ART REVIEW : ‘Plane/Structures’ at Otis: Enriching Work

Art these days feels like an endangered species. The market boom of the ‘80s made it appear important and fashionable. Economic stagnation suffocated enthusiasm, aided and abetted by art grown so thin and preachy as to be virtually indistinguishable from the media. Even L.A.’s great quake contributed to the dirty work, causing collectors to shun art in fragile materials.

The single hope that lay shining in all this rubble was that art would hunker down and--forgetting careers, cash and glitz--once again pursue the muse for its own sake. A new, bracingly important exhibition of abstract art at the gallery of Otis School of Art and Design proves not only that this is happening, but has been happening.

Titled “Plane/Structures,” it includes a couple of works each by 16 L.A. artists and was sponsored by the free-floating support group, the Fellows of Contemporary Art. They have done outstanding work filling important recognition gaps around here since 1976, but they’ve never chosen better than in backing this show.

The show is the brainchild of critic David Pagel. Since he is a regular contributor to The Times and since what follows will be enthusiastic, I feel obliged to point out that we are not personally acquainted.

He has not made an exhibition the casual browser will warm to. He has made an exhibition so smart, dense and resonant as to rewrite conventional wisdom about the nature of L.A. art. His visual evidence is compelling, as is his catalogue essay and those by Dave Hickey and Joe Scanlan.

Los Angeles is reputed to be a brainless bird with no sense of history. According to its lore, all its best Cold War-era art was made around the ‘60s, nothing of great significance has been done since and few if any of the artists to emerge subsequently carried on the key ideas of the Ur-masters.

Pagel proves this is nonsense. The great admired master of the ‘60s generation was Marcel Duchamp, revered for his sidewinder conceptual thinking and mordant sense of fun. His spirit is everywhere in “Plane/Structures.” His cryptic ready-mades echo in Liz Larner’s steel-chain work “Wrapped Corner” and Jonathan White’s pieces involving glass resonators.

Most of this work is severely minimal and conceptual, but this is formalism with an attitude. James Hayward’s black paintings combine L.A. sensualism with Ad Reinhardt’s message that this is tough stuff. All of it has the amused strength of sheer hiccupy hopelessness. There is a collective murmur that says, “Well, nobody is going to like or reward this work, much less get it, so I might just as well go the hell ahead and make it the way I want it.”

Pae White makes a plexiglass slab in naughty translucent chrome yellow, blots it up with solvent, lays it on the floor and calls it, “The Inconsolable Wailing of the Damned.” Take that.

The indispensable master of L.A.’s classic hard-edge painting was John McLaughlin. His stripped-down monochrome canvases are wonderful exercises in perceptual rigor, but they are more.

They combine European philosophical dynamism with Japanese Zen contemplation. They set the stage for an L.A. art that would find its originality through hybridization. These artists have a lot more history to throw in their blenders. John Miller, for example, seems to add optical and perceptual styles to McLaughlin’s minimalism.

Caren Furbeyre’s pink liquid column “Crystal Eyes” brings Peter Alexander’s lyrical brand of macho Finish Fetish art--that well-known form of ‘60s art whose practitioners were obsessed with perfection of surface, like hot-rod painters--into the era of feminism. Mary Corse’s “Black Light Painting” lends metaphysical mystery to the purity of Light and Space art. Linda Hudson cross-fertilizes Ed Moses’ funk with Robert Irwin’s Apollonian invisibility and makes intimacy out of them. James Richards’ twine paintings add a note of thrift-shop crafts to urbanity.

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If this art were classical music, it would be by Alexander Scriabin or Erik Satie. It has their quality of high intelligence being willfully eccentric and minor. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s unstretched abstractions with their frames of pushpins combine extreme refinement with a sense of the primitive.

If this art were popular music, it would be the blues. For one thing, a number of the artists are attracted to deep cobalt. Scot Heywood uses it in a rectangular painting that becomes both weightless and sculptural simply by being hung tilted. Carolee Toon’s “Blue Pocket, Reserve Blues” uses this compelling hue’s capacity to be at once absent and present to create a sense of nuance in a solid field. Maxwell Hendler’s “Film Noir” polishes it to a reflective surface like a deep azure pool. He brings the same L.A. love of surface to it as to his early Magic Realist paintings.

The spirit of John McCracken’s sculpture is omnipresent behind all this. Once considered an isolated master of classicized Finish Fetish art, he has clearly been a major influence.

These days, of course, the computer must be reckoned with. Most artists regard the thing as anathema. Here, certain of them have clearly been inspired by the capacity of its logic and precision to almost invisibly create magic. At a distance Fandra Chang’s “Bit Fall” looks like a series of green vertical stripes rendered in translucent acrylic. Up close it reveals itself as a screen with openings of pixel-small proportion. Roy Thurston’s untitled diptych of small deep-rose squares ripples inexplicably to the eye until close examination shows it is a relief of vertical slots of nearly microscopic smallness.

In style these artists are the clear inheritors of the L.A. aesthetic. In temperament they have the feel of the French post-Post Impressionists, the Nabis. They share the curious toughness of Bonnard and Vuillard in continuing to make beautifully crafted, witty, wistful, sophisticated art knowing that they are at the end of the line.

* Otis Gallery, Otis School of Art and Design, 2401 Wilshire Blvd.; to Nov. 8, closed Sunday and Monday, (213) 251-0555.