ART REVIEW : FIRST SLATE OF ‘SUMMER 1985’ AT MOCA

No matter how you stack it, weave it or cross-reference it, “Summer 1985: Nine Artists” is exactly what its organizers say it is: a congregation of nine separate solo shows. There’s not a theme in sight at “Summer 1985,” and any attempt to impose one is indeed an imposition.

The new slate of exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s enormous Temporary Contemporary showcase, through Sept. 29, resembles nothing so much as a galleria of galleries. You can stroll through the mall lined with murals by Gronk and flagged with Willie Herron’s banners, then pop in on exhibitions of Jo Ann Callis’ photography, Bill Viola’s video, Guy de Cointet’s performance sets, Steve Galloway’s drawings, Suzanne Caporael’s and Mary Corse’s paintings and Jill Giegerich’s constructions.

This separatism doesn’t please the constituency waiting for MOCA to stage boffo retrospectives of contemporary masters or to examine provocative notions--in short, to act with the authority expected of such an institution--but it does provide an agreeable forum for a variegated batch of underexposed individuals. For most of these Los Angeles artists, the show is their first exhibition in a major museum.

Take Jill Giegerich, who has shaped up as one of the city’s most interesting and original young talents. Her recent show at the Margo Leavin Gallery finally revealed her as such and, though that exhibition struck me as more coherent than the present one, MOCA’s endorsement of her work comes at the right moment.

Her art may appear to be the toughest here, but it’s not at all exotic. Her rough constructions of industrial materials and such unpretty art media as papier-mache get back to the basics of looking at ordinary objects and thinking about how to portray them. There’s a lamp as wire outline, a double sink reduced to a ghostly silhouette and what might be an elbow joint of a ventilation system, illusionistically built of roofing material.

Giegerich sees steam billowing out of a white teapot as a collage of patterns printed from corrugated cardboard and chicken wire. As for more traditional art subjects--the human figure and the still life--she stacks them up in a big, faceted relief of a muscular man protruding above a mass of wooden volumes.

But none of these artworks is a representation of how things look; the constructions address questions about how we perceive things, remember or record them. Her work is about equally rooted in Constructivism, Cubism and Dada but her fresh approach stems from a merger of domesticity, industry and aesthetics.

The news in Mary Corse’s show is her old work--elegantly evocative Minimalist paintings done in the early ‘70s. Two all-black and two all-white canvases painted with glass microspheres in pigment are the ultimate in formal seduction. As you walk around them, surfaces change from matte to shiny, from sandy to satiny. Notched corners or squares along the sides (not covered with glass beads) shift in value; brush strokes fall into rhythmic currents. If that’s not enough to convince you that sterile old Minimalism has a Romantic side, walk straight up to “Halo in Rainbow White” and observe yourself as a haloed apparition on a white canvas.

These works are presented as a prelude to Corse’s later glazed-clay paintings. The connection between technical exploration, geometric rigor and shimmering surfaces in both bodies of work is clear, but the perceptual magic of the early paintings undercuts the ponderous ceramic wall pieces. You can go on and on about the conceptual cogency of this art--the artist’s move from light to earth, her use of archetypal shapes--but the paintings themselves declare that theory is not as powerful as experience.

In a show of individuals standing alone, one of the few connections rises between the dark visions of Steve Galloway and Suzanne Caporael. Galloway is a stunningly fine draftsman who tends to trivialize his talent by turning out artworks that could be illustrations for science fiction or doomsday proclamations. His message is about the mechanization of humankind and the ruination of nature.

Apocalypse oozes through Galloway’s art on the trail of Surrealism. A la Magritte, human forms are covered by kudzu or transformed into molten lava, black slime or sponges. A pair of “Friction Wheels” sets off symbolic sparks in one picture; in an adjacent drawing, a beatific reclining man (with a head like a perforated lampshade) keeps a “Satellite Watch” in an effusively Romantic landscape.

Everything is overgrown and overblown to a point of disintegration in Galloway’s art. Predictable as this becomes, he keeps you looking because he’s such a virtuoso at pulling a Wagnerian range of values from a simple stick of charcoal. When he tones down the weirdness in, say, a four-panel drawing of a gathering storm or a field of erupting volcanoes (with light and dark reversed in a vertical diptych), the art takes over with no loss of emotional impact.

Caporael’s painting, which was introduced earlier this year at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, focuses on dispossessed humanity. Lone people--or their stick-figure stand-ins, depicted as configurations of numerals--are adrift in a hostile universe. Whether they writhe in bondage, drown in murky water, huddle on chairs or crumple up beside a bed, they are incapacitated and insignificant. Yet in paintings that contain no people, you feel their absence through the aftermath of fires, floods and unspecified holocausts. Settings are typically midnight landscapes that entice viewers to peep in through dramatically lighted clearings.

Most of Caporael’s work in the Newport show looked overwrought or arbitrary, but it was undeniably unusual in its juxtaposition of Expressionist angst and conceptual puzzles. The Temporary Contemporary trots out some of the same problems (and paintings) but strengthens their case by adding recent works that are more coherent.

In “Supposing You Were Guilty” and an untitled work depicting a numeral-figure amid stairs and a ladder, Caporael literally pulls her work out of the dark and into the light of architectural contexts. Without the moldy weight of Romantic landscape, she seems freer to develop the ideas that distinguish her art from the suffocating crush of Neo-Expressionism.

That’s it for the first segment of “Summer 1985” coverage planned for these pages. The remaining five shows will be reviewed in future issues.