Art Review : A Bigger Message in ‘Big Print’ Exhibit

This century found itself confronted by the most crucial of human issues. The question was, which would dominate, the mind-set of the collective or that of the individual? It was a central theme for fine artists, who are individualists by definition.

Now, as the time winds down, it appears the big guys won. Soviet communism collapsed, to be sure, but its urge to homogenize remained rampant in corporations and the media. Even though today’s popular retreat into subcultural groups seems fragmenting, from the point of view of the individualist, it is collectivist in character.

In the arts, Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner loom larger than Andy Warhol or Allen Ginsberg. But so what? Isn’t there a place for singular souls in the chinks between the massive granite slabs of a monolithic culture?

Probably--but according to “The Big Print,” a traveling exhibition of lithographs on view at USC’s Fisher Gallery, that chink is neither large nor comfortable.

The show was organized by New York University art administrator Leonard Lehrer and Ernst Quensen, proprietor of the German lithographic workshop that produced the large prints. This sampling includes some 40 sheets by 20 artists. More than a dozen countries are represented, but more than half the artists are German. Their traditional passion for punchy draftsmanship sets the tone. Most images are figurative, exaggerated and inclined to either satire or Angst .

At a glance the show radiates a nice cheery ‘60s glow. The catalogue has a reflective mylar cover typical of the hectic cool of the epoch and its promotion of lithography as a fine art medium under the banner of “Art for the People.” The assembled work evokes the animation of “Yellow Submarine” and the wonderful surreal graphics of “Beyond the Fringe.”

But a few minutes of viewing brings on the feeling that something went seriously sour in the meantime. Virtually no artist here seems to try anything that he, she or art in general hasn’t done before. The Brit Allen Jones’ kinky Pop imagery was bracingly irreverent 30 years ago. Today his “One Night Stand” is like a nostalgic tune played in a piano bar. Germany’s Johannes Grutzke confronts us with the powerful image of a male nude in Lucifer’s embrace, but the composition is a frank gloss on the great Expressionist posters of the Weimar era. Paris-based Czech artist Ruth Francken shows a collective portrait of art heroes like Samuel Beckett and Joseph Beuys that is so frankly in emulation of Andy Warhol it’s clear she doesn’t care if we know it.

What is going on here?

A clue is provided by Michael Mathias Prechtl’s offering. It includes a disturbed group of illustrative figures. In one corner a levitating Einstein plays the fiddle. In the other Groucho tries to read his newspaper while a kid dances to his Walkman and a man in high heels grimaces behind his camcorder urged on by Mickey Mouse. Everybody is tangled in wires ending in microphones and telephones leading to the central figure. It is a computer with sexy legs whose monitor shows the face of a Marilyn Monroe-style blond. The piece is titled “mixed media.” It says that everybody including fine artists have succumbed to the seductions of the collectivist electronic media.

In the Pop era, fine artists celebrated graphic design. Graphic artists responded gleefully by imitating innovations introduced by the fine artists. Fine artists then imitated themselves being imitated by the media until the whole thing turned into one vast cultural copying machine copying itself.

In such an ambience, it’s tough to maintain lithography’s status as a fine arts media. It looks too much like reproduction. This blurring of the boundary between art and graphics created a serious identity pickle for a certain stripe of individual artist.

Images like those by Gerd Winner and Cinda Sparling may have their roots in Cubism, but today they look like stills swiped from polite computer-generated graphics seen on PBS. A German neo-Expressionist like Jorg Immendorff may have rescued something important from the ash heap of history in reviving a style of itchy drawing, but today’s audience feels as if they’ve already seen it on MTV or “Beavis and Butt-head.” There is a tendency to be disappointed in this art because it doesn’t move.

There are few ways out of this impasse. Artists can continue to cling to the idea that they are different by staying inside their subculture, working in traditional media like paint and bronze and cultivating wealthy collectors.

Sometime just copping an attitude does the trick. Malte Sartorius’ still-life of a basket of onions does it, so does Leonard Lehrer’s view of a formal garden at night. These guys are so frankly out of it with their dreamy realism they positively invite the anonymity of the true romantic individualist.

Anybody who wants to fit in has to deal with reality. The Cold War Era and the civilization that went with it are guttering out. A new kind of art has to come of Neo-collectivism, just as one came out of post-World War II culture.

The new signal is clear. You can be an outlaw graffiti writer, or you can take your portfolio to an art director who will put you on a team to make multimedia music videos or animated musicals seen by millions. They won’t know your name but, hey, who knows who built the Gothic cathedrals?

* USC, Fisher Gallery, 832 Exposition Blvd., (213) 740-4561. Closed Sunday and Monday. Ends Oct. 22.