ART REVIEW : These Works Aren’t Always What They Appear to Be

Two current exhibitions at the Barnsdall Art Park find numerous local artists wrestling big questions. They ask if an old reality that was tangible, robust and subtly textured has disappeared forever. They wonder if everything from a disembodied information society to the coercive constraints of political correctness have conspired to curdle life into a juiceless abstraction.

None traffics directly in the kind of dreary agit-prop conceptualism we’ve all seen too much of, but they poke at the edges of the issues. Quite a few pipe wistful tunes of Edens lost to all but memory.

“Current Abstractions” at the Municipal Art Gallery was organized by the Muni’s curator and program director Noel Korten. His introduction in the show’s brochure is helpful, as is an essay by Michael Darling. In substance, the presentation includes several works each by some 25 artists who paint, sculpt or both.

Once abstract art was seen as a way of releasing subconscious contents. Then it was reduced to an exercise in pure form. Artists here reintroduce the idea of “Funk” from the ‘60s, its fascination with layered multiple meanings conditioned by the present gloomy Zeitgeist .

The exhibition frontispiece, for example, is a circle covered with aluminum foil. Made by Tim Hawkinson, it’s titled “Volume Control” and brings to mind Robert Irwin’s landmark disappearing discs, but it looks more primitive. It may have something to say about retribalization.

Terri Friedman’s tangle of liquid-filled plastic tubing is titled “Co-mingling (sic) Without Ever Exchanging.” Seems to be thinking about AIDS and isolation.

Sally Elesby’s sweet “Surface Decoration” series makes wall reliefs of delicate wire encrusted with notions-counter gewgaws. Could this be a subversive message about a kind of femininity feminists abhor?

There’s quite a bit of that sort of oblique questioning. Then there is the inevitable segment of the show that fails for sheer timidity.

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Most encouraging is that contingent of artists pushing the envelope using art’s own non-programmatic grammar. Marcus Lutyens brings the natural and the artificial together in “Tuch and Go,” where sections of logs are joined by tense cling-wrap with condensed moisture inside. Social commentary can be inferred from the thing but its success lies in its sensuous reality.

The icy edge of minimalism melts in George Ketterl’s compositions of ovoid forms. They undermine symmetry to become both dynamic and menacing. George Bruland’s small paintings use little but the seduction of color and exquisitely massaged surfaces to create a sense of personal and historical romanticism that make titles like “Byron’s Rock” perfectly apt. Something similar happens in wistful little paintings by Mario Cutajar. They rhyme perfectly with handles like “Watteau’s Melancholy.”

Among others equally worth a second look are Susan Elias, Linda Stark, David Grant and Andrew Watanabe.

If this visual essay is about opening the philosophical implications of abstraction to include the real, then “Illusions of Reality” is the opposite. It extends reality to include the philosophical.

Housed across the way in the Junior Art Center gallery is a smaller eight-artist exercise organized by curator Scott Canty.

It tends toward fool-the-eye technique orchestrated to remind us that illusion is delightful but only poetically real. So what is reality composed of these days?

Carlo Marcucci plunges into the question of physical reality vs. information reality by painting apples or bananas against images of printed documents. James Griffith imitates printing plates to demonstrate how pictorial illusion is built up with abstract means. Steven Robison pushes the edge, making pure abstraction appear to be made of delicate fabric.

Some join those in the abstraction show playing theme and variation on Proust’s conviction that reality exists only in reverie.

Roger Campbell copies discarded mattresses down to the last nocturnal stain. When we stop being fooled, we see the works are embodied autobiography. Haunting photographs of attic treasures by Anthony Nelson evoke old prints that similarly sound chords of nostalgia.

Claire Keith puns on reality depicting rational and artificial things like rulers and wedding cake grooms. Laura Whipple has a delightful time playing with the size of memory. In “Night Sweat” she sees it as a toy ocean liner going through a funnel only to emerge even smaller.

Significantly the most engaging piece here could be in either exhibition. Robert Wedemeyer’s “Music Box” looks like a big minimalist wooden wall-relief sculpture in the form of a cantilevered circle segment. The trick is that it contains about 30 little music boxes that the viewer is invited to wind up according to serendipity. The resulting melding of tinkling tunes makes an eerie original composition that is at once avant-garde and plaintive.

* Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd.; both shows continue through April 17, closed Mondays, (213) 485-4581.