ART REVIEWS : Bruce Nauman Gets the Big Picture

Writer Will D. Campbell made the observation that “a man who understands the nature of tragedy can never take sides.” Bruce Nauman’s art is rooted in that kind of grasp of the big picture. There’s a detached compassion to his work--and a grim gallows humor as well--and he offers no solutions or advice about the human predicaments he explores. Rather, he simply studies them with a clinical eye. Formally, his work is quite cold--there’s nothing remotely pretty or inviting about it--yet the emotions it addresses are so volatile and astutely drawn that his art is at once deeply disturbing and irresistible. Nauman is a master at invoking free floating anxiety and dread.

Arguably the most important American artist of the Post-Minimalist generation, Nauman can be seen in an exhibition at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Santa Monica that includes pieces from four different bodies of work he’s been developing in recent years. Three of them--cast wax body parts, graphic work that makes punning use of language, and video--have been part of the Nauman lexicon since the beginning of his career 25 year ago. The forth--sculpted animals cast from taxidermist forms--is relatively new.

The three video installations are the most striking works in the show. Juxtaposing stacks of video monitors with huge video images projected onto the gallery walls, all three pieces feature close-ups of Nauman’s head as he endlessly repeats monosyllabic chants, on tape loops that replay ad infinitum. On one level the tapes seem a horrific meditation on the human will to perform and carry on for no good reason at all. On another level, the tapes--like the disembodied cast wax heads in the entrance gallery--seem an exercise in physicality drained of sensuality. Pleasure is an impossibility for these fragmented entities--they’ve been reduced to nothing more than consciousness, isolated and frantic.

The animal piece is called “Fox Wheel” and it involves nine life-size fox forms cast in aluminum and arranged in the configuration of a peace sign. The foxes seem somehow debased, and on the whole the piece reads as an unholy marriage of culture and nature. Like all the work on view, there’s something inexplicably morbid about “Fox Wheel,” yet it resonates with tremendous pathos as well.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery: 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica; to Feb. 23; (213) 453-0180; Closed Sunday and Monday.

Interiors: A series of 15 small paintings by British artist David Austen, on view at the Cirrus Gallery in downtown Los Angeles, speak in hushed tones evocative of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Like Dickinson’s writing, Austen’s paintings inhabit a realm of shattered emotions, and the psychological scale of his work--bittersweet epiphanies compressed into intense miniatures--is similar as well. The titles Austen gives his paintings--”Death of Love” is fairly typical--say a lot about where he’s at. He seems to be adrift in the deliciously poisonous ether of desire, however, he expresses extreme states of the heart in a manner very much in keeping with the popular stereotype of the British. There are no unseemly display of emotion here; the only clue we’re given to the high drama afoot is a discreet series of cryptic symbols that are like evidence at the scene of a crime.

All the paintings on view conform to a basic recipe involving a tiny, loosely figurative form positioned dead center--like the bull’s-eye of a target--on a lushly painted, sharply contrasting field of color. The symbols employed--we see such things as a fly, a white handkerchief metamorphosing into a dove, a sea horse, a cross--have the portentousness of hieroglyphics and seem like visual mementos of pivotal episodes or encounters. Viewed en masse, the paintings put one in mind of a fortune teller’s deck of magical cards, and are perfumed with the exotic scent of alchemical transformations and metaphysical leaps; in this, Austen’s work invokes the great mystic of British art, William Blake.

In a piece called “Crushes” we see four golden cords in the configuration of lassos positioned on a hot orange field, while “Days for Dreaming” depicts a human form rendered in white and posed as if to fend off a blow, floating in a square of red. The modest scale of Austen’s work (each painting is approximately one foot square) lends them the quality of whispered secrets, and this studied tremulousness occasionally gets a bit precious and fey. But, as in music by British singer Morrissey (whose work operates at a similar register), Austen’s paintings let out a wail of loneliness and alienation that’s so piercingly clear it cannot be denied.

Cirrus Gallery: 542 S. Alameda St.; to April 6; (213 ) 680-3473. Closed Sundays and Mondays.