ART REVIEW : Disputable Assertions in ‘Body Politic’

Lately, there have been several dozen exhibitions with the words body politic lurking somewhere in their titles.

OK, so there have been only three that I know of. It just seems like dozens. The reason it seems like dozens is that politics, especially political issues surrounding social control of the individual’s body, have been central to much art-making by younger artists of the past decade.

As this art wends its inevitable way into the institutional realm, a certain sameness can be expected to descend on its display. The imminent Whitney Biennial of American Art in New York, which will give its high-profile platform over to artistic explorations of sexism, racism, homophobia and such, can be expected to announce its full-scale arrival into the mainstream.

An indication of the significance that can be claimed for some of this art will be found in the exhibition “Dissent, Difference and the Body Politic,” which opened Saturday at the Otis Art Gallery. A fine, tightly organized, concise overview, it includes among its dozen artists strong individual works by Lutz Bacher, Nayland Blake, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gary Simmons and Kiki Smith.

None of the 12 artists works in Los Angeles, while nine work in New York. (Simmons briefly worked in Los Angeles, before heading to Manhattan in 1991.) Unavoidably, the result is a slightly parochial edge.

More notable weaknesses will be found, however, in two questionable assertions made by the show. Neither is wholly disabling but both are worth disputing.

One is that a new generation of artists has arisen, for whom longstanding, Modernist formal issues loom large as an enemy. In truth, 10 of the 12 artists were born between 1954 and 1964, which is precisely the period when an earlier generation led an all-out assault on Modernist formalism.

Minor, formalist artists, such as painters Helen Frankenthaler or Walter Darby Bannard, might today claim grossly inflated reputations and the outsized support of creaky institutions. Still, it’s safe to say the vanquishing of their rigidly formalist positions has long since been complete. It’s hardly coincidence that they can claim no prominent, younger followers.

The second, perhaps related weakness is the claim that artists interested in the politics of the body have forged a distinct independence from traditional forms of art. It’s true that paintings won’t be found here and that a disavowal of painting--the medium that dominated so much of the art-world spotlight in the 1980s--can certainly be inferred. But the ghost of good old Dada from the ‘teens haunts the Otis galleries--a tradition that also rose to spook the formalist minions of the 1960s.

Furthermore, when Donald Moffet installs a grid of circular light-boxes on the wall, each bearing a picture of a yellow rose overprinted with the word mercy , he may well be employing modern techniques of commercial display. But he is also pointedly setting tender, even sentimental imagery and text against the format of the grid, which is the classic Modernist device of coldly rational organization.

Gonzalez-Torres uses 31 carefully gridded canvases, each with a pale, diagonal line drawn across its surface, either with a ruler or freehand. Together they transform the abstract Minimalist aesthetic of an Agnes Martin or a Sol Lewitt into a subtle representation of a month’s worth of hospital medical charts.

The fragility of Giacometti hovers in the ancestry of Smith’s papier mache bust, set on a high shelf, with bloodlike tears streaming to the floor. It’s also intrinsic to her single, severed, paper arm with extruded blue veins, which is pinned like a specimen to the wall.

Jimmie Durham’s crabbed, tactile text-drawings recall the graphic work of Bruce Nauman, while the bumper-sticker canvases of Marlene McCarty (“I brake for queers,” etc.) and the yellow mural by Michael Jenkins, which quietly coaxes a pirate’s skull-and-bones from the graphic configuration of a common smiley face, plainly count Pop art among their sources.

Lutz Bacher’s remarkable video sculpture, “My Penis,” is a kind of witness chair: A television monitor and a VCR rest on an ordinary folding chair, while a several-second excerpt from William Kennedy Smith’s rape-trial testimony is repeated thousands of times in a two-hour loop: “I did that with my penis,” the boyish witness says again and again, each utterance followed by a dramatic wince that crumples up his face. It’s the most disturbingly effective video-mantra I’ve seen since Joan Jonas’ famous, self-referential “Vertical Roll,” a videotape from 20 years ago.

Simmons’ terrific, partially erased blackboard drawings are among the most resonant works in the show. In a manner unusual for an American, they build directly on the crucial precedent of the late German artist, Joseph Beuys. Beuys’ well-known blackboard drawings, made during demonstrative public lectures, are a legacy of his influential faith in the fusion of art and social process, as an agent of political awakening and change.

Simmons’ chalk images are based on cartoon renditions of African-Americans, in which people are metaphorically represented as comic animals, such as those shady, cigar-chomping black crows of Saturday morning TV, Hekyll and Jekyll. His blackboards, shown at Otis with a classroom-like configuration of exhortatory white podiums, distinctly identify color as integral to the lecture.

Given such an easily recognized list of precedents--and more could be cited--the claim of significance for a rejection of traditional forms is insupportable. It isn’t that Minimalism or Pop, Agnes Martin or Joseph Beuys, is essential as a legitimizing foundation for these younger artists’ work. It’s that they recognize the Modern tradition of art as, in part, a productive critical language, which continuously interprets, revises and remakes art itself.

At Otis, the sculptures of Nayland Blake are provocative, destabilizing demonstrations of this critical relationship to traditional forms. “Hog Tie Cart” is a small, aluminum table on wheels, its clinical appearance made even more chilling by black wrist-restraints dangling from the four corners, and by a black-handled club inexplicably protruding from the table’s top.

Nearby, a garment made from white canvas pinned to a wall, with two hoods and a series of ominous black buckles suspended from its perimeter, continues the table sculpture’s emphatic theme of ritual bondage. It invites imaginative projections into its surely horrific uses--a straitjacket for two, perhaps?

Blake’s nominal sculpture and his canvas “painting” cast the work of art itself as an object of physical, emotional and psychological restraints. Common sentiments of ideal freedom--including (and maybe especially) artistic freedom--are shown to be fictitious. Instead, they are themselves confining shackles, willingly entered into during the discourse between artist and viewer.

“Dissent, Difference and the Body Politic,” which was organized by guest curator Simon Watson, and by John S. Weber of the Portland Art Museum (where the show had its debut in August), is a compelling presentation that raises many questions. One is this: Why is color an almost absent, or at least typically suppressed, ingredient in so much of this kind of art?

From Lorna Simpson’s photo-and-text pieces to Zoe Leonard’s and Catherine Saalfield’s collaboration on a prisonlike cot, with sheets stamped with U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning abortion rights and consensual sex among adults, black-and-white prevails. The sample surveyed by the show might be too small for a definitive answer, but maybe it suggests an awareness of graphic ancestry in political leaflets and agit-prop.

Otis Art Gallery, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0555, through March 24. Closed Sunday and Monday.