San Francisco Museum of Modern Art – Artists Gallery

June 30 – July 23, 1999

Art Issues

Mark Van Proyen

September / October 2000

pp. 40 – 41

San Francisco E-Mail

Sing it: Martha Stewart to the left of me, Charles Manson to the right, and here I am, stuck in the middle of yet another round of “Introductions,” the annual event of debut exhibitions sponsored by the San Francisco Art Dealer’s Association. These exhibitions still provide a festive and invigoration break in summer doldrums, however, if only by removing the largest and safest bets from the table, so that different (if not entirely new) styles of play can come to the fore. But this is a mixed blessing, because it also tends to reverse the standard wisdom of postmodern art marketing, which states that cult followings will get you through times of no etiquette much better than etiquette will get you through times of no cult followings. Most of the artists who exhibit in “Introductions,” of course, have not yet had the amount of exposure which could provide them with a cult following of their own. Once this is recognized, galleries tend to cling to the safe shores of presenting works that appeal to an anesthetized and under-informed notion of art as an etiquette-bound article of gracious living, no doubt because, as the proverb goes, therein lies “the refuge of scoundrels,” where a certain stratum of naïve money happens to be. Recognition of this circumstance leads me to play a contrarian role, focusing on works that seem to counter the most obvious clichés of gracious aesthetic living, and in so doing announce some degree of “cult potential.” Only time can tell how (and if) it will ever be actualized.

It is not surprising that this prejudicial framework leads me to works on paper, because their relatively small scale and intimate tactility can be subversively seductive in ways that larger works cannot. After all, psychological subversion – the ability to establish surprise by reorienting established parameters – is at the core of how cultish works gain their power and break quotidian sense. In Thomas Plagemann’s sepia ink on faux parchment works, cultish subversion comes from an odd mix of narrative and spatial metaphors. He renders World War I-era military technology and futuristic action figures in a style that perfectly bisects the continuum that lies between comic-book illustration and the zaniest drawings of Tiepolo. Plagemann’s works picture scurrying troops of reptile-faced soldiers engaged in nondescript combat, all of which tends to take place on absurdly elevated hills that must be taken so that the territory below can be gained as a key moment in some eternal struggle. Of course, the struggles alluded to here are not so much military as philosophical, leading up to the conquest of key predicates and subsequent determination of institutional values. The humorous satire that lurks behind this art should be applauded, as well as its formal resemblance to the perverse fantasyscapes of artist Henry Darger.

Cassie C. Davis’s graphite works on paper are preoccupied with the portrayal of seductive fantasyscapes as well, but her images have no discernible figures or narrative action. What they do have, in spades, is a soft and graceful elegance which seems to subtly vibrate in the viewer’s eye, rather like the watercolors of Giorgio Morandi. Yet, this is where the fun begins, because in the place of Morandi’s evanescent wine bottles we see other forms that seem at once architectural and mechanical – perhaps an array of interconnected computer components or the fetid recesses of an industrial chemical facility. These are the kind of forms that Caroline Jones has described as echoing “the technological sublime,” but Davis renders them as the intimate and even sentimental opposites of any notion of an all-encompassing vastness. Her delicate icons pay absurd homage to a grimly indifferent reality.

James Claussen’s lithographs also picture fanciful landscapes, but their components are more overtly dreamlike in the way that they suggest the libidinous feverishness of pop-surrealistic animation, such as that found in early Betty Boop cartoons. We see undulating landscapes staged as backdrops for floating objects that swirl about as if they were lifted up by a whirlwind, each a kind of presymbolic omen in a vexing narrative puzzle. Their modeled surfaces are striking in the way that they suggest biomechanical muscles flexing under smoothly gradated skin, thereby underscoring their implied animation, a quality that is further emphasized by the consistent confidence of Claussen’s line quality, its oil-stick blackness definite without being didactic.

In L.G. Williams’s paintings, another kind of allusion to skin takes place, only here it is to Didier Anzieu’s notion of a “skin ego,” that being the psychic membrane that lets in differing levels of worldly impression in much the same way that the epidermis works as a kind of sieve – a container that doesn’t quite contain. Graphic and schematic shapes, articulated in a brackish, black paint, are layered atop one another like those in an archeologist’s diagram of the levels of an ancient city built up over time. Much of the aesthetic pleasure that these works provide consists in tracking the progress and evolution of these shapes through shifting zones of pictorial transparency, but the skin-ego idea is most clearly conveyed by the yellow ocher ground that these markings are inscribed into, its surface revealing a puckering effect that resembles the tough scales of a reptile.

Some of Cheryl Coon’s sculpture also refer to Anzieu’s idea of a skin ego, as they are often made of gauzy fabric that seems to contain the imprints of a hemorrhage of bodily fluid as an indicator of a life that was but is no more. Perhaps more to the point of these works is their connection to what Jaques Derrida has called “archive fever” in his philosophical musings about language’s inability to lay spectral ghosts to a rest. In some of Coon’s works, this fever is played out in the form of creepy specimens displayed in jars set upon shelves or tabletops (the jars are said to contain snake oil as a key ingredient), while in others works, liguistic notations are applied to suggestive objects and materials (tea bags, old garter-belt snaps, and so forth), teasing out a hidden analogy between taxonomic labels and common epitaphs. The most persuasive work is a collection of thirty-six medieval-looking ninja balls made of plaster and carpet tacks affixed in a random pattern to the gallery wall. In them, we see in more direct terms the tacit violence archived by the other works; they have the potential to threaten the real epidermis of a careless viewer who gets too close to their dangerous-looking thistles.

When we think of stone as an art material, we usually think of rugged immovable permanence, but this association is cleverly undermined by Nancy Mintz’s playful sculpture, which places chunks of imposing rock in metal carriages so that they might wobble, roll, and jiggle in ways that seem to say that gravity is not quite as dependable as one assumes it to be. Some of Mintz’s works contain chunks of two different kinds of stone, suggesting a power struggle that is as unchangeable and irresolvable as Sisyphus’s eternal uphill push. Of course, there are two streams of viewer indentification available via Mintz’s work, the first being the viewer’s indentification of the stones with the physicality of his or her own body, and the second being the realization that there is always an imprisoning external force nearby that can trump any assertion of autonomy. Like the Titan Antaeus who lost his strength when Hercules lifted him from the ground, these stones seem enfeebled by their Archemedian repositioning, inviting us to mock their claims to weighty durability. These works provoke a vexing question: If all claims to worldly durability are only worthy of our supercilious scorn, then what cultishness can offer something more than a fool’s paradise?