ART REVIEW : Enjoyable, Endearing Paean to ‘Romance’

It’s rare to run across a contemporary art exhibition where every single piece is endearing. Enigmatic, subversive, esoteric and challenging we are used to but, lovable ? All the same, each of the 30 artists represented in the current show at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design sends you home humming.

It may have something to do with the sentimental season that is upon us. It certainly has to do with the exhibition’s theme. It’s called “Romance.” Ah, that borderless, bottomless miasma of bliss. Nobody knows if it’s real or just a cotton-candy myth disguising a biological drive. Everybody knows how great it feels when it happens and how bad it hurts when it stops.

A large part of the fun of this show comes from empathizing with the various postures assumed to deal with the romantic urge in a decidedly unromantic time. The lyric tends to the bittersweet--more like the hard-boiled 1930s of Rodgers and Hart than the sentimental 1950s of Rodgers and Hammerstein. But the show proves mainly that the varieties of the romantic urge are not bound by time.

Wendy Adest’s “Eros” is a violin bow with a barbed shaft, serrated steel arrowhead and wax flowers for feathers. There’s a fetish-like twist to much of the work suggesting the degree to which romance is seen as healing magic and deadly curse. The piece is at once primitive and Victorian. There’s some of that in Jill Giegerich’s juxtaposition of candelabra and sandpaper.

The romantic symbolism of violins gets into Millie Wilson’s “Easel/Mirror.” The mirror is etched with a tale of a flying violin that extends the theme beyond infatuation into a darkly romantic view recalling Edgar Allan Poe.

For some people romance is a species of fetishization of types. Deborah Small introduces this notion in “Our Bodices, Ourselves.” It consists of a wall of deliciously lurid covers and quotes from pulp fiction novels devoted to heroines obsessed with strong, silent “half-breed” heroes who are reciprocally gaga over buxom blondes.

Then there are those whose romantic mania fixes on a particular individual. Often these days the adored object is a public icon worshiped from afar. Maria Lafia’s piece consists of about 1,000 child-like love letters addressed to artist Mike Kelley. Displayed on the floor under a sheet of plastic, the viewer is invited to walk on them, just as the artist is invited, figuratively, to walk on her.

Occasionally partners in a romance actually know one another personally. Or think they do. Working together, Laura Cooper and Nick Taggart produced a Polaroid of her, still asleep, every morning so far this year. They have that wonderful quality of watching one’s lover looking innocent and almost immortal.

When young, we all wonder what attitude we should cop to both find romance and protect ourselves in the clinches. Alexis Smith’s “Blue Denim” evokes the tough-tomboy posture of the ‘50s when everybody with any class was a juvenile delinquent. It’s a collage of trashy graphics like the paperback cover for “High School Confidential.” The piece is festooned with telling bits like a toddler’s saddle shoe and a license plate that says “JOY.” Best of all is a set of those jumper cables used to get a charge from somebody else’s battery.

Artists like Joseph Kosuth and John Souza try to get some intellectual distance on the subject with the usual humorous result. Dan McCleary and Robin Palanker each notice that kissing couples resemble animals devouring one another. Ed Ruscha, Joann Callis and Nancy Reese just surrender to the feeling.

We owe one to guest curator Irit Krygier for concocting this witty and affectionate proof that romance is alive in the nasty ‘90s.

* Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St. Pasadena, through Feb. 5, closed Mondays and holidays, (818) 396-2244.