ART REVIEWS : Getty’s ‘Connections’: An Insightful Study

An aura of medieval mystery surrounds the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. Although it is housed on the upper floors of an ordinary, modern office building on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and 4th Street in Santa Monica, the private institution has the presence of a secret society, one that is both prestigious and priestly.

Included in its well-guarded and expertly maintained collections are documents of the avant-garde’s activities throughout the 20th Century. In an age of faxes, answering machines, VCRs, floppy disks and microchips, the center’s collection of original materials seems to be a throwback to an era of individually penned manuscripts, when access to one-of-a-kind creations provided one with knowledge and power.

This is still the province of modern scholarship, in which experts and aficionados patiently pursue their solitary tasks, at times specializing to the point of absurdity, but at others discovering some unknown letter, scrap of note paper, or barely decipherable marginalia that alters our view of history by shaking up our understanding of the present.

The parallels between this type of academic research and contemporary art-making are drawn out in a small but excellently selected exhibition. The Getty Center’s staff, led by Thomas F. Reese, chose four well-known, L.A.-based artists whose work often involves books. They were invited into the archives to select priceless documents and previously unexhibited artifacts, books, photographs and prints. The objects they chose are presented in free-standing vitrines and well-mounted cases located in a 7th-floor corridor that is open to the public every Saturday until Oct. 3.

“Connections: Explorations in the Getty Center Collections by Raymond Pettibon, Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith and Buzz Spector” tells its visitors less about the institution’s vast, inaccessible holdings and more about its guest artists’ signature styles and manners of working. It offers a decidedly modern revaluation of the idea that knowledge and power can be stockpiled or stored away as only so much private property.

Pettibon has scattered his trademark pages of hasty sketches and fragmentary captions among books from the Getty’s library. The combination intensifies the existential horror at the root of his prodigious, impossible-to-catalogue body of work. The gap that separates acting in the present and holding the past together as a coherent memory is accentuated.

Ruscha has arranged about two dozen books from the Getty Center in columns and rows so that their covers, spines and pages function as formal elements of a grid-like abstraction. His contribution recalls his early wordless books as well as the blank spaces in his more recent paintings. In each, Ruscha uses muteness to offer a fresh picture of how alien the mundane world can sometimes be.

Smith has juxtaposed graphic designs for outdated styles of furniture and architecture with an aqua and turquoise bowling ball, a swathe of fabric patterned after palm fronds, and a wide, bright necktie. Like her other poignant dissections of mass cultural cliches, these temporary collages intimate that high culture and bad taste share more than is often suspected.

And Spector has collected three vitrines full of historic Fluxus materials, to which he has added a comically repulsive, plastic picnic lunch. The pairing emphasizes the original silliness of this now revered art movement, and reminds us that language and food share our mouths as their points of departure and entry.

Contemporary scholarship has shifted from the discovery of facts to the invention of new interpretations. Likewise, “Connections” proposes that power resides not behind the walls of a faceless institution, but in the Getty Center’s ability to put its resources together with inventive individuals and broader audiences.

Of course this is exactly the kind of propaganda that any elitist institution would like to hide its authority behind. But according to this refreshing exhibition, that belief, too, is left up to each visitor.

* The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 401 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 458-9811, ext. 4177, through Oct. 3. Saturdays only.

Risky Business: The biggest risk Julian Lethbridge’s paintings take is with prettiness. And a considerable risk this is. His exquisitely painted and elegantly restrained images at Stuart Regen Gallery immediately seem to be so easily gorgeous that you can’t help but feel their visual pleasures must not amount to anything significant.

It would be wrong, however, to dismiss Lethbridge’s oils on canvas and acrylics on paper too quickly as nothing more than tastefully designed patterns that have the look of abstract paintings but share none of this art’s rigor, difficulty or seriousness.

The 45-year-old, New York-based artist’s abstractions require more time than that of the speedy glance. They do not need the drawn-out, slow-motion scrutiny demanded by more reductive, Minimalist-inspired geometric abstractions. However, they do necessitate a considerably longer span of attention than that required by almost every other kind of painting, such as biomorphic abstraction, or Pattern-and-Decoration. Located between the sensuality of these styles and the cerebral austerity of monochromatic abstraction, Lethbridge’s art is often lost on its viewers.

Slowly, however, by drawing from us the relaxed gaze of free-floating contemplation, his paintings come alive with a tentative, quivering energy. Light shimmers through and across the abutted planes that intersect to form the surfaces of Lethbridge’s images. Their muted grays, blinding whites and depthless blacks are held together in compositions that appear to be both intangibly ethereal and sumptuously physical.

Simultaneously resembling irregular crystalline structures, panes of shattered glass, abstract road maps, broken spider webs and the organic patterns of magnified cellular growths, his best works are poised on the brink of disintegration. Lethridge’s paintings evoke the idea of entropy’s inevitability.

If the advances he has made since his last solo show three years ago are any indication of upcoming transformations, Lethbridge promises to become an even more compelling painter. Should American abstraction ever escape the hostility toward decoration that is grounded in the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, his work may be part of a movement that does not have to make excuses for its pursuit of beauty.

* Stuart Regen Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through July 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

The Human Record: From 1938-1941, Marion Post Wolcott (1920-1990) traveled around the country taking photographs for the U.S. Government’s Farm Security Administration. Her job, along with a handful of other young, talented artists--including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn--was to document Depression-era America.

Basically a propagandist for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, she was part of an ambitious, optimistic effort to create a human record of her country’s desperate need for social programs, as well as to show the early benefits of these programs’ implementation.

Her 30 vintage prints at Paul Kopeikin Gallery range from starkly beautiful urban landscapes to mysteriously intimate portraits, and from frank illustrations of economic injustice and racial oppression to a roomful of youths joyously jitterbugging on a Saturday night.

Wolcott’s best photographs balance a modest amount of formal sophistication with the straightforward insistence that their subjects are what really counts. Her work is founded on the belief that just because everyone in this country deserves the same basic rights does not imply that we are all alike.

In 1941, Marion Post married Lee Wolcott and set aside her life as a first-rate documentary photographer, never again to take a picture professionally. In the three short years she worked for the government she produced an impressive and moving body of work, one that rivals what other respected photographers have taken a lifetime to make.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 876-7033. through Aug. 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.