ART REVIEWS : Anatomy of Mind/Body Harmony

From the grammar of Classical Greek architecture to the scale of Minimalist sculpture, Western art has long been rooted in the body--its proportion, internal order and supposed self-sufficiency. The ideology of Western art, however, maintains that art is transcendent; that the refinements of aesthetics must be divorced from the mundane world of biology; that the jolt in the gut and the beat of the heart are ancillary to the ruminations of a disembodied intellect and the stirrings of a disembodied spirit.

Frederick Sommer’s remarkable new collages at Turner/Krull Gallery mend this mind/body split, asserting the biological basis of aesthetic perception, and the larger interrelationship between art and science. Elegant, spare, yet saturated, these collages are fashioned out of 19th-Century illustrations of human anatomy.

Here, finely detailed renditions of skin cells, ventricles, femurs, diaphragms, lungs, jaws and teeth--complete with explanatory letters, numbers and arrows--dangle upside-down, abut one another, and overlap. Disengaged from their anatomically correct positions and rearranged with the precision of a perhaps sadistic surgeon, they form fantastic, graphically dense patterns, crisply silhouetted against fields of black or white.

Often, these configurations conjure other forms or recall other times and places--Renaissance portals and shamanistic tableaux, moonscapes and lava runs. In “Isle of Man,” a stalk-like neck balancing a fragmentary jaw and upper palate rises out of a pitted surface much like an overgrown lunar plant. Behind it, a single asteroid (fat cell?) floats against a night sky.

Here, the body is broken down so that it might expand or generate new and unexpected possibilities. What is this if not the mission of both science and art?

The collages represent somewhat of a departure for the 87-year-old Sommer, who has long been recognized as one of the most important photographers of his generation. The photographic techniques for which he is famed--double exposures, montages, fragmentations--derive from a long-standing interest in Surrealism, specifically in the work of Max Ernst, who lived in Arizona, near Sommer, throughout the 1940s.

What unifies the work is an unyielding attention to pictorial structure--Sommer’s images indeed verge on the architectural--and a belief that reality is neither singular nor finite. Ultimately unswayed by such reductive dichotomies as real and surreal, rational and intuitive, Sommer instead insists upon the existence of parallel universes and parallel modes of thought. The collages bear witness to this insistence, enacting one of the artist’s best-known dicta: “Circumnavigation of the blood is always circumnavigation of the world.” In returning physicality to its rightful position within the metaphysical, Sommer likewise insists upon a demystified--if still resolutely mystical--vision of the world.

* Turner/Krull Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-1536, through Sept. 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.

A Clever Fellow: The thing about visual puns and witty conceits, optical illusions and ironic metaphors, is that they often aren’t worth the trouble. You figure it out and it’s all over--a one-note wonder. The work of trickster Paul Kos, however, isn’t just smoke and mirrors--although both devices do come into play here. With Kos, cleverness is certainly crucial, but it never smirks at substance.

The exhibition at Dorothy Goldeen Gallery opens to the ringing of bells and the squawking of a live parrot who happily shimmies up and down a huge ladder strung up with bungee cords and three large bells. The bird is being taught the “Internationale”; thus, the three cedar music boxes stationed nearby, each of which plays the Communist Party anthem in a different language--French, German and Spanish.

The punch line is this: The Blue Front Amazon parrot--which lives from 75 to 100 years--will sing the song long after the rest of us (sympathetic to the cause or not) are dead. Post-punch line, however, broader questions of power, manipulation and history begin to resonate--and they continue to do so, far longer than does the clanging of the parrot-operated bells.

The “Pawn” pieces take up many of the same themes: power (or the lack thereof), class enmity and violence. In one piece, Kos creates an astounding illusion with layers of glass, wood and red paint. Close up, one sees a huge, red chess pawn. From a distance, the “solid” form dematerializes into floating disks of color. In another work, a huge, steel plank is covered with hundreds of magnetic chess pieces--all queens, kings, knights, rooks and bishops--that create an image (in negative) of a pawn. A third piece, “Attack on the Pawn With a Slingshot at 8 Meters; 6 p.m., 7/16/92,” consists of a drawing on Sheetrock, with a hole neatly slicing through the pawn’s head.

Here, Kos suggests the way in which the poor, the weak and the disenfranchised are habitually rendered invisible, defined in opposition to some vaguely unified “we,” and used as scapegoats for a community’s accumulated, unassimilated rage. By using a game piece as his point of reference, Kos shakes off the didacticism of his message without shaking off the message itself. By threading a series of metaphors throughout the exhibition (the pawn merely one among them), he evades the hit-and-run aspect of much conceptualist tomfoolery, without giving up the light touch.

This exhibition, however, is clearly not lighthearted. It is about vision and systems of belief, and the ways both can be manipulated to myriad ends. Like the optical illusions of which he is so fond, Kos’ own aesthetic system must be seen to be believed.

* Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., Santa Monica, (310) 319-9956, through Aug. 29. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Planting Thoughts: It is very unnerving to be taken in by a plastic plant. What’s the matter with your eyes, you wonder, after you surreptitiously squeeze between your fingers what is unmistakably a plastic leaf. Why can’t you tell the real thing from a fake?

Vincent Shine’s artificial plants--although painstakingly, impeccably crafted--don’t really want to take you in. They certainly don’t want to be squeezed; they are, after all, placed on pristine white shelves in the Michael Kohn Gallery. They want you to think. The question is, “About what?”

With their thin green stems, tiny mounds of dirt, faded flowers and translucent, white roots, these “plants” are breathtakingly delicate. As if to complement their formal qualities, Shine’s musings remain breathtakingly tentative.

There is, of course, the stand-off between nature and culture, not to mention the way both get tangled into the larger question of authenticity. There is also the question of immortality. Art is supposed to live on after we die; Shine’s drooping, decaying surrogates suggest the wishfulness of such fictions of eternity.

And yes, in a roundabout way, there is the issue of the viewer’s (and critic’s) inadequacies, faced with a work of art that is stubbornly, vexingly mute. Yet all ideas remain on the level of propositions. True, they are interesting propositions, but, in the end, they make for an unfinished body of work.

Three mushroom pieces are emblematic of the problem. Here, Shine arranges painted plaster casts of long-stemmed mushrooms so that they appear to sprout up out of white pedestals or out of the gallery wall. What they stress is the notion that art and its rarefied spaces can never escape the messiness of randomly proliferating life.

Here, Shine stresses that art and life are by their very natures discontinuous. The latter position is certainly true. Life is replete with provisional inquiries and incomplete thoughts; that’s what makes it different from art. Shine’s work is full of life, but it has yet to find itself as art. This exhibition holds out the promise, however, that when it does, we will be glad we waited.

* Michael Kohn Gallery, 920 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 293-7713, through Aug. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Indictments: The fifth and final installation in the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s annual Artist Projects Series, Pat Ward Williams’ “Vantage Point” offers a sharp indictment of U.S. militarism, expansionism, consumerism and couch potato-ism.

Williams has transformed the 5,000-square-foot gallery into a map that expands volumetrically from the viewer’s point of entry. Wavering black lines designating continents spread across the floor and crawl onto the walls, creating a three-dimensional, anamorphic illusion of the world. There are no names given to any of the continents; we figure out where we are only as we move through the space and come across Williams’ annotations--”U.S. Intervention, 1983”; “U.S. Occupation, 1914”; “U.S. Drops 1st Atomic Bomb, 1945”; “U.S. Invasion, Spring 1970”; etc.

Within this geopolitical framework, Williams has arranged three hermetic, living room environments, each one equipped with a television and telephone. Once settled comfortably into a couch or chair, and tuned in to the rapidly flickering video image, the outside world seems to fade away. Any knowledge we have of that world is limited to the knowledge promulgated by TV.

“Vantage Point” is indeed thought-provoking. But if anything, it is limited by the apparent fixity of Williams’ own perspective--as fixed in its own way as the pabulum offered by the mass media. One would have expected the lightly annotated map to have been covered with references to many more and different kinds of events in order to complicate what is a far-too-easy condemnation of America. One would have wished for a looser model that would allow for--indeed encourage--multiple emotions, fluid identifications and shifting alliances.

With our access to information so tightly controlled, our position as viewers--philosophically if not physically--is predetermined from the moment we enter the room. We know what we are supposed to find, and there is thus little room for true discovery. Discovery may indeed be a suspect notion in 1992, but self-discovery still does--and hopefully always will--have a viable place in art.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-0433 , through Aug. 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.