ART REVIEW : Scrutinizing the Creativity of Joan Tanner

Today one scavenges the deteriorating edifice of Modernism for individual artists who can enliven existing forms by acts of personal originality. The work of one such is surveyed in “Close Scrutiny: The Art of Joan Tanner” at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum.

Tanner is 60-ish, has rarely shown outside Southern California, but is something of a local hero. The exhibition, organized by gallery director Nancy Doll, contains some 30 works, most very recent, a few going back to the ‘60s.

Tanner fashions tableaux of materials that in her hands seem odd, even though they are commonplace--apples, lint, half-melted gum balls, piles of fig cookies. She uses stuff familiar to art whose purpose is to evoke nostalgia and regret--vintage snapshots and infant’s toys.

There is masked autobiography here, couched in a visual language that is relatively minimal. Tanner is fond of elemental shapes, like the vortex doodle that stands for the maelstrom, the twisted loop that means infinity and the Platonic solids, sphere, cone and cube. The work isn’t so much literary as it is organic. It communicates in sensations like fuzziness, stickiness and rottenness. Forced to put a tag on it, one could do worse than Primal Dada.

The show includes sets of photographs and two videotapes Tanner made in collaboration with photographer Wayne McCall. One tape shows the artist’s hands manipulating various small objects. She covers a hole in a ball with clay. She stuffs a tube with fabric. Visceral sensations are communicated. They suggest everything from a woman doing woman’s traditional work to sexual ruminations or fantasies of playing God creating the universe.

The basic formats holding her accumulations are important. In “Glass Vessel Tableaux,” objects are placed on a metal-clad table and contained in transparent vials suggesting an alchemical experiment. In “Trestle,” a metal trough is suspended across wooden supports suggesting an unreliable bridge. The trough is filled with apples that have been fetishized--pierced with myriad tiny nails or pins. The fruits are so wizened they look like fossils.

The biblical apple was the serpent’s vehicle to seduce Eve into seducing Adam into original sin. Opinions vary as to the nature of that sin. Whatever it was, in Tanner’s cosmology it was traumatic. Everything here looks as if it were made after something dreadful occurred. Was the victim the artist or the universe?

“Vanity” suggests a dressing table. The mirror is just a rectangle of aluminum with an awkward landscape scrawled upon it. Where cosmetics should be, there is dead cactus. An open overnight case contains not pretty things but plastic bags of lint.

The most persistent theme here is creativity itself. There is special meaning to that when the artist is a woman. Does she make babies, poetry or both? Are they really the same? Is it all meaningful or all futile?

Tanner’s work obliquely suggests the poetry of Sylvia Plath. There’s a similar talent for making one’s expressive vehicle more eloquent than most can manage.

* Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, 653 Paseo Nuevo, second floor, Chapala and De La Guerra streets, through Aug. 12, (805) 966-5373.