ART REVIEWS : Theatrics Skew Intent of ‘Suicide Notes’

There is only one philosophical problem, Albert Camus has written, and that is suicide. Suicide is, indeed, no laughing matter--even for artist Erika Rothenberg, who has long operated on the principle that laughter is the best medicine.

Over the years, this rather banal credo has accounted for some good and some bad art.

Notable among the latter category is an ongoing suite of “greeting cards” that satirize our culture’s media-driven, hypocrisy-laced preoccupation with trauma. “Condolences on being falsely accused of child abuse,” burbles one. “Being homeless isn’t so bad; at least you didn’t have to pay rent,” quips another.

In “Suicide Notes,” a new installation produced in collaboration with Tracy Tynan at Rosamund Felsen, Rothenberg moves, relievedly, away from the one-shot jokes and toward a more thoughtful approach. As ever, her path is paved with good intentions. Yet, once again, she runs afoul of a series of potholes--and these are bigger and more treacherous than ever before.

Eighteen black-vinyl body bags hang from the gallery’s four walls. Each of these contains a suicide note obtained from an anonymous source in the Los Angeles Police Department; the names and handwriting have been changed, but the texts have not been altered. A black fountain and two black benches enhance the funereal mood; a packet stuffed with statistics about suicide, as well as numbers for suicide-prevention hot lines, signals hushed seriousness.

The notes themselves are overwhelming, horrifying, deeply moving. Some are pithy:

“Please bury me in my blue suit,” writes a man, 52, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Others are more protracted. The most tragic, not surprisingly, are those written by children: a 12-year-old boy who got an F in English tells his parents not to be sad, that he’ll look for his grandparents in heaven; a teen-ager explains that he knew since he was 6 that he wouldn’t live to 30 because he had “cancer of the spirit.”

And yet, as art, all of this rankles. If Rothenberg’s earlier work had the unmistakable ring of stand-up comedy, this installation aspires to the condition of the television docudrama. This is the genre where bathos reigns, where the “facts” surrounding this week’s tragedy are recast within the conventions of dramatic narrative--the crisis staged at midpoint, the catharsis occurring near the conclusion, and the credits preceded by a textual crawl informing the audience about the fate of this or that murderous housewife, or where to write to get more information about juvenile diabetes.

Likewise in “Suicide Notes,” real tragedies have been appropriated, subjected to and indeed diminished by a painstakingly fabricated context. What does it mean to transcribe these calamitous, purloined letters in carefully varied handwriting and pieces of paper? To hang them in an art gallery specially outfitted with dim lights and cemetery benches? To use body bags as decor? Unfortunately, the theatrics obscure other meanings, other intentions.

To take on suicide is indeed daunting; but “Suicide Notes” fails. At best, it is trivializing; at worst, exploitative.

Erika Rothenberg & Tracy Tynan at Rosamund Felsen, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652-9172. Closed Sunday and Monday, through March 13.

Labeling Art: Mildly humorous and/or acid-tongued, impeccably constructed and/or rudely deconstructive, Guy Williams’ mixed-media assemblages at Kiyo Higashi seem to have it both ways--well, a lot of ways--at once. This isn’t too surprising considering Williams’ subject matter. How can we expect art about the whole business of art not to be conflicted?

As far as conflicted constructions go, these are remarkably elegant--panels imprinted with texts, monoprints and/or photographic reproductions, floating above shelves laden with cans, jars, and/or boxes. Without being shiny, everything bears the sheen of the new. Without being assembled by machine, these arrangements look as flawless as mass-produced objects.

No wonder, then, that so many of the forms are embellished with the coolly ironic label “Agenda Brand/Significant Content.” Less ironic, and more biting, are those cans with the word variety printed on their labels, or those boxes bearing graphic representations of the ubiquitous UPC bar codes--their computer-monitored vernacular alarmingly close to modernism’s vaunted language of geometric abstraction.

This work continues to veer away from Williams’ well-known geometric collages and back toward earlier projects, such as the concrete poems that paid naughty homage to admired artists. “Bridget Riley,” for example, featured parentheses arranged to ape the artist’s famously undulating Op Art images.

Here, it’s Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko who provide the motif for a pair of images. In the first, black letters spelling the word line amble down the surface, materializing Newman’s famous “zip.” In the other, a hazy square of pink letters repeats the words, “You can warm your hands on this color,” a textual equivalent of Rothko’s gorgeous color field paintings.

It’s all sweetness and light, then, until you look at the shelf mounted below the images. There, four simulated stationery boxes are labeled with the same word-poems, as well as the phrase “Contains 500 Sheets.” The implication is, of course, that even art as ostensibly personal and purportedly transcendent as Abstract Expressionism is formulaic and commodious.

Perhaps Williams is suggesting that today Abstract Expressionism’s “significant content” is its dollar value, or its status within art history. Indeed, for what art, or which artist, is it any different? Williams doesn’t answer the question. For now, it’s enough just to pose it--and a few others besides. Here’s the first refrain of the “Agenda Brand/Significant Song,” which appears on the back of a jar guaranteed to “Contain No Art”: “Where was Gauguin going that Van Gogh couldn’t go?/What was Degas doing that Renoir didn’t know?/Why was Monet meeting with Manet, by the way?/And who was Seurat seeing?/Well, Cezanne wouldn’t say.”

Guy Williams at Kiyo Higashi, 8332 Melrose Ave., (213) 461-8166. Closed Sunday and Monday, through March 27.

Maddening Hybrids: If film proclaims itself as art, then Carter Potter takes it at its word, lacing together transparent strips of 15-, 35- and 65-millimeter film into gridded “paintings.” Yet what kind of paintings are these? And, indeed, what kind of art is film?

Potter’s hybrids at Sue Spaid are designed first to be seductive objects, and second, to muddy up the terms. These forms are static but also narrative, miniature images streaking across and/or meandering down the interlaced strips of film, marking out not just space but time. Grids are emblematic of modernism’s masculine-encoded rigor; yet weaving is a “feminine” endeavor. Worse yet, Potter’s privileged motif is that most debased of domestic items, a roll of toilet paper.

In profile, the roll resembles a white ellipse, repeated ad nauseum, like a consumerist mantra. Film is consumerist. Is, or isn’t, art?

For those enamored of Potter’s operatic couch “paintings,” a couch turns up here, as well--stripped, upended and mounted to the wall, its webbing exposed as just another grid.

Here, Matisse’s famed injunction that art be as soothing as an armchair likewise goes belly-up. What could be more uncomfortable than a skeletal sectional? What, indeed, could be more maddening than art that refuses to pick a medium, a genre, an attitude? Potter, happily, continues to speculate.

Christel Dillbohner at Space, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., (213) 461-8166. Closed Sunday and Monday, through March 20.