ART REVIEWS : ‘Boots’ Postcard Series Gets Across Message

It’s always somewhat poignant to see Conceptual art entombed in a gallery--a conventional move guaranteed to subvert its subversiveness. More than two decades after the fact, Eleanor Antin’s wonderful postcard novella of 1971-73, “100 Boots,” can be seen at Craig Krull Gallery, surrounded by documentary material testifying to its historical significance. If its radical nature is inevitably compromised by this historicizing exercise, its humor is not.

“100 Boots” consists of 51 postcards distributed through the mail over the course of two years, to more than 1,000 artists, writers, galleries and so on. The images on the cards depict the everyday travails and fantastic misadventures of a fiercely loyal band of boots.

Antin thought of these images as a kind of picaresque novel. Indeed, they spin out a pictorial narrative that rails against the period’s dominant aesthetic of Modernist abstraction. What’s interesting in retrospect is the wicked prescience of some of the individual images--among them a shot of the boots mounting a hill that resembles some of the photo-documentation of Christo’s 1972-76 “Running Fence,” a brand of Conceptual art decidedly more grandiloquent than Antin’s epistolary drollery.

Certainly the best image, however, is the very first one, a shot of the boots all lined up in a neat row, facing the vast, unknown sea. Here is a poke at Minimalism’s geometric rigidity and, more subtly, at Caspar David Friedrich’s unforgettable image of a monk transfixed by the sublimity of nature. This time, the artist-surrogate is 100 rather clumsy lumps of black rubber, as romantic as it gets in the post-industrial era.

One of the famous boots is on view here, along with the original mailing list, preparatory drawings and scrapbooks filled with responses sent to Antin by the recipients, many of which are themselves Fluxus-like gems. This is quite an important show, for it fills out our understanding of this project and provides a context in which to understand Antin’s later work, whose eccentricity and performative aspects have been pivotal for a growing number of younger artists.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through May 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Literary Music: David McDonald’s art conjures what Milan Kundera has called “the unbearable lightness of being.” There is something literary in “Trace,” his show at Dan Bernier Gallery. In fact, McDonald’s attractive and very fragile works are much closer to musical compositions, especially in terms of their rhythmic variations upon particular themes.

McDonald pursues many of the gambits availed by Postminimal aesthetics: repetition and variation, craft and handiwork, ephemerality as ruling principle. Each piece, composed of several discrete forms that relate closely to one another, is a series in microcosm.

The standard element is a delicate basswood frame, with a sheet of semi-transparent Duralene stretched around it. This might be large or small; it might or might not have a small piece of tracing paper laid on top of it, affixed with tiny strips of masking tape or invisible glue; the tracing paper might or might not be covered with a layer of wax; it might be enlivened with very fine, oil-stick markings--or not. The other elements of the series, hung alongside, above or beneath this image/object, improvise within its parameters.

One of the more interesting aspects of McDonald’s work is its fascination with the moment in which the transparent becomes the opaque. One piece explores the way in which layers of scotch tape and tracing paper conceal what lies beneath; another, the way in which small fragments of white cloth seem to expose their wooden supports.

These are admittedly unassuming conceits. Yet, when the artist goes for something more substantial the careful balance McDonald sets up is thrown out of whack. The pictorial nature of the work militates against the introduction of sculptural issues like mass, volume and space.

This kind of miscalculation suggests that the artist is still somewhat tentative about his strengths. He need not be. His work is compelling when it eschews the matter-of-fact realities of the object and addresses the everyday deceptions of the image.

* Dan Bernier Gallery, 3026 1/2 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4882, through April 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.