ART REVIEW : ‘Still Working’ Shows Firm Direction of Senior Artists

“Still Working,” at USC, includes 32 American artists from age 60 to ninetysome-thing. All are still doing their thing with the exception of a couple who died during the course of organizing the show. At least one of them writes in the catalogue that he’s a little annoyed that anyone should find this artistic persistence remarkable. He’s right. There is no reason outside infirmity why an old person shouldn’t be as creative in anything from love to art as when they were 20. Now, with any luck at all, they know who they are and what they’re doing.

A slight aura of condescension and dabbling in fashionable identity politics hovers about the show. This is considerably mitigated by its fundamental good intentions. It wants to do its bit to undermine undeserved negative social stereotypes pasted on the old. If that seems like tilting at windmills, that’s no reason not to try. The millennium, after all, is coming.

History teaches that artists of the caliber of Goya, Monet, Matisse and Picasso did great work when the snow was on their shoulders. To keep matters straight, however, it’s important to remember that, for example, Monet changed the history of art twice. The first time he was a brash young Postimpressionist, the second, a man in his 80s who’d spent years painting his famous Giverny gardens again and again like a monk chanting a mantra. Nobody should think that an old guy is just a teen-ager running around in a beat-up body. Even if he thinks he is, the creativity of life’s dawns and dusks are formed by markedly different sets of awareness.

One of these, reflected in the exhibition, is age’s mounting conviction that what you think of yourself is far more important than the opinion of others. There may be artists here who would believe that this exhibition is the big break that will make them famous, but it doesn’t look like that.

The work is uniformly sound but serenely indifferent to fashion. It looks like art made by people who’ve learned a hard lesson. To wit: about the only thing tougher than making good art is the rigmarole and politics of establishing and maintaining an art career.

California artists on hand include Frederick Hammersley, Claire Falkenstein, Jack Zajac and the late Hans Burkhardt. In the decade following World War II, each was considered an artist to be reckoned with. Any responsible history of the period would have to include them. Yet in an art sphere that rolls over with the nitwit ease of a fashion magazine, they are all but forgotten. From the looks of their work this is less an occasion for regret than one of admiration for mature decision. They seem to have concluded that their job is to make art and leave history to sort it out, if at all, later.

The ensemble is generally informed with a wonderful sense of rapt engagement in the-thing-itself. Among sculptors, Mel Katz and Charles McGee look as hip as hip-hop. Morton C. Bradley Jr. makes colorful spatial constructions with the delight of a kid building a delicate model airplane of balsa-wood struts. David Slivka works in New York but his “Mangrove” has all the drawled down-home funky wit of the outback.

Among painters Guy Anderson continues to practice a Soyer-brothers style of realism that’s been out of style most of his life. In a self-portrait with mannequins he looks like, “Well, so sue me, this is what I do.”

Figurative Expressionism has votaries like Miriam Beerman and John Serl. A deadpan like Michele Russo stands out with a faux-naif work where Sacco and Vanzetti are depicted as a pair of hats.

Abstract painting is as various as Edward Dugmore’s Spanish-style abstract Expressionism or Oli Sihvonen’s distillation of Stuart Davis’ hard-edge abstraction. Nobody makes much of an effort to hide their generational roots.

Stella Waitzkin unabashedly tills the much-plowed field of assemblage to telling effect. Her “Details of a Lost Library” depicts a weathered shelf full of books and fragments of sculpture. All are rendered in plastics made to look like slightly melted wax. Title and context suggest reading it as a rumination on a loss of memory as in Alzheimer’s disease. It seems to say that art made in old age may still ooze with vitality but there’s no getting around it, it’s different.

The exhibition was organized by Stuart Shedletsky for New York’s Parsons School of Design.

* USC, Fisher Gallery, 823 Exposition Blvd.; through Nov. 16, closed Sunday and Monday, (213) 740-4561.