ART REVIEW : ‘Gemini at 25’: Celebrating a Child of ‘60s : The print emporium attracted famous artists, pioneered the multiple and stretched the medium to accommodate aesthetic vision. The show features works by 17 artists.

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 since 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 local maker of prints and multiples Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited). Located in a gray, bunker-like building on Melrose Avenue not far from La Cienega Boulevard, the building is marked by the astrological sign for Gemini, a huge Roman numeral II in a circle. Its location marks it as a child of the ‘60s.

In those days the idea of a print was just one more 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. Print collectors would be able to acquire works by the likes of Josef Albers, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg for a fraction of the cost of their unique objects.

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

One Gemini partner, Sidney Felsen, loves art with a passion. His former wife opened the adventurous Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Stanley Grinstein and his wife, Elyse, work tirelessly around the sphere particularly on behalf of younger Turks. By 1984, Gemini had become so respected it was given a survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Art after the formation of a Gemini archive at the prestigious repository. Recognition-wise that’s the top of the heap.

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. Consisting of some 100 works by 17 artists, it will travel, but the itinerary is not yet completely fixed. A book catalogue was unfinished by preview time.

The show is in two sections. The first 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.” It has a red light that flashes in time with the 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 last 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 works by Richard Serras include black wedge abstractions of monumental proportion in paintstick rendered as a screenprint.

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 risks taken.

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’s works look 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 actual social sphere, but the elitism, status-seeking, economics and promotion that make artists think their real 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 just 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 is 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.

Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive , Newport Beach, through Nov. 29, (714) 759-1122, closed Mondays.