John McCracken Capitalizes on a Crisis : Art: When just one of his sculptures sold at a recent show, the artist pulled ‘out all the stops’ and switched to painting.

Times are still tough for most everybody. Artists are no exception. Like the rest of humanity, they scramble to cope. Some of the most successful art-makers in this town are quietly selling property, unloading cherished works from private collections or applying for teaching jobs. Others in better shape are declining to show new work for fear it won’t sell in a lousy market and will be returned to the studio tainted by failure. It’s understandable to retreat when the going gets rough.

A few old hands, on the other hand, decided to turn the tables on the Fates and capitalize on crisis. Notable among them is L.A. veteran John McCracken. Since the ‘60s he’s established an international reputation as a maker of severely minimal sculpture--cubes, wedges and leaning planks, all highly polished. Their colors make some look like weightless apparitions and others like obdurate squatters from outer space. They cop to nothing save their own enigmatic presence.

“Sometimes I feel like a channeler for these things,” McCracken remarked recently. “I get mad at them and say, ‘If you guys don’t tell me what you are about I won’t make any more of you.’ They never say anything.”

At 58, McCracken looks unsettlingly the same as the guy who blew into town from the Bay Area in ’64 to show at the legendary Nicholas Wilder Gallery. He’d just made up his mind to be an artist at the California School of Arts and Crafts. He did the work, targeted the gallery and, bang, it all came true just like that. The show made him an instant fact-of-life on the artscape.

He’s still rail-thin with a weathered face that appears to be a mixture of Jack Palance and Clint Eastwood. The sinister implications are offset by a Gary Cooper smile and an aw-shucks manner. He’s dead straight, once admitting to a critic who’d come to review his show that “it just doesn’t work.” He looks and behaves, in short, like a good cowboy.

He grew up moving around California, notably near Mt. Shasta, where his dad owned a ranch. The old man was a kind of Jack-of-all-trades who once invented a smokeless smudgepot that John McCracken thinks was swiped from him by some big concern.

As a kid, McCracken said, he leaned to the egghead/nerd variety but he did like sci-fi comics and stories of cowboys, hunters and trappers. He did a stint in the Navy as a sonar man and once had a studio outside Las Vegas in an unused airport control tower, and he flew his own little plane.

Now he lives in a downtown loft with his third wife, painter Gail Barringer. The building’s exterior is blighted with graffiti. Its roof is accessible from a nearby bridge. Recently a neighbor-artist was up there painting when somebody took a shot at him. Everybody’s a critic.

The couple rarely goes out after dark. That’s partly prudence and partly the fact that they are night owls and swing-shift workers who not uncommonly make art until dawn. It’s the perfect ambience to remind McCracken that he lost his L.A. dealer a few months ago when the respected Fred Hoffman Gallery suddenly caved in. His neighborhood could only deepen McCracken’s anxiety over the outcome of his most recent New York show, at Sonnabend Gallery a year ago.

“Only one work sold when usually at least half do. I suddenly realized I was living in a drastically changed world.”

This dilemma, which faces even many of the most successful of today’s artists, only strengthened McCracken’s resolve:

“I decided to pull out all the stops and go in a direction I’d wanted to go for a long time. In the past I thought it would be crazy or schizophrenic to do such different things. But the things being the way they are I decided it’s time to take a risk. It made me feel younger, brasher. ‘Go ahead and trust yourself,’ I said.”

He started making paintings.

In the rarefied and fastidious air of the art scene, such a move is crucial, especially to an artist as closely identified with a kind of trademark product as McCracken. What’s this about? Some sort of desperate sellout to a market where painting moves better than sculpture? A crackpot inspiration to cede cool, structural control and go bananas “expressing” himself? It’s the kind of gesture that gives everybody the willies, especially the artist himself.

As it turns out McCracken’s “Universe Series” paintings are the best idea he’s had since the sculpture itself, a resounding personal best and a likely breakthrough in the annals of making a brand of abstraction for which a few L.A. artists seem to be developing a kind of genius. It’s an art that finds its expressive center by somehow combining the coolly calculated with the explosively spontaneous.

The series has just gone on view at the emporium of McCracken’s new dealer, Venice’s L.A. Louver Gallery, where it can be seen through March 27. Traveling art buffs might want to catch a sculpture show he’s opening in Brussels this week. Not a man to let the grass grow.

Before the Venice opening, the nervous artist invited a couple of acquaintances to the studio for a look. Most paintings are large, horizontal in format and at first have the appearance of highly domesticated Jackson Pollocks. They are made up of myriad strokes that coalesce into overall textures. The color palette in each leans markedly to the warm or cool ends of the spectrum.

“Universe: Oracle” is dominated by reds and yellows, “Universe: Time” by blues and lavenders. All initially appear related to the sculpture in the unyielding flatness of their surfaces, their sameness from edge to edge.

Gradually the eye discovers that this confetti of strokes subtly points from every direction to dead center on the canvas. Then the works open up onto a kind of hyperspace and implode as if into one of the universe’s black holes. As the eye recovers from that surprise, the direction of movement reverses itself. A galactic optical explosion ensues and one feels the power of the Big Bang in action. After that slow-motion pyrotechnics occur along the horizontal axis with patches looming back into an illusory distance and forward so that some parts appear to float several inches in front of the canvas.

Each work, of course, functions differently. Some variations are as subtle as kaleidoscope patterns; others as dramatic as one unusually simple blue and red combination. In contrast to the structural elegance of most of the series it has the directness of aboriginal art.

“I wanted to make a mystery,” he said. “Perfect space, vast and beautiful like thunder, the stars a sunrise.”

The paintings have the virtue of clarifying McCracken’s sensibility, which has remained something of a mystery even to longtime admirers of his sculpture. Basically McCracken is a metaphysical idealist steeped in Zen, Jung, Edgar Cayce, Carlos Castaneda, Theosophy and the Seth books.

His philosophical position is clearly grounded in the experience many artists have while working. Making art is so labor-intensive that it’s common for an artist to lose his sense of time, place or conscious purpose while in the act.

“I am struck by the timeless timeliness of great art,” McCracken said. “I’m impressed with the living spirit of ancient Egyptian art. It’s as alive now as it was then. Rembrandt isn’t a ‘was’ artist, he is an artist now. All artists are alive at once talking to one another. They let us escape to a place that isn’t stuck in time. That implies life after death in an easy way.

“I try to make work someone would make in another world and bring here--work from the future. The part of me that does the art is timeless. I’m always surprised there is a particular me in a particular place. My own work mystifies me.”