ART REVIEW : Probing the Nature of Perception

In the mid-1960s, Sylvia Plimack Mangold began a group of paintings, drawings and prints of a most peculiar specificity. Their simple subject was wooden floorboards in light-filled rooms, frequently with a bit of white wall and baseboard in the upper register.

Save for an occasional wood-framed mirror standing on the floor and leaning against the wall, these rooms are empty of furnishings--and of people, pets, plants or any of the typical accouterments of modern domestic environments. In their stripped-down simplicity they recall an American vernacular tradition of architecture. But the hardwood floors and white walls are also as specific to the postwar New York art world as colossal spaces were to 17th-Century Rome: These are the spaces of artists’ lofts and of downtown art galleries.

That they are, in Mangold’s art, totally emptied of objects is of considerable importance. Not created to hold chairs and tables, paintings and sculptures, they are instead spaces meant to be entered and occupied by the self-consciously perceiving eye. Mangold is a Realist, but what she describes in her work is the mysterious fact of perceptual understanding, which lies at the core of contemporary artistic inquiry.

“Sylvia Plimack Mangold: Works on Paper, 1968-1991” is a concise and absorbing show that, by concentrating on the New York-based artist’s often compelling graphic work, lays out the highly focused trajectory of her career. Organized jointly by the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, the 26 prints and 43 drawings are on view in a handsomely installed exhibition in the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery.

Mangold’s work on paper is sometimes executed as a preparatory study for a painting, and sometimes as a finished work in itself. For the show, the prints and drawings have been divided into five groups, which articulate the chronological sequence of sometimes overlapping subjects that have occupied her since the 1960s: floors and mirrors; floors and rulers; fields marked off by masking tape; landscapes near her house in Washingtonville, N.Y., and, finally, trees, typically silhouetted against a background of sky.

Beginning with the rigorously ordered, Modernist geometry of hardwood or linoleum floors and ending with sinuous renderings of oak and locust branches might seem an odd path for an artist to take. But, as this show makes plain, all Mangold’s art is geared toward probing and defining the nature of perceptual space. Try thinking of the unusual sequence of her investigations as sort of Mondrian-in-reverse.

Mangold began her images of floors in 1965, and in 1972 she inserted her first mirror into the scheme. Mirrors are a device common to the history of art, from Velazquez and Titian to Lichtenstein and Smithson, and they perform a complex function in Mangold’s art.

Because they are reflective, the mirrors show the space that would have been behind the artist as she was drawing; and, because a mirror’s reflection is, in fact, a flat illusion on a two-dimensional surface, it also mimics the flat illusion of space that Mangold has rendered in the drawing itself.

So, simultaneously, the presence of the mirror both expands and contracts the picture’s space. It makes the drawing breathe.

It does something else, too--something disconcerting. A reflection of the artist, who would have been seated before the mirror as it leaned against the wall, is nowhere to be seen. Mangold has erased her own image from the space. In effect, to create the picture she has looked right through herself. As a spectator, you get to look into a mirror in a way you never could, except through the fiction of art. The odd sense of self-effacement and displacement that results is fundamental.

Sylvia Plimack was a student at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture from 1959 to 1961, a remarkable period when she counted among her peers Chuck Close, Rackstraw Downes, Eva Hesse, Brice Marden, Richard Serra and Robert Mangold (whom she married). Her work, like theirs, was to become part of a larger effort to dismantle the prominent, essentialist myth that had congealed around Modernism, which said the expressive self is what was embodied in a work of art.

When Mangold (or a spectator) looked into her mirror, she didn’t see a representation of the essence of her being. Instead, she saw the defining context of existence. Rather like Dracula, who casts no reflection in a looking glass, the expressive self was dead.

This is the underpinning to all Mangold’s subsequent work, which is explored with a keen logic and, on occasion, a wry wit. For example, when she began to include measuring devices in her rigorously controlled pictures, she chose ordinary rulers conspicuously printed with the names Westcott Flexible Stainless Steel; EXACT Level & Tool Mfg. Co., Inc., and Non-Skid Flexible Dual-Rule. As with the mirrors, her rulers were deployed in pictorial space in ways that confound expected rules of linear measurement: An 18-inch ruler, drawn in perspective, could calibrate a distance equal to a 12-inch ruler; or, a pair of identical 24-inch rulers could seem to be uneven, depending on the perspective. Their flexible , exact and dual-rule names are turned into resonant puns.

The slyest joke of all is found in the reference to stainless steel. The word first cropped up in a 1974 drawing that shows two identical rulers abutted at right angles on a wooden floor, so that one appears to be shorter than the other. Its pointed title is “Flexible and Stainless.”

In the vaunted abstract art of Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis--an art of liquid color soaked into raw canvas that came to be called stain-painting--Modernism’s essentialist myth found its last-gasp champions. Mangold, using a pair of identical measuring devices whose placement in her picture made them seem to contradict each other utterly, transformed essentialist absolutes into visual hash. Her disconcerting image favored rulers that embraced flexibility--and that were emphatically stainless.

Without fanfare or spangles, the show at UCLA gives you just what you need for a full encounter with this challenging and often exquisite art. It’s a model of tight editing and careful documentation, as befits an artist of Mangold’s perceptually demanding temperament.

Wight Art Gallery, UCLA, (310) 825-9345, through Nov. 15. Closed Mondays.