City of Dreams: Art and Architecture
Artspace Gallery, 21800 Oxnard, Woodland Hills
by Joe Futtner
Urban Man truly is an odd bird. From Rome of yore to Rome, New York, he has simultaneously loved and hated the City which sustained him. The Club Med mandate—to seek an antidote to civilization—has been part of our civilization from just about square one. Little wonder, then, that the urban denizens of post-modernity, not the least of which, artists, should feel a kinship with this ambiguity. And what better town than L.A. to express these feelings? It’s not the most crowded, the most infrastructure-compromised, the most dangerous, or (surprise) even the most polluted city in North America; it is nevertheless notorious for all of these qualities. Different from Gertrude Stein’s Oakland (“there is no there, there”), there’s plenty of here, here; we just haven’t figured out what it’s all about, let alone what to do with it. The historian Nikolaus Pevsner may have thought he’d resolved the issue (“a bicycle shed is a building . . . Lincoln Cathedral is . . . architecture”), but, then, he never visited Southern California.
Architectural realities, fantasies, dreams, and nightmares are the subjects of a recent exhibition at the Artspace Gallery (21800 Oxnard, Woodland Hills, through June 25th). Suggested by most of the work on display is a quality of acute irony, the suspicion that our best-laid humanist ambitions have gone awry, and that only the expressive articulations of art will serve to undo the current mess.
The first freeway in America was suburban New York’s Merritt Parkway. The bulk of them, and arguably the last, have been constructed in our back yard. Where four lanes once did, eight no longer do. Yet our myth-making has the freeway as the symbol of individual freedom, of virtually instant access, and power (consider the metaphoric “information highway”). Paintings by Seta Injeyan address the theme of the highway, America’s quintessential expression of infrastructure might, urban destruction, and societal anomie. The system we all love to hate, at once place and non-place, represents our society’s fundamental ambiguities.
Who can look at a freeway overpass without remembering January 17? This ominous quality is conveyed in Injeyan’s Historical Site: The Acropolis. Here the “crown of the city” is not ensconced in the sacred mountain, as in the Athens of Antiquity, but is instead shown, in post-modern terms, to be always in an indefinite state: under construction? Destroyed? Always a little bit of both, of course, as anyone who travels the interstates knows. But here the issue of the city and its infrastructure is elevated to the discursive level of typology. What is sacred in our urban civilization? How is this set off against the profane? Injeyan’s images are strong indictments of the soulless character of our contemporary condition. Particularly interesting is the manner in which the artist is able to combine temporal and spatial qualities. The view of the freewayscape is split between an inserted, stop-action image (photograph-like) and a framing, painterly depiction suggesting movement (and thus, in spite of compromising the legibility of details, more “real” to our experience). Thus underscored, a fundamental fiction of the representative act is taken as a metaphor for our urban existence generally.
The making and unmaking of myth is no less evident in the work of artist Michael Hughes. For Hughes, the City consists of narratives bound to structural realities. A large work of 1991, Memorial Construction, consisting of several panels arranged in the manner of a medieval altarpiece, captures this essence. The subject matter is the New Man at work on the New City. Figures are arranged hierarchically to suggest the directed intensity and ideological commitment of social realist murals of the 1930s (on both sides of the ideological fault line, capitalist and communist). The four corners of the piece are marked by simple architectural types—archway and pedimented temple front—and their corresponding memorial forms—cruciform and headstone. Interspersed between these panels are the images of man as constructor, the skilled laborer of the construction trades, and images of the architect. While the two classes heroically conspire on this monumental project (represented by an unadorned post-and-lintel formation against a cloud-dappled sky—Speer, anyone?) there is nevertheless the suggestion here of a class struggle and its consequences. (In the center of the lowest stratum, a Lenin lookalike sketches away against the background of a shattered wood construction.)
Richard Sedivy’s large, attractively rendered paintings suggest working drawings for suburban tract houses. Lacquer-glossy and sepia-enriched—Sedivy uses oil with varnish and phosphorescent—the subjects are handled with an “added value” foreign to the domestic type he chooses as his subject. Juxtaposition is Sedivy’s strategy here, as he opposes to his house curvilinear rhythms, “lines of beauty” available in neither the Bauhaus nor our house. (Plenty else is, including Sedivy’s Playboy logo, sgraffito houses on the margins, as though from a child’s hand, etc.) Cantata Holy Fragment II summarizes this aesthetic. Sedivy’s Ur-house is superimposed over the form of a flower, which is nearly lost behind the gloss of the lacquer. The Primitive Hut never looked quite so slick, or so seductive.
Likewise focusing on the domestic type, Candice Gawne’s Mi Casa Es Su Casa tells the tales of the terror of the type. An outline form of pitched roof house opens, like the panels of a diptych, to reveal the motto of hospitality, ringed by a foreboding outline of neon flame. The Bed, 1990, suggests the interior of a hotel, with the clean symmetry of paired lamps and nightstands. The lamps cast a Munch-like umbra, a spectral presence in an interior ever of absence (warmth, comfort, meaning, you name it).
Human figures, when they do appear, appear in isolation, and without recognizable qualities of identity. This is the case in a pair of images, Upstairs (1989) and Reflections (1988). In both these large canvases (84″ × 36″), a single human figure is shown in an indefinite architectural interior, one trabeated, the other arcuated. We do not know who they are, or where they are. As such, they are virtual urban phantoms, anonymous inhabitants of overwhelming urban spaces and circumstances. We look into the hot light of Candice Gawne’s interiors to discover ourselves.
Nature and Culture duke it out in Kristan Marvell’s large-scale site-specific sculptural installation, Requisite Columns (mixed media, 1994). Marvell renders the column, vehicle of Antique balance and grace, in terms of its structural fundamentals: wooden, roughly expressed (the surface looks hacked), darkened, and petrific. What the work says about our culture’s sanitizing, marmoreal ambitions is instructive, and a little frightening, too, as Marvell shows us that the Classical orders have another, darker, side.
The fusion of architecture and power is represented by “an eclectic series of drawings about the artist’s role in society” by artist Richard Turner. Entitled I Was Hitler’s Curator, the series is meant to suggest the Führer’s megalomaniacal ambitions, abetted by the work of his favored painters and architects. Presenting us the plans for an imaginary Third Reich art museum (the ground plan of which, in the tradition of so-called “speaking architecture,” literalizes its function: it spells the words “Kunst Halle”) Turner’s totalitarian fantasy has both social and individual consequences (“would I have allowed myself to become co-opted by the state?” Turner asks in his written statement reproduced in the catalogue). He reminds us in pleasantly terrifying terms of the political nature of art and culture, and the ideology underlying all aspects of human relationships.
Not unrelated in theme and intent to Turner’s work is a large photomural composition by Jody Zellen. Zellen’s wall-sized series of images contrasts the ideal “clean” lines of Classical architecture and International Modernism with their destruction (through fire and riot, for example). These images are in turn articulated by passages of text (“history’s objective is to shatter” or the more ambiguous “history is repres—— [repression? representation?]”). By adopting a form of art developed and exploited in prewar Europe, Zellen suggests that history—or more precisely, those who determine it—is to blame for our current sorry state of affairs. Any coincidence of these images with those, photographic and video, forever to be associated with Los Angeles, circa 1992, is for the viewer to ponder and explain. Zellen’s take on the work and the prospects of the City is fairly pessimistic: “The city is a place of flux, a chaotic environment from which dread is the only escape.” With dreams like this (one might ask), who needs nightmares?
A final note: the Artspace Gallery, for five years the West San Fernando Valley satellite gallery of the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, will be closing with the current exhibition. We are saddened by the loss of yet another opportunity for art to speak to its public freely and accessibly. ♦