ART REVIEW : Conceptual Art Thrives in ‘Presence’

Interest in Conceptual art, its complex history since the 1960s and its broad influence into our own day appear to be on the rise.

The Museum of Contemporary Art is organizing the first--and what it hopes will be the definitive--history of American and European Conceptualism, for display in the spring of 1994. Later this week, the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara opens a more schematic presentation, an 18-artist show called “Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art.” And currently, the Otis/Parsons Art Gallery is offering “The Presence of Absence,” wherein the Conceptually based work of 13 artists has been assembled.

Three reasons might be cited for this apparent surge of interest in Conceptualism. One is the simple fact that a full generation has passed since the emergence of this art, in which ideas are given precedence over their material fabrication.

Another is that, although no full accounting of the origins of Conceptual art has yet been attempted, either in a show or book, its influence on other artists, past and present, has been incalculable. Conceptually based art is long-since commonplace.

The third is that we have just come through a period in which the material object of art, as a luxury commodity for eager consumption, has been at center stage. The commodity fetish would seem to be at distinct odds with certain of the original aims of Conceptualism, creating a tension that begs further examination.

This third reason appears to be the big motive for the small show at Otis/Parsons. “The Presence of Absence,” which was organized by free-lance curator Nina Felshin for Independent Curators Inc., has been touring college galleries and community art centers for two years. A basic tenet of Conceptual art has been that the idea, which is what counts, precedes and thus might make unnecessary the actual execution of an art object. Since the idea for “The Presence of Absence” of course preceded the show’s execution, it’s worth noting that, although executed at Otis in 1991-92, the show was conceived in 1987.

That is the year eight of the artists--Judith Barry, Daniel Buren, Daniel L. Collins, Sol Lewitt, Lorie Novak, Buky Schwartz, Leni Schwendinger and Krzysytof Wodiczko--were commissioned by the curator to make new works for the exhibition, filling out selections of earlier, existing works from the others. Its organizing principle must therefore be examined against the very different art scene that existed five years back--that is, against the dominant backdrop of an art market whose dizzying upward spiral seemed unlimited, and immediately following the wholesale return of old-fashioned paint on canvas to international prominence in the early 1980s.

As a result, among the “absences” emphatically “present” in an exhibition containing virtually no objects is a subtle but nonetheless distinct moralizing tone. While never stated outright, “The Presence of Absence” seems intended to demonstrate another, more “appropriate” aesthetic way.

Perhaps this is why one of the more inadvertently arresting moments in the otherwise generally lackluster group of installations will be found in Judith Barry’s wall painting. Consisting of a sequence of schematic images, alternating between a linear description of a tepee and of a house and each carrying bits of text, a wholly unexpected absence turns everything on its head--and in ways the artist could hardly have anticipated.

To see how it’s important to know the show’s modus operandi . All 13 artists had been asked to submit plans, instructions or diagrams for works of art that could be fabricated by others at the various exhibition sites. (At Otis/Parsons, gallery director Anne Ayres organized a class of students around the show, and the 13 installations were fabricated by them.) Barry’s piece is described in the catalogue as “examining the course of white domination of native Americans.” In order to fill in several blanks in her bits of printed text, those executing her piece were asked to research Indian tribes in their locale who had been forced to relocate to other parts of the country.

Ayres’ students dutifully followed instructions, but they found that no such tribes existed locally. The history of white brutality against American Indians was no less tragic here than elsewhere, but it did not conform to the pattern supposed by Barry. So, the students had to leave several spaces blank in her wall painting, and they wrote a vaguely exasperated label to explain the omissions.

In good Conceptualist form, Barry’s idea preceded the execution of the piece, driving its creation like a machine; however, the execution here managed to expose the weakness of the presumptuous idea. The machine cracked up. The moralizing tone of the exhibition, in general, and of Barry’s piece, in particular, wittily got the rug pulled out from under it by a couple of finger-wagging students.

Two related types of work dominate the show: Projections, in which ephemeral slides are projected on surrounding walls; and wall paintings, in which ephemeral images are projected on surrounding walls and then painted in place. The painted geometric projections by Schwartz, Patrick Ireland and Justen Ladda are frankly silly, mere extrapolations into real space of old-fashioned Cubist multiple perspective. The slide shows by Wodiczko, Lorie Novak and Leni Schwendinger are pale and self-absorbed exercises in now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t theatrics.

Dan Graham’s 1976 “Projections on a Gallery Window,” which projects onto a translucent scrim a changing array of slides of current exhibitions in area commercial galleries, effectively blurs intransigent boundaries between artistic forms and their aesthetic containers, commercial and nonprofit. Collins, whose anamorphic projections of signs for the United States, the globe, the Pentagon and a cowboy hat together reads like a rebus, deftly conjures relationships between our location on the political map and how we perceive.

Standard issue stripes by Buren, a typical pencil wall-drawing by Lewitt and now-familiar bromides by Jenny Holzer (programmed into an existing electric sign downtown at LACE, but oddly represented at Otis by a Holzer sign borrowed from a local collector) round out the show, whose single most compelling work happens to have been created by Lawrence Weiner in 1968--ironically, the early heyday of Conceptual art. “A 36x36 inch removal to the lathing or support wall of plaster or wallboard from a wall,” as the recreated work is descriptively titled, is just that: a square hole, cut directly in the gallery wall, which exposes the wall’s hidden structural innards.

Rather like a “negative” painting, Weiner’s absent square throws a big question mark into our easy assumption that art’s highest function is to reveal a supposedly hidden universe of thought and feeling, lying in wait just below the visible surface of the world. More profound and artistically far-reaching implications emerge from this deceptively simple piece than from most of the rest of the works in the show combined. It’s a classic--and reason enough to look forward to future excavations of the history of Conceptual art.

* At Otis/Parsons Art Gallery, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0555), through Feb. 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.