Shark and Octopus: Metaphors for Experience

To Laurel Beckman, art can be experienced many ways: “By seeing or feeling it,” the Los Angeles artist says, “or by reading about it or buying it.”

Is one way superior to another? Beckman leaves that up to the viewer but explores the question with a site-specific installation at Huntington Beach Art Center that also delves into such issues as social hierarchies and pacifism versus aggression.

“Bloody Entrances and Inky Exits,” a visually simple work that belies complex ideas underlying it, is on view Saturday through Sept. 1.

“You might think that being in front of a work is superior to getting an understanding of it through [written] criticism, or vise versa,” Beckman says. “I’m not saying either is better; I’m just trying to [present] those positions.”

The fragmented installation consists of three inkblot-like shapes painted on the center’s floor-to-ceiling front windows. The central red figure looks like it was produced by lobbing a paint-filled balloon at the window: a big splat, with dribbles heading south. It’s flanked by symmetrical purple shapes resembling Christmas trees in silhouette.

Beckman has hung in the center store’s doorway glinty red and purple plastic beads that serve two purposes: Viewers can literally feel the artist’s work as they enter or exit by parting the bangles, which, by their strategic placement at the store’s entrance, allude to the purchase of art.

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Finally, small cards (in a bowl by the store) containing disjointed, poetic text and photographic images and Beckman’s explanatory brochure let viewers experience the work through the written word.

Half the cards depict a blood-red shark, Beckman’s symbol of the act of possession that occurs when one visually “takes in” an artwork or buys it, the artist said. The rather abstruse text on the cards reads: “The promise of complete adoration. Up close and ultra personal; a violent, sweet possession.”

The concept of possession or embodiment--likewise symbolized by a shark’s ability to literally “take over” living things by violently devouring them--is really what the installation’s all about, said Beckman, who also works in graphics and computer-generated media and publishes an avant-garde magazine.

“If there’s anything at the bottom of all this, it has to be the shift or movement between embodiment and non-embodiment,” she said in a recent phone interview from her home. “I’d consider a physical experience, like looking at art, an embodied experience.”

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“Non-embodiment” occurs when one reads text contained in a work or reads about a work, Beckman said. That concept is symbolized by an octopus, depicted on the remaining cards in purple--as in the color of its own ink and printing ink.

Octopuses, she said, remove themselves from danger by escape, by ejecting ink that clouds pursuers’ view.

“I’m drawing a direct parallel between reading or writing about work and a kind of exit or escape or direction away from the work. You are more removed from a work by reading or writing about it than you are by looking at it.”

Taking in art in this non-embodied way, Beckman added, is more spiritual, because the experience is “not so restricted by the physical world.”

“I’m not fixated on these animals,” she said. “I have affection for them, but mainly they are amazing analogies for how we think about how we operate: either in a dog-eat-dog, hierarchical situation [like a shark], or like an octopus, which has a nonviolent way of surviving.

“Focusing on either extreme--shark-equals-violent-equals-bad, versus octopus-equals-escape-equals-good--leads to a structure in our professional and personal lives where we think only one person can be on top,” she said. “I’m suggesting a win-win dynamic where either way of functioning works. I can’t stand the dynamic where people think somebody has got to win, that somehow someone is better.”

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Did a particular personal battle prompt this sentiment?

“No, I’ve done fine,” said the artist, who teaches studio art at UC Santa Barbara. “But I think people get really fearful because there’s an assumption that in our work as artists and teachers and writers, someone’s going to get the gravy--and that can only be one person--or that there’s a pecking order, and I don’t like that.”

Beckman would like viewers to literally take something away from her installation, however: the blood-red shark and inky octopus cards.

“I don’t want them to just look and leave,” said the 1976 graduate of California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita. “I want to give them something because I was weaned on early-1970s art-making, a second-generation conceptualism that was more democratic. The idea was that art should have an everyday quality and be available to people, literally. That appealed to me a lot.”

* “Bloody Entrances and Inky Exits,” an installation by Laurel Beckman, opens Saturday and runs through Sept. 1 at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St. Gallery hours: Tuesday-Wednesday, noon-6 p.m.; Thursday, noon-8 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, noon-9 p.m.; Sunday, noon-4 p.m. $2-$3. (714) 374-1650.