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Between 1973 and 1975, John Divola made an exploratory group of black and white photographs that built on the deadpan anonymity of Ed Ruscha's photo books while also scuffing up their pop-culture sheen. Divola's "Vandalism Series," shot mostly in abandoned houses, oozes the poetic mixture of lament and curiosity amid collapse that speaks of their conflicted moment in American history.Like Divola's slightly later yet better-known "Zuma Series," examples of which are in the Museum of Contemporary Art's current show, "Under the Big Black Sun," the artist took spray paint to ruined walls to explore a question dating back to camera work's earliest years: What is the relationship between painting and photography? The 67 prints at LAXART, which become steadily more involving as you work your way through the show, keep complicating the question, here updated to absorb abstract painting.

Silver paint echoes photographic silver printing, the dominant mode until color photographs moved into the foreground in the 1960s. Divola uses it to draw on walls, subtly announcing the light reflections that animate all photographic processes, and sometimes juxtaposing it with light-absorbent black marks. In some of the most compelling works, he shoots into corners formed by walls and floor or ceiling, emphasizing three-dimensional volumes that get flattened out by paint marks riding the surface.

Some works are rather arch, such as a businessman's lost wing-tip shoe painted silver, while others are savvy -- none more than a corner shot including a pair of sticks propped up to form a big "X," which transforms the photograph into an image of a canceled negative. Before the 1980s, photographs lived in an art-ghetto, a specialist's field with a separate history. Divola's photographic mash-up with painting would be instrumental in changing that, and these early works chart his eloquent path.

Christopher Knight
@twitter.com/KnightLAT

LAXART, 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 559-0166,
www.laxart.org

Photo: John Divola, "Untitled" from "Vandalism Series," 1973-75, black and white photograph. Credit: LAXART

latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/12/art-review-john-divola-at-laxart.html

Raymond Pettibon’s “Desire in Pursuyt of the Whole”
by ANDREW BERARDINI

All the gang is here. An open-mouthed munchkin, mouth pitched back in roaring vavoom, the Reagan-headed claymation adventurer Gumby, weird scientists, weirder hippies, butch baseball players, and a gang of distant surfers sliding down the faces of pristine blue curls, most of it accompanied by the clipped noir narrative and untraceable quotations of Raymond Pettibon’s scattered story, the one he’s been writing for decades. Not every piece contains an old character though, and there’s even an unfamiliar stage: a clutch of collages occupy part of the exhibition, curled edges of layer after layer, old ads and celebrity snapshots, battered Valentines and newspaper clippings, but mostly just drawings layered on drawings, some stripped and simple, others spooky and complex, all of them an all-over-the-place mess.

But there’s something about looking at a new exhibition by Raymond Pettibon that is always like looking at an exhibition by Raymond Pettibon. In a first blushing witness of the work, the language, the voice was all there, and this last viewing finds the same: the pitched-punk anger balanced against something altogether fragile, heartbroken, and literary. The visual language is like that of a cartoon that’s wandered far from its comic book origins and found an oasis where Egon Schiele nudes trade baseball cards and read hellfire religious tracts chock-full of hard-luck stories, good Christians falling prey to hippie Satanists. Since its public inception under the banner of SoCal punks Black Flag, Pettibon’s distinct visual style has grown older, stronger, the lines so confident that even when reckless are still inimitable (though many try). The style has not grown less thrilling in its familiarity. Pettibon is still like a good punk record, even if he’s managed a nuance and subtlety that was never punk.

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When Richard Serra was about seven years old he would walk along the water's edge at the beach near his home in California, then turn around and retrace his route back to where he had begun. Same sand, same surf, same small steps – yet somehow the reversed orientation gave rise to an experience that was palpably different and thus perplexed the small boy. But when he returned home and tried to explain this conundrum to his mother, she advised him, quite simply, to ‘never mind’.

Serra recounts this memory, included in an interview with Met exhibition curator Gary Garrels, in the catalogue for Richard Serra Drawing, as formative for him as an artist – not, one assumes, as formative as his oft-told childhood sighting of a tanker at a shipyard slipping slowly into the water, but formative nonetheless, perhaps in part because Serra clearly did not follow his mother's advice. To the contrary, Serra has dedicated the bulk of his artistic career to paying 'mind' to the perceptual experience of the human body in movement through space, time and its immediate physical environment – most successfully, but not exclusively, in his sculpture. And moreover he has done so while maintaining an insistent and even belligerent attitude of rejection towards artistic convention that, by the mere fact of existing as convention, in effect 'advised' him otherwise.


Richard Serra, Pacific Judson Murphy, 1978, paintstick on Belgian linen, two parts: 285 x 442 cm and 285 x 272 cm, private collection. Photo: Rob McKeever. © the artist

Richard Serra Drawing captures both aspects of the artist. The work on view is referred to collectively as 'drawing', although by rights much of it could (or should) be categorised otherwise. More germane than a quibble over terms, however, is that the works collectively transmit Serra's fierce drive to break with tradition and generate, via two-dimensional work, a physical experience different from what most two-dimensional art is held to be capable of, more akin to an ‘expanded field’ of drawing that might parallel the ‘expanded field’ of sculpture which he helped to initiate.


Richard Serra, No Mandatory Patriotism, 1989, paintstick on two sheets of paper, 237 x 534 cm, collection Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Rob McKeever. © the artist

This, in other words, is an experimental body of work, and among the more successful of these experiments is a series of drawings consisting of vast stretches of Belgian linen that have been thickly coated with black paintstick, then cut and hung with precision so as to meld seamlessly with their architectural container. InPacific Judson Murphy (1978), two blackened sheets of linen meet in the darkest of corners, obliterating all sense of juncture between the walls on which they stand; the grainy black of Taraval Beach (1977) fills the height of a nearly 20-foot-high wall and looms, even at a distance, over an entire room; the two identical components of Blank (1978) occupy opposing walls, activating a force-field-like space between them.


Richard Serra, The United States Government Destroys Art, 1989, paintstick on two sheets of paper, 287 x 547 cm, collection Eli and Edythe L. Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Dorthy Zeidman. © the artist

These works, in striving for an autonomous presence, share the qualities of much of Serra's sculpture; but they do so, fascinatingly, in an abstracted or distilled version, not reliant on the three-dimensional works' characteristic combination of real weight, perceived threat and fluid occupation of space. A series of diptychs from 1989 – The United States Government Destroys Art, The United States Courts Are Partial to Government and No Mandatory Patriotism – functioned in a similar fashion. The drawings consist of paired sheets of paper, each covered with black paintstick; like sheets of Serra's favoured Corten steel, the blackened sheets of paper seem to lean against each other, providing one another with the support necessary to remain upright and creating a small but powerfully charged space between them.

Not all of these experiments can be said to have resolved themselves with an equal degree of success – such is the nature of genuine experimentation – and the show's installation suffered from lapses of pacing and balance. But as in Serra's 1968 film, Hand Catching Lead (on view here along with Serra’s three other early ‘hand’ films), in which his disembodied hand attempts with intermittent success to catch falling pieces of lead, over the course of his career Serra has openly placed himself in situations where his reach exceeds his grasp; and in so doing, he has proven what an artistic heaven is for.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through 28 August

Source artreview.com