Living Large

It’s almost always better to aim high and fail than to keep your goal narrow in the hope of making no mistakes. With respect to “Wrestling With the Sublime: Contemporary German Art in Southern California”--at the Main Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton, through Dec. 12--the art itself is so big, in concept and, sometimes, in size as well, that it seems to beg for pull-out-all-the-stops treatment.

Graduate student curators Linda Centell and Ewa Kirsch have chosen a worthy group of artists rarely seen in Orange County, located good-quality examples of their work and hooked them to a huge theme developed by 18th century German philosophers:

In the presence of certain massively forceful natural phenomena, humans were believed to experience morally revelatory feelings of terror and awe--”the sublime.” The quintessential paintings of the sublime were Caspar David Friedrich’s early 19th century images of tiny figures turning their backs on the viewer to stare at wondrous landscapes.

Despite stylistic shifts in art forms, this somber Romanticism persisted in the work of the German Expressionist painters of the early 20th century. After World War II, another wave of notable German artists deliberately invoked the inverse of the sublime.

By alluding in their work to humanly mandated (as opposed to natural) death and destruction, these artists aimed to purify society or to locate for themselves and for their countrymen a ground zero from which to move on.

The Cal State Fullerton exhibition includes utopian Postmodernist Joseph Beuys and several of the well-known Neo-Expressionist painters who came to prominence in the ‘80s (Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, A.R. Penck, Markus Lupertz) as well as artists in their 30s who, for the most part, turn away from painting, overt expressivity and any hint of sublimity.

In Beuys’ short video, “Vitex Agnus Castus,” he assumes his familiar shamanistic role. Lying on his stomach, wearing his trademark felt hat, he repeatedly rubs the fingers of one hand over the edges of a pile of copper sheets.

The erotic overtones of this gesture deepen as we watch. Trained as a radio operator, he often employed materials that carry current in his art. In the video, he implicitly links copper’s role as a conduit to the transmission of sexual energy, transforming a purely physical property into the equivalent of a vehicle for human warmth. This was Beuys’ way of substituting his purifying mysticism for Hitler’s warped variety (the Third Reich embraced a crackpot idea that ice was the key element of the universe).

In Kiefer’s didactic “Wege” (Way)--a huge canvas crowded with portrait heads--the purifying path leads back to pillars of Germany’s cultural history. (Too bad the curators couldn’t have corralled a visually sublime piece by this master of magisterial effects.)

Baselitz took the opposite approach, rejecting his countrymen’s weighty history of profundity for overt banality. His upside-down images were serious but ultimately unconvincing attempts to remove literary content from his work (in “Adler,” an eagle, symbol of imperial Germany, does a cartoon-like free fall).

Penck looks backward in a stylistic sense; his energized, quasi-primitive ideographs cut across epochs and continents to evoke a wildly disjunctive alternate world. In his etching “A Taste for the Desert,” biblical shepherds and saviors coexist with a rifle-toting stick figure and the head of Uncle Sam.

Lupertz emphasizes the lumpen state of the things. In his bronze sculpture “Ganymede,” the youthful male beauty of Greek myth becomes a rough-textured, asexual figure holding a dead rooster--a poor substitute for the eagle on which he once flew to Zeus.

Roger Herman’s paintings remake familiar sights--a multistory building, an empty auditorium--into powerfully abstracted essences. The gray-and-white building is all sharp angles, as if seen in intense sunlight; the black outlines of the seats are partially swallowed up by the insistent yellowness of the auditorium.

With all due respect to the Neo-Expressionists, however, it is the younger group who seem the most vital today. They are a diverse lot, working mainly in photography and installation. In their hands, “the sublime” may become simply the flip side of “the ordinary” or the result of a stubborn search for content where most would see only nothingness.

Andreas Gursky seemingly comes the closest to the traditional view of sublimity in his manipulated photograph, “Schnorchler, Rias Bajas” (Snorkeler, Rias Bajas). All the figures in this beach scene are dwarfed by an immense landscape. And yet the aesthetic in which he works is deadpan and secular, not emotional and spiritual in the “sublime” tradition.

In a similar vein, Thomas Ruff’s huge, somewhat blurry photograph of a portion of the night sky (“Stars”) testifies bluntly--yet with a peculiar beauty of its own--to the limitations of human vision.

Torsten Haake-Brandt’s piece seems to belong in this show only by virtue of its ironic view of the little guy caught in the maelstrom of a pitiless contemporary economy. “1991-1996” consists of a five-year parade of rejection letters he received from businesses and institutions in far-flung locations and multiple sheets of virtually identical ballpoint-pen doodles--a form of idle “industry” in which he became a master.

Often something is obviously missing from these works--something that may also be missing from our lives. Katharina Fritsch’s records are displayed in color-keyed jackets labeled in German with their titles: “Muhle/Krankenwagen/Unken” (“Mill/Ambulance/Toads”). The ease of imagining the sounds of these things seems related to our widespread familiarity with urban emergency and fainter awareness of rural life.

Two of the photographers attend to things normally considered peripheral. Uta Barth’s soft image of a patch of light in a corner of a room reaffirms a lush retinal experience normally ignored or discounted. Isabell Heimerdinger’s bland yet uncomfortably empty interior views (movie sets minus their characters) underline the degree to which they mutely accommodate the action.

Work based on the value of peripheral vision is not brand new to contemporary German art; for more than a decade, Gerhard Richter has invoked this way of seeing in his fuzzily painted works based on photographs, which might have been more to the point for this show. Instead, he is represented by an untitled work in which layers of paint evoke both mechanically applied and hand-brushed color.

The art in the show was drawn from Southern California collections, and four of the artists (Barth, Herman, Weirich and Heimerdinger) live in Los Angeles. But somehow that wasn’t enough of a connection for the curators, who insist (in a catalog essay) on looking for parallels between Los Angeles and Germany.

Perhaps more able writers could have drawn connections between a city that lives in a constant present, obliterating its past, and a country that went through a long period of silently ignoring its shameful past. But, rather astoundingly, the curators have nothing to say about World War II and its aftermath.

After dutifully including a term paper’s worth of quotes from various authorities on the sublime, they blithely remark that in Southern California, “sublime experiences are sought as a matter of course.” Uh, like surfing?

There is a basic confusion in the essay between California’s combination of utopian and dystopian qualities and the intellectualization required to view them as “the sublime.” Meanwhile, the individual works of art get short shrift.

Still, it is rewarding to see work by fabled and rising German artists gathered in one place and to consider them in terms of a towering ideal that shaped the history of art.

* “Wrestling With the Sublime,” through Dec. 12 at the Main Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton. Hours: Noon-4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday; 3-7 p.m. Wednesday; 2-5 p.m. Sunday. Free. (714) 773-3262.