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diversions:
exhibition review
Human hands vibrate
delicate art imagery at University Art Museum
By Glenn Zucman
Special to the On-line Forty-Niner
Cal State Long
Beach's University Art Museum Curator Mary-Kay Lombino has
a show and written a catalog about it. In these passages,
with the help of creative luddite Chuck Close, Lombino seems
to tell us that handmade art is good because computer-made
art is bad.
"The pencil
can be used a million different ways by a million different
artists, while the numbing ordinariness of software is confining,"
Close said.
Nevermind that
a talented artist gives instructions to a digital computer
compared to sliding an acetate grid over a photograph and
painting the corresponding squares. Close is essentially taking
instructions from an analog computer.
Nevermind that
as a tool, a computer can be used to realize idiosyncratic
visions as unique as Frank Gehry's "Guggenheim Bilbao"
or Scott Blake's "Bar Code Jesus," wherein he composes
a portrait of Christ accreted out of bar codes of the text
of Revelation.
Nevermind that
when shown a 1916 watercolor by Kandinsky and told it is a
detail of a Close painting audiences not only accept it as
fact, but continue to do so even when asked if anything seems
amiss.
Nevermind all of
this, because for his entire career, Close has been bothered
by computational art practice.
From Leon Harmon's
extraordinary portrait of Abraham Lincoln in 1973 to Rob Silvers'
unique "Photomosaics of 2001," Close has rejected
the digital as incapable of expressing unique, meaningful
thought. Close's own works are unquestionably marvelous, but
by refusing to consider any conception of art making beyond
his own privileged realm, he firmly establishes himself as
a master of 20th century art, and an irrelevant luddite of
the 21st century.
How unfortunate
then that Lombino chooses to introduce the true richness of
the artists she has selected by associating them with Close's
rigid dogmatic thinking.
To be sure, "By
Hand" is an amazing show. The strength and power of the
artists' work does not require the marginalization of another
form of art practice to make that clear.
As they did at
Pasadena's recent multi-venue "Universe" show, Russell
Crotty's hand drawings of his astronomical observations steal
the show at the UAM's "By Hand."
Crotty has a big
telescope in the Malibu Hills. He does not put film in it.
He puts his eye up to it. Then he draws what he sees. Really,
it is as simple as that. Except that the simple astronomical
drawings made with his favorite brand of ball point pen are
amazing. It really is a big telescope, and the detail of the
moon, Jupiter, Saturn or the nearby hillsides are remarkable.
One does not have
to be for or against technology to realize that these days
we routinely view extraordinary images from sources like the
Hubble Space Telescope, and not so routinely do we actually
press our own eyes up to an observing glass. By engaging the
simple act of looking and seeing, Crotty has made the familiar
new: he has united the cosmos with the hand of man.
"Universe"
was a valiant multivenue effort that succeeded well at points
like Crotty at Art Center's Williamson Gallery and was strained
at others, like Rauschenberg, et al. at The Armory. In "By
Hand," Crotty is surrounded not by other artists whose
work vaguely revolves around astronomy or science, but by
other artists who draw! Lombino has assembled a group of obsessive
mark makers whose works resonate well against each other.
Like Melissa Maxfield's
Masters of Fine Arts show at the CSULB Design Department Gallery
last week, where her fine ceramic coils accreted to form larger,
sometimes massive structures, these repetitive works take
the finest of pen and pencil marks and build up the face of
Jupiter, or a trace of the human heart.
Another of "By
Hand's" sumptuous feasts is a two drawing suite by Makoto
Sasaki: "Heartbeat Drawing for 24 Hours, May 2000."
Even before reading
the title, the gallery viewer is captivated by the jagged
red hash marks that pulsate on his oversized drawings. On
discovery that these hash marks represent EKG-like tracings
of his beating heart, the work achieves an even further level
of conceptual and tactile significance.
Also among "By
Hand's" curious, arcane works of intense power and beauty
are the drypoint on tinfoil engravings of Margo Maggi's exotic
worlds. As with Crotty and Sasaki, Maggi's work simultaneously
excites the viewer with its strange beauty and its revealing
of a secret personal world as well as with its overwhelming
sense of technical virtuosity.
In By Hand, Lombino
has assembled the work of a whopping 26 artists. Much of the
work is sublime, a few of the pieces seem more like exercises,
but as a whole, they stick together well. As a group they
paint and draw an impressive portrait of how the vibrations
of the human hand can layer delicate imagery of extraordinary
world.
The exhibition
catalog is also a gem. With the exception of the unfortunate
Close-luddite allusions, Lombino has written an informative
article that well illuminates her inspired curating. Because
of the delicacy of these works, one craves even more illustrations
and detail views, but as it stands the catalog is illustrated
well. The catalog design by Amanda Washburn is elegant and
the acid lemon pages are quite effective. Unfortunately at
$20 for the brief 56-page tome, not many CSULB students are
likely to become owners of this desirable volume.
By Hand runs now
through Oct. 14: Tuesday through Thursday 12-8, Friday through
Sunday 12-5, and closed Mondays at the CSULB University Art
Museum.
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