Riding Tradition’s Currents to a Higher ‘Consciousness’

Abstract painting, whether gestural or geometric, is frequently seen to embody a personal response to landscape--either the external landscape of the world or an internal landscape of private experience. From the birth of Modern abstract painting more than 80 years ago, the internalization of landscape has been a standard modus operandi.

Monique Prieto’s wonderful abstract paintings in “Stream of Consciousness: Eight Los Angeles Artists,” an engaging exhibition newly opened at UC Santa Barbara’s University Art Museum, demonstrate a certain allegiance to this established tradition--albeit with a twist. Composed from big, gentle, organic shapes of flat color--cushy shapes that pile softly atop and against one another across the surface of the raw canvas--they unabashedly evoke Color-field paintings of the 1960s.

Even the name, Color-field, suggests an equivalence to nature’s landscape. Yet, when looking at Prieto’s work it’s the historical art of Color-field painting, not the artless landscape of actual nature, that comes immediately to mind.

Consider the long, skinny, razor-sharp lines that extend at odd and contradictory angles from her seemingly organic blobs of smooth color. Visually, these lines read as drips of paint; but, in the manner of sensory probes sent out by some artificial intelligence, they are less like drips responding to the pull of gravity and more like the organized rendering produced by a child’s Etch-a-Sketch toy. Prieto’s abstract paintings speak of the internalization of landscape, all right; but it’s the landscape of culture, not nature, that is at issue.

So it is with the ambitious paintings of Steven Criqui, which are not abstract. Conventions of Old Master painting seem to have been run through a computer program before being cleanly assembled with slick, sexy colors on hard, alert surfaces of wood. Wittily, Criqui’s landscapes and still-lifes are mounted on top of their picture frames, reversing the usual custom in which the frame protrudes as a seductive device to gently mediate between the natural world and the artifice of art.

Todd Gray’s big black-and-white photographic banners, the largest more than 7 feet tall, are heavily varnished and bolted to the wall with industrial steel plates, thus employing formal means to emphatically deny any claim to photographic naturalism. They also show looming, shadowy, demonic figures of Snow White, Scrooge McDuck, Goofy and other animated characters, as if these insubstantial celluloid images lurk as monstrous phantoms in some collective cultural nightmare.

Photography, along with other modes of mechanical or electronic image-production, recurs throughout the show--often pointedly counter-posed to traditions that value direct evidence of the artist’s hand. Amy Adler’s grouped displays of creepy photographs don’t show gangly children in typical poses of play; instead, the photographs show pencil drawings of gangly children. The camera is inserted as a distancing device, which suddenly reveals the drawings’ “typical” poses to be studied and poignantly unnatural.

Dave Muller makes startlingly peculiar posters and announcements that copy advertisements for gallery and museum exhibitions, occasionally featuring other artists in the show. Rather than mechanically printed, though, each poster is a unique, hand-made drawing in pencil and ink.

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One poster shows the famous furniture designs of architect Eero Saarinen, designs that wedded organic form to machine production. Muller’s poster turns the tables, endowing organic production (a hand rendering) with machine form (a mass-produced image).

Muller’s work recalls the anxiety-driven cliquishness of adolescence, in which hand-made posters are produced to advertise the class play. But his art also slyly reverses the common modern polarity between ad and exhibition, deftly placing as much value on the agency of distribution as on the works of art that get funneled through it.

Sometimes these kinds of reversals are more simplistic and studied. Frances Stark’s carbon-paper drawings pointedly use an outdated medium of reproduction--who uses carbon paper for duplication purposes anymore?--with which she hand-copies such texts as Herman Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” or Emily Dickinson’s poetry. And Joe Mama-Nitzburg’s photo self-portraits show him sporting the pop-music stage-drag once worn by Boy George, while holding up reproductions of Barnett Newman’s painting “Onement,” the famous abstract meditation on the spiritual paradox of wholeness and division.

Both are dull academic contrivances (they practically feature footnote references to popular critical theories of the day), which wither in comparison to the vivid source material on which they so heavily depend. In the transformation into esoterica, they diminish the vernacular, democratic potential of their sources.

“Stream of Consciousness” was organized by the museum’s curator, Elizabeth A. Brown, and comes with an appropriately thrifty catalog, produced in the style of a do-it-yourself Kinko’s copy-center job. The title suggests artistic potential in a dreamy disengagement of focus--an internalized landscape of sun-dappled streams of consciousness. Nowhere is that idea more trenchant than in Jeff Burton’s luscious color photographs.

In one, naked limbs and body parts of assorted men and women are dispersed at the picture’s peripheries, while the camera’s angle of vision centers on the unassuming edge of an innocuous outdoor Jacuzzi. It’s as if the artist’s mind has wandered, leaving behind an ostensibly exciting sensual extravaganza to marvel at the surprisingly gorgeous blueness of chlorinated water, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye but nonetheless capable of holding attention.

Burton smartly plays against the steadily accelerating clamor for center stage that describes a landscape created, processed and sold by mass culture. His work, like that of Prieto, Criqui and a few others in the show, manages to create a small clearing in the dark and densely tangled underbrush.

These eight L.A.-based artists extend artistic traditions established by such notable predecessors as Mike Kelley, Sherrie Levine, Stephen Prina and Al Ruppersberg. In fact, the show exudes a distinct generational feel.

Burton’s interest in photographing “in-between-ness” might help explain it. For his is an in-between generation.

Almost all the artists received advanced degrees from art school between 1989 and 1995. That means their youthful entry into artistic consciousness came during the media-savvy art boom of the early 1980s--a cultural period of unprecedented weirdness. But their adult entry into the ranks of working artists came at (or just after) the moment the boom went bust. In many of this show’s streams of consciousness, free-floating dyspepsia is an inescapable undercurrent.

* University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara, (805) 893-2951, through Nov. 10. Closed Mondays.