Saar’s Spare Forms Resonate With Richness

If her current exhibition of recent sculpture at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is any indication, Alison Saar is presently making the strongest and most compelling work of her career. (The artist is 42.) Few missteps are encountered among the six figurative sculptures on view, while the increasingly refined sense of elegant spareness that characterizes most of these examples yields a surprising, allusive richness.

At the entry to the museum, Saar has installed a massive bronze bell, cast in the over-lifesize figure of a black man. Columnar, with his arms held at his sides and two legs together, the figure resonates with a deep, sonorous gong when you pull the clapper cord protruding from his back. The sound is like an aural italics, for the bell also resonates in other powerful ways.

Static, dark and massive, the columnar form gives the figure a sense of immovable permanence. Formally, this aura of eternal presence recalls traditional memorializing sculpture that dates to ancient Egypt. Echoing through eons, the sculptural suggestion of steadfast endurance is given a temporal spin by the fact that the figure is suspended by heavy chains from a steel beam in the ceiling--a black man lynched. But Saar has turned the figure upside-down, so that he hangs from his feet. Turned on its head, the sense of memorializing endurance is joined by an uncanny, quietly thrilling tone of determined resistance.

Two galleries away, at the other end of the building, a second upside-down figure couldn’t be more different. Titled “Topsy Turvy,” its form derives from the once-popular type of doll that consisted of two female torsos joined at the waist. Held one way, the doll was black; turned upside down, a white doll emerged from beneath the inverted skirt.

Saar’s “doll,” composed of wood, tar and plaster, stands about 3 1/2 feet tall. She stands on the ceiling, not the floor. Unlike her conjoined predecessors, she is a single figure, black from the waist up, white from the waist down. Her feet are firmly planted in place overhead, so that her simple white skirt hangs down, obscuring her torso and head and exposing her lower extremities.

Up there on the ceiling, the little figure occupies a kind of otherworldly dream-space. The location also has its nightmarish overtones: Standing beneath her in the gallery, you’re put in the queasy position of looking up the little girl’s dress. There, her small hands are pressed firmly over her eyes. White on the outside, black on the inside, this topsy-turvy little girl is a stunning image of childish gaiety bearing awful secrets of fearfulness and shame.

Ironically, the least successful work in the show is also the largest and most commanding. A pair of totemic wood figures, one male and one female, each stand more than 14 feet tall; their legs are positioned as if growing out of a tangle of tree roots. (This intertwined “pedestal” adds another 14-plus feet to the overall height.) Titled “Tree Souls” and clad in copper sheets, the generic man and woman offer gentle (if finally undecipherable) hand gestures, like an Adam and Eve from a lost Garden too remote to retrieve.

Also problematic is a video projected on a wall above a sculptural odalisque reclining on a shelf in a darkened back gallery. The sculpture, complete with several dozen little white bottles in myriad shapes sprouting like a crazy corona from the figure’s dreadlocks, is itself a knockout. Titled “Compton Nocturne,” its form melds narrative traditions associated with the American South into Modern images as familiar as Rousseau’s “Sleeping Gypsy,” Matisse’s “Blue Nude” and any number of German Expressionist examples--all of which owe debts to precedents in African art.

The video projects shadowy pictures of medical texts, illustrations, photographs and drawings of various bodies. It’s a high-tech version of the little assemblages behind window glass that frequently appeared in Saar’s past work. Literalizing the powerful odalisque’s nocturnal dream, however, robs us of our own. The video feels superfluous.

By stark, stripped-down contrast, take the two exceptionally compelling sculptures Saar calls “Stone Souls.” On close inspection, these low, compact, boulder-like forms, which are covered in pieces of old-fashioned ceiling tin, reveal themselves to be human figures lying on their sides, each crouched into a ball with head tucked into knees.

In earlier work, Saar was also audacious enough to refer to Michelangelo’s celebrated sculptures of slaves, but never quite so eloquently as here. The clenched poses of these two evocations of black American slavery, sheathed in careworn tenement tin, oscillate between protectiveness from fearsome brutality and imminent, explosive release.

At her best, Saar has an exceptional capacity to weave together African, American and African-American artistic traditions, creating rich and provocative sculptural tapestries. Present and past strike against one another, often causing radiant sparks. Would that this first-rate museum exhibition came with a catalog, in which Saar’s increasingly powerful work could be further explored.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 586-6488, through March 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.