculpture and installation. Muller, especially, seems to have absorbed Beuys’ lessons, casting his own personal artifacts among those of a bleak, impersonal industrial society.

In “Metamorphosis,” for instance, the artist’s own jacket, draped onto a tabletop, serves as a link between a loudspeaker and a machine filter. Tucked inside one of the jacket pockets is a small ceramic vessel, an allusion to fertility, birth and sensuality and one of the recurring motifs in Muller’s work. As its title suggests, “Metamorphosis” speaks of change, of one thing becoming another, higher thing, and of all things shedding their mundane, functional identities to assume a higher purpose.

“My Own Fragility” also layers the personal with the universal. A fabric-topped table, set on its side, has large, frosted-glass bulbs strapped to the bottom of two of its legs. The table would stand only tenuously on such fragile supports. But those bulb forms are also symbols of insight and illumination, the essential footings of an artist’s life.

Muller exhumes industrial junk for his architectural-sculptural tableaux, but his tone is never that of the bleak discard. He is often buoyant and coy, as in “Transformation From an Everyday Object,” where he has constructed a vertiginous tunnel through one thick wall, then propelled a ladder through it. His marriages of industrial, domestic and personal objects are surprising and poignant. They seem to emblematize relationships that range from firm friendship to casual flirtation and even illicit embrace. The richness of this range is what gives Muller’s work great emotional staying power.

Lohmann, too, has a canny grasp of materials and an interest in both the origins and destiny of humankind. Despite her repeated use of wing-shaped panels and her references to flight, however, her works tend to be more leaden, conceptually, than airborne.

The most intriguing element of her work is her use of X-rays, furled into a cone and mounted high on the wall, rolled into columns, both standing and fallen, or slipped into the recesses of painted aluminum wall sculptures. The X-rays map an internal world that is normally invisible--they expose the body’s architecture, the soul’s home.

In her gallery statement, Lohmann associates her work with shamanism. Looking at our own bones, she writes, gleans a knowledge akin to the insights of shamanic dreams. Looking in and aspiring beyond, whether through shamanism or science, are acts at the core of her artistic enterprise. Though her work does not always fulfill the ambitions she assigns it, it does exude an admirable spirit of inquiry as well as a gentle, humble sense of humor.

* “Sculptural Installations” continues at UCSD’s Mandeville Gallery through May 17. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday noon-5 p.m.

Every day, Chan Cheong-Toon, a middle-aged Chinese man, spends a few hours singing on a street corner in San Francisco’s North Beach district. His body clenched with intensity, his chanting passionate, he performs a seemingly private ritual in a thoroughly public space.

Whether Chan is to be regarded as a living emblem of free expression or a mentally deranged nuisance to society is the question at the crux of Valerie Soe’s video installation now at Sushi. Titled “Diversity,” the installation features three video monitors, each playing a different short, repeating tape.

One monitor shows Chan, bowing, arching, clasping his hands behind his back and singing furiously in Cantonese. Another shows him discussing his curious practice with Soe, a San Francisco artist. On the third tape, passersby comment on Chan’s singing, some recommending that he see a doctor, others praising his energy and spirit.

Standing amid the triangle of screens, the viewer becomes somewhat of a fourth leg, a potential anchor upon which the unresolved issue of Chan’s status can rest. Soe’s installation argues gently but persuasively for a state of healthy diversity that would embrace those on the fringe, like Chan, as heartily as those in the mainstream.

She ushers viewers through Sushi’s hallway/lobby toward the monitors and toward her perspective on the matter by lining the walls with a dozen names of Asian Americans who have made contributions to American society and culture from a position far from the center of that culture: Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American who defied orders to be placed in an internment camp during World War II; Ah Bing, the developer of the Bing cherry; Merle Woo, a lesbian activist and educator who sued UC Berkeley for discrimination after being denied tenure.

All of these individuals, who are identified in an accompanying wall text, have tested the limits of society’s notions of propriety. In refusing to conform, they have realized their own visions, defended their own integrity and certainly enriched the integrity of American culture.

In this beautifully simple installation, Soe raises complex questions about tolerance, personal freedoms and rights, questions that are perennially debated in the arenas of art and politics. Where, for instance, should the line be drawn between the unconventional and the threatening? If all of society’s energy is channeled into protecting the status quo, how will culture advance and blossom? If no risks are taken, Soe’s installation smartly implies, neither will there be any rewards.

* Sushi, 852 8th Ave., through May 17. Gallery hours are Friday and Saturday noon-4 p.m., with special Artwalk hours Saturday, May 16 from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. and Sunday, May 17 from noon-5 p.m.

ART NOTES

Budgets have been raised for two of the city’s Public Art Master Plan commissions, from $7,000 to $14,000 for Linda Vista and $17,000 for Golden Hill. The deadline for artists’ proposals for public art in these neighborhoods as well as Emerald Hills and City Heights (both commissions of $7,000) is Friday. For more information, call Gail Goldman at the Commission for Arts and Culture at 533-3051. . . .

Artists and arts organizations are encouraged to submits proposals for collaborative art projects to the Voluntary Fund for the Arts Grant Program. Grants ranging from $1,000 to $3,000 will be awarded to projects that benefit county communities. Call the Public Arts Advisory Council at 495-5818 for more information.