‘80s Enough : Lecturer Lawson’s Work Embraces a Central Concern of Art During the Past Decade

Thomas Lawson’s audience at Newport Harbor Art Museum was restive to begin with, since Lawson--enroute Tuesday from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he is dean of the School of Arts--was half an hour late for his noon lecture. But when the affable, 40-year-old Scotsman announced he would be talking about his own work, the grumbles began . . . and continued right into the question period.

Why didn’t Lawson talk about “the art of the ‘80s,” his announced topic? Why wasn’t he helping people understand the museum’s current exhibit, “Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties”--a show that includes none of Lawson’s work?

He looked bemused. “(My art) was my perception of art of the ‘80s,” Lawson said.

“Isn’t that rather self-centered?” said a man in the front row.

“That’s what artists do,” Lawson replied cheerfully. “We’re megalomaniacs!”

In fact, Lawson’s work--which evolved during the ‘80s from paintings shown in art galleries to public works in a sculptural format--embraces a central concern of art during the past decade. His art, he says, is about the “different meanings (that) evolve when you work in the famous gap between art and life.”

In a series of monochrome paintings from 1980-81 that first brought him to public attention, Lawson recombined elements from the front pages of the New York Post tabloid. Copies of photographs of the “blank, innocent” faces of children who were victims of violence are superimposed on a continuous text of the screaming headlines (BOY SHOT FOR A BIKE . . . HAPPY TO BE ALIVE) that accompanied them.

The image reveals “the manipulative separation between the horror of the headlines and the lack of content of the images,” Lawson said.

In other paintings, he experimented with tactics calculated to call into question “the reality of representation.” He used paint both to create and obscure images in these works. One was painted in such a way that the viewer could only grasp all the details and the brushwork by moving around to look at each part of the canvas in turn.

Another group of projects--done in New York, where he was living at the time--involved looking afresh at public monuments, “images a community pays money for, to provide an uplifting representation of themselves to present to the world.”

At first these paintings were private, art-world artifacts. “To Those Who Follow After”--based on a war memorial in his neighborhood that incorporated a large blank wall--was intended to memorialize the “death” of painting during the 1970s, much rumored in art circles. Lawson’s virtually blank canvas invoked “a new beginning,” he said.

Several years later, while driving across the country for a temporary teaching stint at CalArts, he said he became “fixated” on billboards and neon signs as “part of a community’s self-image.”

In a museum installation called “California Dreaming,” he created a mini-billboard (balanced on scaffolding) that contained a melange of photographs, painted passages and re-photographed material--a merry pattern of New York City views, cocktail glasses and fluorescent-colored circles. The piece even had its own light source, “which obscured the image rather than illuminating it.”

In “Civic Virtue, Civil Rights,” Lawson took his ideas into the public realm. The piece was displayed temporarily in City Hall Park in New York City, on the site of a fountain with allegorical figures that was installed in the late 1930s.

The fountain, which contained a very large nude male figure (Virtue) straddling two female naked figures (Vice and Corruption), was removed several years later, after a public outcry. Ironically, it was transferred to government offices in the borough of Queens, which Lawson referred to as “the most corrupt borough in New York.”

His “funky, friendly” piece consisted of a group of notice boards planted in the grass. They displayed photographs of details of the statues, punctuated by openings through which viewers could see the surrounding city.

“The most important thing,” Lawson said, “was the opportunity to have face-to-face contact with a public that didn’t identify itself as an art-loving public yet were willing to talk about figures placed in front of them.”

Eventually, Lawson hooked up with a billboard artist whose technique struck him as “a streamlined version of Italian fresco (painting) . . . a tour de force, athletic way of getting color and image onto a surface.”

For a billboard alongside Interstate 95, near New Haven, Conn., Lawson designed a three-part image--which was visible for miles-- of two wild horses being tamed and a faint, hard-to-read scene (“like a TV (picture) that has gone bad”) of an art historian admiring a reclining nude. It only came into focus up close, Lawson said. “You’d (drive) past it before you realized what was going on.”

His biggest public project to date, “Portrait of New York,” on view since the late ‘80s, is one-third of a mile long. This billboard mural stretches across the plywood “bridging” covering part of the scaffolding on the Manhattan Municipal Building in New York, which has been undergoing renovation.

Again employing the billboard painter to do the hands-on work, Lawson devised a recurring pattern of images reflecting the homogeneous nature of public sculpture in New York City. During the past 200 years, he said, “the surprising thing is that the great melting pot has represented itself as a place of white male power.” Most public statues in the city are of “politicians and poets striking rhetorical positions.”

Women (except for former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir) appear only as allegorical figures in these monuments, and minorities (usually children) turn up only in sculpture placed in public-housing projects. Each male figure in Lawson’s mural is a different sculpture, but the close-up views of the heads of women and children constantly repeat--presumably as reminders of their status as types instead of individuals.

At the conclusion of Lawson’s talk, someone asked whether he thought art in general was becoming more accessible to the masses.

“I don’t think it ever is something that becomes that accessible,” he said.

Well, did he expect people to understand his own work?

Certainly, he hoped people will “stop and look at it.” But an an artist, “one always keeps secrets.” In any case, he added, “art is just one way of communicating. I don’t think it’s possible to pin too many hopes on it. . . . Its ability to convey narrative and political and personal messages is kind of limited.”

* “Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties” remains through June 21 at Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $4 for adults, $2 for students and seniors, free for children under 12.

The next free lecture in the series, curatorial assistant Michelle Guy speaking on “Women Looking: The Male Gaze Under Scrutiny,” will be at noon on June 16. (714) 759-1122.