Image Translation Links Two Separate Exhibitions

Two exhibitions at Cal State Long Beach appear, at first, to be unrelated. What could a conceptual installation by a pair of brothers have in common with a survey of American lithography? Well, they’re in the same museum but that seems to be about it. In the end, however, the separate presentations address the common question of what happens when an image is translated from one medium to another.

Los Angeles artists Doug and Gary Quinn frame the issue in “Gericault’s Magic Raft.” Their work is a variation on a masterpiece painting that hangs in the Louvre and is famous on two counts.

Unveiled in 1819, “The Raft of the Medusa” is the chef d’oeuvre of Theodore Gericault, an artist who encapsulated the ideal of the volatile, troubled Romantic genius by dying at 32 after showing just three paintings. He was, so to speak, the Jim Morrison of his time.

The behemoth 16-by-23-foot picture, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, remains moving even without the tragic association to its maker. He brilliantly orchestrated a chaotic composition into dramatic coherence. It depicts some 20 tattered castaways on a raft adrift in an angry sea. Various postures speak of everything from death to despair, anger, violence and desperation. Men at the raft’s far end wave rags at a tiny frigate on the horizon. There is hope.

The picture was based on a real-life disaster that occurred in 1816 when the French frigate Medusa sank off the coast of Africa due to the incompetence of its captain, a political appointee. In the ensuing chaos, some 250 passengers were put into life boats while 150 more were consigned to a large makeshift float. It was towed until things got really rough. The captain had it cut loose without provisions. After 13 days of death from sickness, exposure, murder and cannibalism, survivors were rescued. Only eight lived to tell a tale the government did its best to suppress.

When Gericault’s painting was shown, it caused both an aesthetic sensation and a political scandal. The Quinn brothers’ version reproduces the painting full size in what looks like a huge, faded copying-machine image of wan grays--intentionally a ghost-like echo of the original.

Their artists’ actual medium is some 3,000 Magic Slates, abutted like a mosaic. Kids use the toy drawing tablets to make images with a stylus, then erase them by lifting a plastic cover. By further dramatizing the ephemeral character of their translation, the artists intend to pose questions about the ambiguous nature of history and who determines its quasi-fictional content. Perhaps unintentionally, they also seem to mourn the fine artist’s loss of the power they once had to affect real events.

It’s unlikely that the museum intended the exhibition to harmonize with “Celebrating Lithography at 200,” the second of six touring theme shows from the collection of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. A fairly straightforward affair, its 32 prints intend to simply chronicle the rise of modern lithography.

In present context, however, one unavoidably notices that, like the Quinn brothers’ piece, many images are translations from painting. Equally striking is the paradoxical fact that more recent prints look dated while older ones remain fresh.

I think the two perceptions are related. Until the ‘50s, the scale of a work of art depended mainly on the importance placed on it by the artist. Thus Stuart Davis probably didn’t pay much attention to the fact that his “Barbershop Chord” of 1931 may have been one-fifth the size of related paintings. Lithographic stones were of a certain size so artists simply adjusted imagery accordingly. Thus prints by such older artists as Theodore Rozak, Abraham Walkowitz and Man Ray sit very comfortably within their formats, appearing classically at ease and self-confident.

After World War II, however, American art responded to a Baroque impulse. Format, size and material substance became critical to fulfilling expressive intent. Abstract Expressionist compositions like Sam Francis’ 1971 “Yunan” often depended for their effect on filling the viewers’ field of vision and saturating the eye with juicy paint. Adapting such conceptions into the necessarily smaller, drier medium of lithography is bound to result in a net loss of impact.

Generally this is the case with works from Jasper Johns’ “Periscope” to Ellsworth Kelly’s “Red Curve (Radius of 8’).” It takes a considerable suspension of disbelief to ignore a feeling of something lost in translation.

* Cal State Long Beach, University Art Museum, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach; “Gericault’s Magic Raft” to July 24, “Celebrating Lithography at 200” to Aug. 30, closed Saturdays and Sundays, (562) 985-5761.