O.C. ART REVIEW : Gemini Duplicates Art, Life

Not long ago, a famous L.A. artist was explaining what he called an “ethical dilemma.” Renowned for his figure drawings, he’d recently faxed one to a chum back East. The friend then sent it back to the artist. He was flummoxed to see the result.

He said that if the fax machine had been loaded with a piece of fine lithographic paper the result would have been as good as an image from a series of prints he was currently making. On one hand, he was awed that technology had reached a point where an artistic image of high quality could be transmitted over a phone line and reproduced in virtually unlimited quantities. He was happy at the thought that fine works of art could be made available at minuscule cost to a potential audience of millions.

On the other hand, he felt very queasy contemplating the notion of his work being pirated and the bottom dropping out of his market, because his prints sell for thousands.

Thereby hangs the larger paradox that lurks around the new Newport Harbor Art Museum exhibition “Both Art and Life: Gemini at 25.” It celebrates the silver anniversary of the respected Los Angeles maker of prints and multiples Gemini G.E.L (Graphic Editions Limited).

Gemini is in a gray, bunker-like building on Melrose Avenue not far from La Cienega Boulevard, the building marked by the astrological sign for Gemini, a huge Roman numeral II in a circle.

In the ‘60s the idea of a print was just one among many liberating notions in the air. The craft of printmaking was being revived. Artist June Wayne had led the way with her renowned Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Gemini came along at a moment when irreverence was king, so everybody laughed when one of the partners cracked, “We print money.” Clearly, he was kidding. But print collectors would be able to acquire works by the likes of Joseph Albers, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg for a fraction of the cost of their unique objects.

At least one leading dealer complained that Gemini was undermining the market for entry-level artists, but never mind. The print emporium attracted famous artists, pioneered the multiple (ways of making limited editions of three-dimensional artworks) and went to great lengths to to accommodate aesthetic vision.

By 1984, Gemini had become so respected it was given a survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Art after a the formation of a Gemini archive at the prestigious repository.

The present show arrives in more modest circumstances and a very changed climate. It was organized by museum director Michael Botwinick and Guggenheim Museum curatorial consultant Mark Rosenthal. The show, consisting of 100 works by 17 artists, will travel, but the itinerary is not fixed. A book-catalogue was unfinished by preview time.

One section of the show is devoted to familiar works from the Gemini gang. Albers’ squares, Frank Stella’s protractor compositions and some multiples--usable wallpaper by Roy Lichtenstein, a “Cardbird” door by Rauschenberg and a piece by Jonathan Borofsky called “Heart Light” (A red light that flashes in time with the distracting, amplified sound of a heartbeat.) It’s distracting enough to make one wish that noise art and visual art have separate rooms.)

The ensemble is a reminder of the generic problem of lithography and certain kinds of screen prints. Except in the hands of the most skillful artists and craftspeople, their surfaces tend to feel wan and lifeless. People who do prints are forever struggling to bring this work back from the dead. A few succeed. Joe Goode literally slashed the material of his “Tissue Tear” series. David Hockney draws so vibrantly that he could make good work on a Xerox machine. Vija Celmins’ “Ocean Surface” is alive and well, but it’s a drypoint.

The larger section is devoted to works done within the past year to celebrate the anniversary. They prove that Gemini and its artists have not ceased attempts to animate their reproduced images.

One tactic has been to make everything bigger. Borofsky’s “Man With a Briefcase” is life-size and concocted out of a woodblock monotype on handmade paper with painting and collage. The Richard Serras include black wedge abstractions of monumental proportion in paint-stick rendered as a screen print.

They are not awful, but they aren’t enough to distract one from awareness of the status of the artists on view. Most belong to the original Gemini group. It’s impossible to tell if this has happened out of friendship and loyalty or bankability. Either way, there is an intense feeling of playing it safe and virtually none of risk taking.

Certain of these artist art so Establishment as to be in that black hole of history where familiarity curdles into boredom.

Lichtenstein is still likable and amusing, but his “Modern Living Room” with a portrait of Chairman Mao doesn’t play. Rauschenberg veers between cute and decorative. Claes Oldenburg looks like a period piece. Ellsworth Kelly has put graphic self-portraits into his minimalist format, and we wish he hadn’t. All have done important work and will no doubt survive historically, but at the moment they look like paleontological specimens.

The work shows no awareness of epic change in the world, of recession, populism, the multicultural movement. The ensemble simply calls to mind all of the things that make artists who love art hate the art world. Not the people or the social sphere, but the elitism, status-seeking, economics and promotion that make artists think their values go ignored or misunderstood.

None of this can be laid at Gemini’s doorstep any more than at that of any other art institution. The reality is that the art world is a sometimes distasteful subculture whose shortcomings are tolerated for one reason: It produces wonderful things.

When we find wonderful things in this exhibition, none of the rest matters. They are to be found, if not quite often enough. There are Susan Rothenberg’s “Bone Man,” Ken Price’s cups and Malcolm Morley’s “Erotic Fruits.” Most of all, there are Richard Diebenkorn’s two sober, engaged little abstract lithographs. One would rather live with them than all of the elephantine rest together.

It is surely significant that the most successful works here are small in scale, like those that made Goya and Durer great. When they are larger, it is because they have the graphic clout that allowed Toulouse-Lautrec to make lithographic posters that were plastered all over the kiosks of Paris as advertising. Today the survivors are priceless collector’s items. There is much to mull on Gemini’s birthday.

* “Both Art and Life: Gemini at 25,” works by 17 artists, including Josef Albers, John Baldessari, Jonathan Borofsky, Richard Diebenkorn, Joe Goode, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and others, opens today at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours today: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free. Through Nov. 29. (714) 759-1122.