CONTRAST: Minimalist, Pop

Two exhibitions at Cal State Long Beach appear to be a study in contrasts, but they’re joined by common origins in the ‘60s.

“Richard Tuttle: Renaissance Unframed 1-26” consists mainly of fabric constructions by a pioneer Minimalist. “The Velvet Years 1965-67: Warhol’s Factory, Photographs by Stephen Shore” rekindles memory of Pop art’s most mordant and innovative savant nai^f and its biggest self-invented celebrity.

Today Shore is 50 and a respected American photographic artist. He was a teenager when he went to New York, met Warhol and started hanging out with the gang around Warhol’s studio. Shore’s photographs are precociously crisp and professional, but their style is more documentary than art. Good thing too. Otherwise we might not notice the self-conscious mannerism of the people pictured.

Shore’s images recall how stylized the period really was, the cool ironic contempt of its wit, the preening postures of dances like the frug and the costume-party character of bell-bottoms and miniskirts. The era made acting natural into a form of pretense.

All this is dramatized by the fact that everybody looks so incredibly young. When Warhol drops the shades and black leather jacket for a second, he looks like a cherub with acne. Lou Reed, lead singer for Warhol’s influential band, the Velvet Underground, has the edge of one of those Dead End Kids with hearts of pure gold. Youthfulness always equates with innocence in the mind’s eye, so these kids had to make a big effort to look as decadent as they were trying to be.

Oddly enough, the women seem more used and shop-worn, but they come out with a more appealing aura of tainted artlessness. Edie Sedgwick looks like a cuddly raccoon. Singer Nico was surpassingly beautiful, but her face is usually a mask. Occasionally Shore’s camera penetrates the surface. Warhol’s superstar International Velvet (Susan Bottomly) reveals flesh-and-blood melancholy. Barbara Rubin appears authentically rapt listening to Reed play.

*

It’s curious to contemplate that all of this clowning, boredom, hanging out and self-dramatization were the ambience in which a unique and unrepeatable moment in American art was being acted out.

You see Warhol’s silk-screened flowers and Elvis Presleys, his floating Mylar balloons and bits of sets for films like “Chelsea Girls” in the backgrounds of Shore’s pictures. You realize this was the last moment when popular culture and high culture could dance deliriously together and still be told apart.

If Shore’s photographs document the beginning of the fusion of high and low culture into media culture, Tuttle’s work does something else. It marks art’s retreat into an ivory tower, where it speaks only to itself.

There is, evidently, quite an elaborate rationale for “Renaissance Unframed” in the artist’s mind. An accompanying brochure lists titles of individual works in untranslated Greek. There is a bit of prose in the general accents of Homer’s Iliad, but it’s nonattributed. The artist seems to relate the fabric constructions partly to drapery in old master painting, but the connection isn’t clear. All this creates an aura of mystification that’s topped off by an anomalous bronze casting about the size of a sledge hammer head that lies on the floor. It forms a case of being so unobtrusive that you can neither miss it nor quite figure out how it fits the enigmatic program. We’re told it’s been placed on a precise east-west axis with the aid of a compass, but not why.

Because art is not obliged to explain itself in the first place, there’s something irritating about being offered the suggestion that there is an explanation that is withheld. Feels like mumbo-jumbo. It’s too bad to do this to work that plays so pleasantly purely as a visual trip.

The little bronze functions to call attention to the surrounding empty space. This creates a nice breezy ambience for the fabric constructions, causing them to feel a bit like flags or sails. Each is hung unframed with crystal plastic push-pins and imprinted with biomorphic abstract shapes in atmospheric hues. One is reminded vaguely of John Marin’s watercolors.

At the same time, the muslin cloth is folded like napkins, suggesting both a picnic and informal bas-reliefs. We all know about drawing on napkins, but sculpting with them is an original twist. In short the real delight of Tuttle’s suite is that it comes off as utterly lyric and unexpected as the first day of spring.

The Tuttle show is a traveling exhibition launched at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum. “The Velvet Years” was originated by Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It comes with a valuable catalog with text by Lynne Tillman and reminiscences by numerous denizens of the Factory.

* Cal State Long Beach, University Art Museum, 1250 Bellflower Blvd.; ends Saturday. (562) 985-5761.