ART REVIEWS : Nothing Nostalgic About Tansey’s Works

In conjunction with one of the most important museum exhibitions this season, Mark Tansey’s retrospective at the L.A. County Museum of Art, Kohn Abrams has mounted a small, sharply focused show of the New York artist’s current paintings and drawings. Tansey makes what appear at first glance to be old-fashioned narrative images. And if it initially seems odd that his paintings are rendered in monochrome--cool blues, dusky reds, pale umbers--one is soothed by the fact that they bear the distinctly nostalgic look of discolored photographs or faded news clippings.

Yet there is nothing old-fashioned, nor anything remotely nostalgic about Tansey’s art. Tansey is, in fact, an immensely sophisticated post-modernist--scanning and cannibalizing old magazines and newspapers, as well as theoretical and critical texts, for images and ideas that fuel works that refuse these very distinctions--between image and idea, theory and practice, language and art.

Not that Tansey would relish being labeled a “post-modernist.” Such art-world slogans, avant-garde catch phrases and galleries’ super-added metaphors are his long-embattled nemeses. Two men toss a large, gilt frame down into the bowels of a cave--”Literalists Discarding the Frame”; a group of ennui-plagued Soho-ites celebrate at the “End of History Victory Party.” By literalizing these sacrosanct cliches, Tansey deftly defuses them. Against all expectation, then, he emerges as this generation’s preeminent anti-jargonist.

Art history bills itself as an orthodoxy, a linear progression of techniques, movements and prescriptions. Tansey insists that the history of art is more complex, a circle, perhaps; more likely, a synchronous web. A painting titled “Lost Watch” juxtaposes differing representations of movement over time: The stars in the sky dissolve into streaks of light, aping the look of time-lapse photography, a bird is caught in flight, resembling an Etienne Jules Marey chronophotograph, and a man sits by the water, watching, trapped in painting’s inescapable stasis. “Lost Watch” is melancholy, but it is also profoundly liberating. Like much of Tansey’s work, it suggests that every “truth” is malleable, relative and subject to the whims of time.

* Mark Tansey at Kohn Abrams Gallery, 9002 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 278-8790. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through July 13.

Word Games: Since the 1960s, Reinhard Voigt has been producing gridded paintings of kitschy birds; witty homages to the pixilated imagery of video games; non-objective configurations that wed Mondrian’s neoplasticism to cybernetic neorealism. In his latest show at Angles Gallery, the German-born artist turns to words. Tomatoes , potatoes and artificial coloring are spelled out in minute, black squares set against patches of red, orange and pink, or more somber backgrounds of beige and gray. These gridded image-texts conjure both the nostalgia of the embroidery sampler and the future shock of industrially cultivated farms as seen from the sky. The proliferation of such scientifically plotted parcels of land reifies the slow, but inevitable transformation of nature into culture. So, too, do Voigt’s and, for that matter, all figurative images--though these do so while mourning the very process they accelerate.

The exhibition is titled “In Memory of Petra Kelly,” and indeed, the paintings make oblique reference to the concerns of the recently slain founder of Germany’s Green Party. Like Kelly, who was a continual source of friction both within the German Parliament and her own party, Voigt is an iconoclast. He is concerned with systems building--rigor, precision, unswerving devotion to a predetermined scheme. Yet seduction is also part of the plan--thus, the luscious and/or acrid colors, the fine, hand-drawn lines of the grid, the sly lure of the game board.

The game Voigt plays, however, is not the end game favored by postmodern polemicists. He is less self-consciously smart, more elegiacal. He doesn’t pronounce. He muses--on the boundaries of nature and culture, the line dividing the authentic from the artificial, and foremost, on how to reconcile a socio-cultural with a geopolitical agenda.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through July 24.