ART REVIEWS : Calm, Exhilaration From Woelffer Retrospective

One expects many things from art--solace, intimidation, distraction, illumination. It is rare, however, to come upon a body of work that provides both calm and exhilaration. An important retrospective of 50 years of Emerson Woelffer’s works on paper does just that.

Here, one experiences the calm that comes from being in the presence of someone who is in control of his medium. There are no gimmicks in this show at Otis School of Art and Design Gallery curated by Anne Ayres and Roy Dowell, no uncertainties, no lapses. Woelffer has consistently turned to paper over the years because paper--at least in his hands--is extraordinarily manipulable.

Paper works in these compositions both as a support and as a collage element: It is ripped or cut; it is casually tossed onto the surface or placed there with the utmost deliberation; it asserts its identity or burrows under the very skin of the image; it is vibrant or colorless. As Ayres points out in her catalogue essay, paper is, for Woelffer, equivalent to paint--a scrap of pasted paper is like a brushed area of color, its torn edge both line and shadow.

For Woelffer, the struggle has been to reconcile the demands of pictorial structure with the whims of automatism. Not unexpectedly, then, Miro, Matisse and Arp, among a host of others, dance in, out and around the edges of these abstract compositions. The earliest work in the show, a heavy, opaque drawing from 1940, shows the artist striving to balance Moholy Nagy’s constructivist geometries against Klee’s playful wit. Throughout Woelffer’s lifework, the scribbles, doodles and numbers familiar from the surrealist romance with automatic writing play upon wide expanses of saturated color that recall Matisse, or thick swatches of black that conjure Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell.

Yet this art is not about appropriation, sampling, pastiche or any other such postmodern strategy. It is emphatically modernist work, as the subtitle of the show insists. Modernism works teleologically: The artist must progress through established vocabularies and come out on the other side with something that goes beyond. Woelffer builds upon pre-established tropes, then, but he tweaks at them until they become his own.

There are moments that are especially fine: Collaged bits of gold paper affixed to the surface with straight pins in an untitled work of 1955; bits of brown paper, shredded so fine they resemble dead skin, silhouetted against a somber black background in a work of 1958; the large “color aid” collages of the 1970s, wherein long strips of color-drenched paper are laid over and under one another, the restless white lines of their torn edges like narrow crevices struggling to split open the pictorial surface.

Woelffer’s take on European modernism has certainly achieved less notoriety than that of his New York School contemporaries. This exhibition suggests that we should begin to pay more attention to the wonders that can be found in our own back yard.

“Emerson Woelffer: A Modernist Odyssey,” at Otis School of Art and Design Gallery, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0555. Closed Sunday and Monday, through Nov. 14.

Frontiersmen: For American artists of the mid-19th Century--the Luminists, the Hudson River School--the frontier was a mythical site of adventure, conquest and destiny. For American artists at the close of the 20th Century--San Diego’s Border Arts Workshop and Craig Stecyk, among them--the frontier signifies something quite different: the myth twisted inside out to reveal its xenophobic, imperialist face.

If the frontier refers to a line of division between opposing forces --notions as much as nations--then Daniel Wheeler’s installation, “Frontier” at Newspace, straddles that line. The work is political, but it is also poetic; its focus is tight, but the work is emphatically open. Refusing to paint the world in black and white, Wheeler cleaves unto the gray area, where the romance of the unknown and the will to power are acknowledged--not merely the brutal consequences incurred thereof. This makes for art that is difficult to assimilate, that is both troubling--and urgent.

The installation opens with a jolt--a canvas tent, propped up on wooden scaffolding containing a stuffed coyote. Invited to handle the creature through gloves sewn into the tent, the viewer is caught between fear and the desire to go further, to know more. That desire is thwarted by the fact that the animal can never be known through sight, only through touch.

Sight is similarly banished, this time in favor of hearing, in a larger structure in the next room--on the frontier, after all, we must rely upon all our senses. Here, the viewer climbs up a wooden ladder to peer into the darkened interior of a makeshift water tower. Nothing is visible; all that is audible is the sound of one’s own breathing, amplified by a microphone.

The experience is strangely soothing--no traffic, no voices--and as seductive as the unexpected lucidity that comes before sleep. But in cutting the viewer off from consciousness of everything but oneself, this piece enacts the solipsism that justifies a colonialist imperative and the egocentrism that powers an expansionist thrust.

Where Wheeler stands in relation to that imperative and that thrust is never in doubt. “Empire Builders”--like all the pieces in this show--is beautifully crafted, a skeletal hammock constructed out of bars of steel, suspended from a model train track affixed to the ceiling. In juxtaposing this structure with two piles of chopsticks, Wheeler refers not only to the Empire Builder--one of the earliest trains to come out of Chicago--but the Chinese laborers who were in large part responsible for building the railroads, and by extension, for the American Empire.

The American Empire is, indeed, about extension. Wheeler’s fine installation announces that we seem to have come to the end of the line in our push toward the end of the Earth--without regret, yet without exultation. What the artist asks us to do, in turn, is to look backward so that we might figure out what and who we have lost in looking ever “forward.”

Daniel Wheeler at Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353. Closed Sunday and Monday, through Nov. 14.

White House Material: Aaron Brian Clarkson, one of the 254 presidential candidates registered with the Federal Election Commission this year, does not believe George Bush. “The President says that we are in a recovery,” Clarkson declares. “Maybe if you look in a microscope you can find one electron of a recovery.”

Ross Perot is evidently not the only 1992 presidential hopeful to know how to turn a phrase. Among the other contenders are Messiah, who is “For All the People/Everybody Rich”; Mr. George Washington America, who promises to force the retirement “of all the justices of the Supreme Court who were appointed during the Reagan-Bush covert operation Era”; and Susan Block, who claims she went to Yale, did inhale, and wants “free orgasms for everyone.”

Photographs of these (very) dark horse candidates (Clarkson is as fresh-scrubbed as a choirboy; America resembles a snake oil salesman; Block is sheathed in nothing but the American flag), accompanied by their platforms (typed, scrawled and hand-illustrated), are among the political hopefuls that have been assembled by Ruth Honegger and Marino Pascal in a remarkable exhibition at the Armory Center in Pasadena.

“Beyond a Politics of Exclusion Toward an Art of Inclusion” opens up the ostensibly three-man race to the 112 others--WWII veterans, professional comedians, housewives, murderers, zealots and ex-governors--who responded to a letter sent by the artists inviting all the registered candidates to participate in their project.

Honegger and Pascal allot each one a photograph and a one-page statement, each in identical black frames, as well as a clipboard hung below with any additional memoranda, memorabilia and/or effluvia. All this is in a room in which the names of all 254 candidates have been printed on the floor in large, black letters. The result is a visual and a conceptual tour de force. In this rogue’s gallery, Bush, Clinton and Perot are recast as merely more convincing rogues--and not all that convincing at that.

In this context, the trappings of office become irrelevant, and Bush’s presidential grimace appears alarmingly folksy. Sandwiched between Mississippi’s Reverend Billy Joe Clegg, who promises to eliminate the IRS and quarantine homosexuals, and Florida’s “Pro-American and Pro-Business” Blanche Cox, Arkansas’ Clinton looks irredeemably bland. Perot’s conspiracy theories, on the other hand, make him seem uncomfortably close to Kip Lee, who is certain, among other things, that if the extraterrestrial Ashtar Command could just appear before Congress, they could arrange to bring Jesus back in their spaceship.

Though one can quite obviously appreciate this exhibition on the level of a freak show, its meaning goes far deeper. Like all challenging political art, it is about power--apower wielded, power obscured, power splintered, power abused. And it is also about representation--how the manner in which we present ourselves determines the extent to which we are seen. Honegger and Pascal insist that we look at those who refuse to give in to their own invisibility. As such, their project is not merely provocative; it is moving.

Ruth Honegger & Marino Pascal, Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, (818) 792-5101. Closed Monday, through Dec. 23. Political Woman: As a preface to his frequent feminist updates, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh plays one particular sound bite over and over again with delirious glee: “We’re fierce! We’re feminists! And we’re in your face!”

To my dismay, this hortatory chant reverberated in my mind as I walked through this exhibition of Marlene McCarty’s recent work at Linda Cathcart. McCarty arranges mounds of matchbooks on the floor and affixes heat-transfer “paintings” to the wall. These are imprinted with purportedly activist slogans. The most compelling address AIDS (“Lick Me, I’m Sick”); the least compelling are feminist in intent, these ranging from the relatively sanguine (“Beat the hell out of an inflatable doll”) to the unprintable (boasts about female genitalia, phrased in locker-room slang).

Being “in your face” is indeed a political strategy--and one that has achieved a marked degree of success; McCarty’s own work with Gran Fury, the graphic arm of the AIDS activist group ACT-UP, should be cited here. But here, McCarty doesn’t wear it well. The work is attention-getting, to be sure, but its noise generates no echo. McCarty stops short at anger, and while anger is a lot, it is not enough to make for persuasive art. In the end, one can only say that the work is simplistic--as much so, regrettably, as the one-note diatribes of people like Limbaugh.

* Marlene McCarty at Linda Cathcart, 924 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 451-1121. Closed Sunday and Monday, through Nov. 14.