‘Meditations’ Goes Beyond Recognition

A wag once said that in our time if you want to be famous, the best thing to be is a rock star, but if you want to be a failure the best thing to be is an artist.

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In this century the artistic impulse is not always the same thing as a lusting after fame. On the contrary, the calling is often a way of fulfilling a creative urge while remaining largely anonymous. Artists of this stamp come second only to poets in obdurate determination to do their thing while protecting their privacy.

The point is made by “Three Meditations” at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. It consists of installations by a trio of artists each more interested in contemplation than recognition.

Marvin Harden held his first solo show in 1967 at La Cienega’s lovably rear-guard Ceeje Gallery. It produced a larger crop of honorably obscure artists than any interesting gallery before or since. About the only one to float more-or-less accidentally to larger recognition was Charles Garabedian.

Harden, from the beginning, made work so introspective it could barely be seen. He painted or drew very small cows or horses on relatively large formats. About the only embellishment he allowed himself were poetic, slightly wistful titles. In the ensuing decades he confined himself to studios in rural locations, declined to define his art in written statements and never made an issue of the fact he is an African American.

About the only changes in his work consisted of its growing ever smaller; witness the prints and paintings on view. None is larger than about 3-by-7 inches. All depict a single bird nearly invisible against its background. All paintings are titled with the same brief verse:

songs sung

(with grace)

of an inward place,

in a stillness, sweet,

in morning, mourning

in evening, even.

He has made his pictures more sumptuous over time. Each frame is marbled gold. Mats are a close match to his images, often rendered in lush texture with metallic pigment. Clearly, however, the intent of all this is to create an atmosphere rather than an impression. Images seem to exist as objects hovering on the brink of disembodiment. They are like the first rays of dawn or the last of dusk.

MacRae Wylde is almost literally unknown. Just 30, he’s held only four exhibitions in venues each more modest than the last. He’s hiked around from the Central American rain forest to the natural American outback on both coasts. He collects earth and rock that he grinds into painting pigment.

His installation is called “Four Places.” Each wall of a small pavilion in mid-gallery bears a number of thick, nearly square paintings, groups of which are in one solid earth hue--siennas, ochres and grays. Evidently grouped according to the source of the pigment materials, the work brings to mind severely minimal artists from Malevich to Judd but it doesn’t matter much.

If anything is unimportant here, it is the usual citing of influences evident in the artists’ work. To whatever extent this group has paid attention to other artists, it has only been with a view to translating other ideas into their private languages.

Wylde’s most interesting piece is “Slocum River.” Two of its large gray compositions cantilever vertically from the wall on their edges, becoming virtually architectural. The artist seems to muse on the primal moment when humans began to apply rational process to the primal ooze.

If Wylde is intuitively involved in philosophy, the remaining meditator reaches to cosmology.

She goes by the pseudonym “Madame X,” upping the obscurity ante. She explores “Eternal Culture” in various mandala drawings bearing the usual diagrammatic vortexes, whorls and cryptic writing.

But there is nothing scholarly or archeological here. Madame X goes about this like autobiography. “In the year 0000 Madame X journeyed into the sphere of eternal history, becoming the first to observe its eternal order,” she writes in one mandala.

One wall displays a group of “Little Spirits”--sculpture that look like an abstract distillation of votive folk carving. An inner sanctum nook encloses a “Model of Time” that is a beautifully formed hinged wooden cone covered with decorative glyphs and containing a double spinning top.

There’s a whiff of camp about both Mme. X’s persona and her work, but where is it written an occult seer can’t have a sense of humor?

Her art harks back the adventurous spirit of the late ‘50s, the art of Wallace Berman and George Herms and the films of Kenneth Anger. It’s both apt and bracing to find this happening in a coercively conformist decade that makes the Eisenhower years look like a bacchanal.

* Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena; through Oct. 9, closed Monday, (818) 792-5101.