The Decadent Decor of Pittman’s ‘Drawings’

After World War II, Los Angeles became the mecca and seedbed for a new youth culture. Its art, from the Beach Boys to the Finish Fetish, celebrated the idea of eternal adolescence.

Like surfers and hippies, another subculture already stereotyped with the pursuit of sybaritic pleasure was the one that labeled itself “gay.” The sobriquet always carried a freight of mordant irony. Back then, homosexuality was illegal. Today the climate is far more tolerant, but the onslaught of AIDS has brought a new tragic factor to the gay community. The only possible good to emerge from this lethal epidemic was an enhanced appreciation of the homosexual contribution to art and culture.

These considerations are central to the understanding of the art of Lari Pittman. He’s a native Angeleno now in his mid-40s who will be anointed in June with a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He’s built an international reputation as a member of a generation of California Institute of the Arts graduates that also includes Eric Fischl and David Salle. They revolted against a prevailing scholastic climate, where Conceptualism was considered king and painting dead. As a kind of curtain-raiser, UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center is presenting “Lari Pittman Drawings,” in collaboration with the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. Pittman teaches at UCLA.

The show consists of about 50 works. Both images and catalog raise puzzling questions. The title provides an initial clue. These are not drawings; Pittman just chooses to call them that. They’re works on paper in various media. They share a technical problem generic to some print media--a kind of inert, boring surface. Pittman seems to attempt to enliven the work by making it so busy it comes to look like a kind of apocalyptic wallpaper.

Writing in the catalog, curator Elizabeth A. Brown of UC Santa Barbara’s University Art Museum, who organized the show, confirms that the artist is openly gay, adding that he is authentically multicultural since his father is white and his mother Colombian. She also reveals that in 1985 he was shot twice in the abdomen by a nighttime intruder and spent five weeks in the hospital. In the meantime, his older brother died suddenly of a burst aorta.

Not long ago, the introduction of such intensely autobiographical information would have been avoided in a scholarly catalog. Maybe its appearance simply signals the superior frankness of a new generation. But this information runs the risk of coming across as special pleading to create sympathy for an art that is otherwise lacking.

The survey samples Pittman’s work since the early ‘80s. As time progresses, it takes on an ever more impacted design, until it becomes virtually an overall pattern. His expressive themes and artistic sources are initially difficult to divine. Gradually one sees his abstract shapes are most closely related to the Catalan biomorphic surrealist Joan Miro, although there are echoes of everyone from Klee and Kandinsky to the Abstract Expressionists.

His imagery bounces around like a pinball machine until it sorts itself into two genres. One consists of Liberace-style decorative motifs ranging from candelabra to antebellum silhouette figures, fancy calligraphic tropes and ever greater uses of motifs like hermaphroditic cookie-cutter dancers and the number 69. This is gay camp humor so fey that if a straight artist used it, it might be taken as offensive. Pittman swings between such matter and images of guts, anuses, vortexes and other signifiers of confusion, chaos and obsession.

One needn’t be gay to empathize with Pittman’s trauma or the wistfulness and uncertainty it can bring. One work includes the lettered wail, “When will I feel whole?” Another asks, “How do I find meaning?” A series whose motif is a fantasy schooner with silken sails dreams of utopian places in titles like “Where the Expression of Love Will Be Encouraged.”

Sometime in early pubescence we all felt like that. Sometime in our lives we’ve all been victimized. Sometime we all have had to say, “Well, OK, that was tough,” and get on with it. We realize the California dream of a Peter Pan life is unsustainable and we grow up.

It may not be asking too much to accord tolerance to an artist of Pittman’s gifts while he works through an awful patch. But in the end, art is not made out of therapeutic exercise, endless self-contradiction, sentimentality or cliches. It’s made out of insight.

* UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., through March 10. Closed Mondays. Information: (310) 443-7020.