ART REVIEW : A Good Motive With Mixed Results

Achieving mediocrity may be a bureaucratic virtue, but it is not an artistic one. An exhibition of 13 lesser-known local artists raises the point. Called “Take 2,” it’s a collaborative effort between USC’s Fisher Gallery and the nearby California Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park. It’s also part of LAX/94, the second installment of a citywide biennial celebration of the visual and performing arts. A celebration, being like a party, induces generosity and inclusion.

In the grip of such effusive emotion, there’s a tendency to want to give a break to artists who are unfairly ignored. In this equation, “unfair” becomes equated with “ignored.” The standard of selection then becomes a search for artists nobody else wants to show, forgetting that there may be jolly good reason to leave them in peace.

The work here isn’t terrible, but it is divided both between two galleries and two awkward aesthetic polarities. One large fraction belongs to the tradition of abstract modernism. Its ideas and masters are so well established it virtually belongs to the past. Wringing a new insight from such a mature concept is very tough.

Claire Falkenstein is certainly the best-known veteran artist on view. Justly admired for her metal sculpture and gates, here she paints. Her imagery combines modernist figuration in the tradition of Matisse, with rather timid borrowings from contemporary underground graffiti muralists. The graft doesn’t take. It does, however, point to the exhibition’s stated theme. It intends to reflect the state of the Angeltown psyche after the traumas of riot, earthquake and fiscal erosion.

Abstract art leans more to universal than literal themes. Seeing this one in other practitioners requires pretty fancy mental contortions. Yvonne Cole Meo shows a series of rust-colored monoprints. The first is divided into four areas of contorted lines. Following sheets show these shapes consumed in agitated, flame-like brushwork. At a stretch the suite could represent the conflagration of a human brain, but that’s too programmatic. The work has enough problems of its own.

Rochelle Nicholas-Booth makes a familiar form of abstraction by juxtaposing rectangles of various paint and metal textures. Sue Dirksen gets a little dynamism into “Emergence” by carrying a spiked projectile shape across 13 mottled tan panels.

All artists in the exhibition happen to be women. No great point is made of this, which is as it should be. There is, however, considerable emphasis on home, nurturing and the protection of children among those artists dealing in graphic themes.

They make up that fraction belonging to the future. The talent is raw and looks unschooled. It tends to recall the Social Realism of the 1920s and evoke artists like Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood and Romare Bearden, but without any sense of conscious quotation. There is no reasonable way to respond to such work except with patience. It has simply not arrived where it is headed.

A couple of these artists are wedged between what is concluded and what is to come. Memory plays a large role in photographic prints by Dorothy Braudy. They concentrate on pet dogs and zoo animals, often quite touchingly. Their subtle melancholy is jarringly contradicted by a polemical concept piece centering around a big game hunter confirming that the great tusked elephant he has just shot is truly dead.

Two artists are well down the path to artistic sophistication. Marina Moevs’ paintings bring a hint of Edvard Munch’s decadence to scenes of ordinary suburban landscape. Alysse Stepanian paints patterned domestic interiors overlaid with architectural plans and lettering. They are a curious combination of reflection and force, of forbearance and analysis.

Others hover somewhere between Expressionism and folk art. A wonderful comic energy informs Cynthia White’s scenes of domestic life. Franceska Schifrin lives part time in Haiti. Anger and mourning show in her images of dead kids among the rubble.

These days nobody knows where the world or its art is headed. Clearly artists here have feelings about an aesthetic that confronts and shapes reality. If they haven’t yet fashioned the visual language that makes it relevant, well, neither has anyone else.

Other participants include Toni Love, Sheila Batiste, Phoebe Beasley and Shirley Levine.

* USC, Fisher Gallery, closed today, Sundays and Mondays, (213) 740-4561; CAAM, 600 State Drive Exposition Park, closed Mondays, to Jan. 22. (213) 744-7432.