ART REVIEW : L.A. Artists Put History Into ‘Present Tense’

The current show at the Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, has a clever handle. Called “Present Tense,” it includes six lesser-known locals and promises to talk about the tensions of the moment. Oh, boy! Another exercise in contemporary Angst .

Some viewers will be relieved that the exhibition--organized by curator Marie de Alcuaz and on view to Nov. 6--does not quite deliver on its moniker. If anything, the art scrutinizes the glorious past of Modernism, alluding to everything from Impressionism to Cubism while musing on aesthetic giants from Seurat to Picasso.

It feels more worried than tense, ruminating on the dilemma of squaring classic Modernism with today’s artistic problems. Of course, you can’t go around calling an exhibition “Six Artists in Search of a Way to Update the Past” or, more to the point, “Six Artists Who Still Haven’t Quite Figured Out Who They Art.”

There is some social aptness in examining work that grapples with our culture’s pervasive conservatism. It is certainly worth noting that this generation of artists seeks inspiration in artistic grandparents like Joan Miro rather than near siblings like Keith Haring. On the other hand, that relevance does not quite hide the fact that this is in many ways a regulation presentation of still-emerging artists, accomplished enough to engage public interest yet still betraying symptoms of artistic immaturity by running off in five directions at once.

Three painters on view each do their variation on the theme. Laurel Paley makes big dun-brown atmospheres haunted by the shades of Miro and Arshile Gorky. Abstract arcs of black form into primitive men and beasts. Almost unnoticed, small cartoon figures wander about mumbling to themselves, refugees from Pop Culture lost in the steaming purgatory of the primal subconscious.

It is an interesting expressive conceit not yet quite matched by its execution. It promises both elegance and wit but winds up meandering thinly off the point.

Ken Hurbert creeps into the sanctuaries of Kandinsky and Matta, tiptoeing out with curved red lightning bolts and gem-like science-fiction shapes. He arranges them along ceremonial paths on terra firma or firmament, then annotates the whole with a fringe of bright ordinary beach balls.

Hurbert and Paley are each up-to-date in their mixture of differing artistic grammars. Theirs is the visual version of esoteric study of signs and symbols so much abroad these days. Profundity may be born of literary semiotics but in art the results appear more and more as a species of in-group cleverness.

At first blush, Dan Connally’s paintings look downright archeological in his earnest blend of Paris circa 1909 and New York circa 1948. Given half a chance, however, his tornado-struck Cubist still lifes show virtues of painterly seriousness. The guy is not trying to cute his way out of visual problems. It remains to be seen whether this work’s arteries harden into academicism or flow forth into the heartbeat of slowly advancing classical painting.

Jay Dunitz’s art epitomizes the problem of confrontation between the aesthetic past and technological future. His pictures clearly started life as photographs but--heavily reworked--they pass backwards through Pointillism to Futurism and forward into the computer age. They are collectively titled “Pacific Light.” One looks like a silhouette of a tree trunk done in scratch board revealing a flaming prismatic background. Another resembles a field of Monet poppies run through a computer and displayed on a television screen. The work’s engaging experimental matter results in a massive aesthetic migraine. A lyric sensitivity is robbed of substance and made coldly chemical by domineering technical processes.

Two sculptors seem to have been included with the help of a crowbar. It is a real stretch to link Shelley Hill back to, say, Kurt Schwitters. Her earliest ancestors really seem to be contemporaries like Brian Hunt or Charles Arnoldi. She makes cantilevered wall-hangings by banging together scraps of wooden lath and splashing them with paint. Results look vaguely like architectural struts and braces cheered up and made weightless by paint and placement. The inclusion of a disharmonious fantasy house facade suggests Louise Nevelson and the possibility that this art does not really know where it is going.

If Lila LoCurton seeks the past, it is either that of ancient Stonehenge or of recent Process art. She makes odd, wiggly pieces of Fiberglas that look purely accidental but stand in rows humorously identical to one another. One piece boogies along the floor, another ladders up a wall. Both look like abstract distillations of R. Crumb’s famous drawing “Keep on Truckin’.”

OK, “Present Tense” is a mild red herring that at least reminds us that art is as much about watching the journey as arriving at the station.