ART REVIEWS : A Trio of Masterpiece Makers

An exhibition of drawings by Jasper Johns, Brice Marden and Terry Winters at Margo Leavin Gallery quietly reintroduces the notion of the masterpiece to contemporary art. This idea was banished from discussion in the ‘60s because it had become a cliched evocation of inspiration, genius and transcendence. The drawings by these three New York-based artists demonstrate that these associations are themselves cliches, that making a masterpiece is as dependent upon talent, dedication and painstaking scrutiny as it is upon a single flash of brilliance.

Johns, Marden and Winters reached their artistic maturity, respectively, in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. The exhibition wisely refrains from relating the artists to one another historically. It doesn’t construct a generational lineage in which each builds upon the achievements of his immediate predecessor, but offers their drawings as essential elements of their highly individualistic projects.

As Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe points out in the catalogue’s thoughtful essay, drawing was traditionally a preparation for something else--usually functioned to describe or represent objects in the world--and recorded the artist’s touch more intimately than any other medium. Johns, Marden and Winters rarely use drawings as preparatory studies. For them, it is a means of formal research that exists as an end in itself.

Johns’ ink drawings on Mylar achieve a translucence and fluidity greater than that of his famous wax paintings on canvas. In a series of tracings he made from Duchamp’s abstract painting “Bride,” and another series based on Hans Holbein’s “Noble Boy With Lemur,” Johns subjects art history to the paint-by-stencil process he initiated more than 30 years ago.

Those early works consisted of seemingly endless repetitions of stenciled numbers and letters, painted in the flamboyant brush-strokes of Abstract Expressionism. Johns almost single-handedly deadened that movement by putting anonymity and muteness in place of its overwrought emotional turbulence.

In his more recent drawings, also made with a brush, he obsessively remakes Duchamp’s and Holbein’s images by obliterating them. They serve only as a sort of skeleton for his beautiful, X-ray-like depictions of disappearing forms. Even more than his early paintings, these black, white and gray images have the haunting presence of memories that have been drained of significance but still cannot be forgotten.

Marden’s small ink and gouache drawings on paper and board also begin in silence but sometimes transform this stillness into a jittery lyricism. His seven “Shell Studies” are abstract sketches that look more like musical notes than shells, as if Marden transcribed not what he saw but the invisible hum each shell emitted. Likewise, “Don’t Bungle the Jungle” is a lacy tangle of black lines and sporadic whitewashes that playfully refers to the addictive rhythm and sensuality of pop music.

Marden’s two largest and most recent pieces are based on more esoteric sounds. “Cold Mountain Addenda I and II” dissolve and condense the calligraphic couplets of an 8th-Century Chinese hermit-poet into a graceful language all their own. Marden’s simplified lines float in a fluid space that feels weightless and airy but is hardly without substance. More physical than illusionistic, its deliberate entanglements constitute an organic circuitry that is simultaneously incidental and unalterable, dispassionate and moving. Marden’s drawings incorporate fragility and grace without any tentativeness.

Winters’ similarly colored organic abstractions seem almost clunky by comparison, as if they were made from the flowing protoplasm that we think of as the very stuff of life. In his mysterious, indeterminate gouaches and watercolors, animate forms seem to be turning themselves inside-out according to their own unstoppable logic--the weighty volumes in his images rebuoyed by a lightness that somehow seems funny. Winters’ best pictures have an easy-going quality, as if their forms were having a good time cavorting before their viewers.

Their sense of humor is related to Winters’ whimsical interpretation of Modernism’s demand that painting be about nothing but itself, and therefore be absolutely abstract. He promptly depicted the cellular structure of his pigments. He followed a rule by breaking it. His images, like the others in this exhibition, attempt to expand drawing’s potential by focusing more closely on its formal properties.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through May 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Piquant Pastels: William Leavitt’s pastels on paper at Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery appear to be innocent sketches of innocuous subjects. In “Enterprise Tomatoes,” the famous spaceship from “Star Trek” hovers between a pair of tomato plants and a string of bright yellow buoys floating in the ocean. In “Ariadne & Minotaur,” the L.A.-based artist juxtaposes a twig, the silhouette of a classically depressed woman playing a harp, and a giant, telescope-like device situated at the center of a stadium.

Most of the drawings consist of three elements that do not tell specific stories. Rather than locking his pictures into logical sequences that develop into coherent narratives, Leavitt lets his images operate in the realm of free association. Here, the viewer’s personal reflections and private recollections attach themselves to simplistic depictions of banal subjects.

This phase, however, is only the first one activated by Leavitt’s multilevel images. His pastels are more than open-ended games of random association. A subtle and supple structure underlies their mix-and-match compositions: Nature, Antiquity and Modernity interweave in his art to form an ever-changing but always recurring arrangement.

His drawings occupy the territory where symbols mean more than what they represent, appearances sometimes mask hidden motivations, and reality is often riddled by illusions. This is the terrain that Freud discovered at the beginning of the century and that advertising continues to mine, with increasing sophistication, at its end.

Leavitt’s sketches come somewhere between Freud’s scholarly dissection of modern consciousness and advertising’s willingness to manipulate everyone’s self-image for its own narrow purposes. Like both of these explorers and exploiters of subconscious desire, Leavitt suggests that nothing fundamental has changed throughout the ages.

His almost artlessly rendered aquatint of an electrical distributing station endows this ugly piece of modern technology with the mystery and magic of Stonehenge or Machu Picchu. Likewise, in tree pastels with watercolor, he forgoes his usual part-by-part format to depict unified, if imaginary landscapes. “Four Leaf Signs” most clearly illustrates his fatalistic contention that modern culture and contemporary habits follow quasi-mythical patterns, and that both are grounded in nature.

Leavitt’s tragi-comic drawing of four enormous billboards in the shape of different leafs collapses the opposition between nature and culture. Like his installations, which often employ potted plants and their more permanent plastic substitutes, his deceptively simple images claim that the idolization--and idealization--of nature is a recent invention, one that stems from the desire for the illusion of stability in a constantly changing world.

* Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery, 1630 17th St., Santa Monica, (310) 450-210, through June 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Piece Train: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler are a collaborative duo best known for their works that escape the confines of the gallery. In 1986, they filled a gallery with enough lumber to build an average house. On each piece of wood they transcribed sentences about the home from Carl Jung, Flannery O’Connor, Emily Dickinson and Frank Lloyd Wright. When the house was built, nothing was left of the art except documentary photographs and the memory of the writing that was hidden within the walls, floors and ceilings.

Ericson and Ziegler’s latest project is a simultaneous miniaturization and expansion of their “House Monument.” On display at Gallery 1301, “Raw Material” consists of a large-scale model train whose 12 hopper cars are filled with fragments of the type of marble that covers the nation’s Supreme Court Building. On these broken pieces of stone the artists have sandblasted the U.S. Constitution and its amendments.

Ericson and Ziegler have shattered the Constitution not as an act of protest, but to suggest that our country’s founding document is a floor plan that must be actively put to use if it is to be more than a decorous abstraction. Broken up into little chunks and loaded into toy train cars, their version of the Constitution is suspended between demolition and reconstruction, in an ongoing process of reinterpretation, adaptation and transformation.

As their singular edition is sold, the Constitution’s wholeness is again violated, this time by the individual collectors who take away entire sections of the document. Gaps appear between cars until all that is left of the train is its engine and caboose. The artists thus propose that art works best when it is more than private property, when it gives form to the real intersections between individual interests and social goals.

* Gallery 1301, 1301 Franklin St., Santa Monica, (310) 828-9133, through May 7. Closed Monday-Wednesday.

Presidential Pontifications: Kim Abeles’ “Presidential Commemorative Smog Plates” are tourist souvenirs gone hopelessly wrong. Rather than celebrating the grandeur of a single event, such as an inauguration or an anniversary, they materialize the undramatic day-in and day-out regularity of the conditions in which we in Los Angeles live.

Abeles’ porcelain plates consist of portraits of every U.S. President from the 20th Century ringed by a gold-lettered quote concerning the relationship between business and the environment. What distinguishes her mementos from normal ones is that she has drawn the Presidents’ faces with smog.

Abeles places stencils over clean plates on the roof of her studio in downtown L.A. After as few as four days, the air has done its work and finished her pictures. She peels off the stencils and seals the plates with a fixative so they could be used to serve meals, if one still had an appetite.

Although a schematic history can be traced from the date the word “smog” was coined in 1905 by a London journalist at the Public Health Congress, to Reagan’s 1980 statement that vegetation causes 80% of air pollution, the strength of Abeles’ work lies in the way it gives physical form to the vast distance between every politician’s golden words and the deplorable quality of the air we breathe.

Turner/Krull Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-1536, through May 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.