2001: A Space Oddity

In 1969, after witnessing a NASA space launch, Robert Rauschenberg produced a group of lithographs at Gemini G.E.L. called the “Stoned Moon” series. “Sky Garden” is probably the series’ most famous single print.

A 7-foot-tall composition, built on the skeletal armature of an information-loaded diagram of a rocket, “Sky Garden” uses carefully chosen pictorial layers to create an unabashedly sexual image. The clouds of exhaust left in the aerial wake of a thrusting rocket form an enormous phallus in the center of the picture. Rauschenberg emphasizes the techno-erotic quality by rendering the engorged shape in flaming red inks. At the top, three big puddles of liquid blue cover the page.

Inside each splash of blue is a postcard view of Florida. One shows a rocket waiting on the Cape Canaveral launch pad, flanked by palm trees. Another captures the ecstatic moment of liftoff. The third features an elegant heron, a different kind of bird that watches serenely from the shelter of an ancient swamp.

The postcard juxtaposition of the old world and the new also informs the artist’s technique. Collaging mass-media images in an antique art medium (printmaking), he produced a multiple (prints) rather than a one-of-a-kind object (a painting).

Rauschenberg’s frankly sexualized print performs an insightful riff on an explosive attribute of mass culture, which came roaring to the forefront in the 1960s and is now a given. His glamorously erotic picture underscores the promiscuous nature of mass-media imagery, where the flood of visual information collapses old distinctions between high and low into a democratic stew. For better and for worse, the promiscuity of images today has forever changed the world.

“Sky Garden” is one of five Rauschenberg prints in “Contemporary Art and the Cosmos,” a show newly opened at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts. The exhibition anchors a citywide collaboration on the theme of “The Universe,” which also includes shows at the Norton Simon Museum, the Pacific Asia Museum, the Huntington Library and Art Center College. If you’re wondering what the promiscuity of images in mass culture has to do with “the cosmos” or “the universe,” except in the most banal sense--well, such is the dilemma of theme shows, especially for contemporary art. They typically narrow and restrict art’s meaning and reception, rather than opening up its wondrous complexity.

Two years ago, the five host museums scored a welcome collaborative success with “Radical Past: Contemporary Art and Music in Pasadena, 1960-1974.” Those shows succeeded because they chronicled important developments in art, at a rare moment when Pasadena was home to an exceptionally adventurous museum (the old Pasadena Museum of Art) and to such critically important artists as Bruce Nauman. The shows were small but had historical weight.

Lightweight Link Is Lost in ‘Cosmos’

By contrast, the Armory’s “Contemporary Art and the Cosmos” is virtually weightless. Except superficially, its actual theme is neither art nor the cosmos, but Pasadena’s place as the site of prominent institutions, both cultural and scientific. Art and science get uncomfortably aligned, while the result feels like a chamber of commerce promotional event.

You can feel it in the artless disconnect offered by the Rauschenberg. Yes, it’s got rocket ships in it, and the Jet Propulsion Lab is certainly in Pasadena. But the cosmos--the universe considered as a harmonious and orderly system--isn’t what “Sky Garden” is remotely concerned with.

The show features an uneven selection of 28 paintings, sculptures, photographs and prints by nine American artists. Sky-related imagery is common.

In 1984, Kim Abeles built a makeshift backyard observatory with which to record the movement of the sun and moon on panels of sheer fabric. The following year Vija Celmins continued making weirdly poetic etchings that incorporate velvety expanses of star-studded night sky. Linda Connor’s recent, exquisite sepia photographs of sacred sites and mystical sights in India, Southeast Asia, Europe and the Middle East are interspersed with period photographs, anonymously taken through the telescope at Northern California’s Lick Observatory as much as a century ago. Ed Ruscha’s new painting “Mares” is a speckled mental map of what appear to be lunar oceans, their spiritually inflected names--Fecunditatis, Tranquillitatis, Serenitatis--lined up like waves lapping at the shore.

Loosely, the artists could be broken into two groups: Pop and Process. The first includes Rauschenberg, Ruscha and James Rosenquist, who is represented here by a gaudy, billboard-size print called “Time Dust,” which has all the designer charm of a glossy ad for “Star Trek: Voyager.”

The second includes work whose form derives from natural processes, such as Abeles’ calendar tracking relative movements of the sun and moon. Carl Cheng has built a blank gray wall of 114 unlabeled meters, which transform invisible, inaudible radio waves into the movement of jittery red needles. For her paintings, Dorothea Rockburne mixes raw pigments into various liquid mediums to oozing, cracked, magma-like effect. Rockne Krebs’ 1973 graphic, “Secret Weapon (Light Factor X),” is like a journal entry by a mad scientist who has just discovered the stunning power of a prism to bend rays of light, exposing their hidden color.

Pressing These Works Into Common Theme

Despite some rich work, however, the show seems distracted and thin. The trouble with theme shows in general, and this one in particular, is that they keep leading you away from the actual art that’s in front of your eyes and toward the nominal theme. Convincing contemporary art is not made to illustrate topics or subject headings, in the manner of the old academies. Gathering together disparate works just because they feature sky imagery or employ scientific references merely leaves you with, well, a bunch of sky images and scientific references. When a curator becomes an accountant, art’s complexity undergoes a disabling reduction.

The problem is more acute today than ever, as the empty distortions of theme-show packaging attract more art institutions in search of more corporate patronage and more general audiences. (See the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s apocalyptic “Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000” for an especially pitiful demonstration of the tendency, here expanded into a full-scale theme park.) So let’s call for a moratorium on theme shows, and let’s do it now. Otherwise, we’re liable to begin thinking that advertising Pasadena’s prominence in the modern “development of a theory of the universe” (to quote from the catalog) is a noble aspiration for art.

*

* Pasadena Armory for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., (626) 792-5101, through April 22. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Rockne Krebs’ laser installation “Mr. Belloli’s Universe” can be seen outside the museum nightly, from 7:30 to 10:30, through Monday.