Pop: The Next Wave

This year’s installment of the City of Los Angeles’ Individual Artist Fellowships, “C.O.L.A. 2002,” is notable for two reasons. First, a one-time grant from the National Endowment for the Arts has funded four additional awards for designers and architects. Second, the diverse works by the 14 winners are remarkably consistent in the ways that they update Pop art. If you plan to visit the Warhol retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, be sure to drive a few extra blocks to the Japanese American National Museum, where the paintings, installations and displays by the fellowship recipients draw on the legacy of the prince of Pop.

Warhol’s great achievement was to take modern art public, without dumbing it down. More than any other 20th century artist, he transformed the largely private relationship between an artist and his work into an openly social affair--an unpredictable, often tempestuous relationship between works and viewers. Art is dead, his trademark images continue to demonstrate, until it leaves the studio and stirs an audience’s passions. It really comes to life when it gets a large crowd arguing.

Nearly all of the works in the C.O.L.A. exhibition put a high priority on art’s public component. As big as a billboard, Alexis Smith’s wall painting plays off Robert Indiana’s Pop icon, which spells out the word “Love” against a bright background. In place of the sweet feeling that named a summer in the 1960s, Smith juxtaposes less sentimental words: “Lust,” “Rust” and “Dust.”

Printed to read as a compact sound poem, her Scrabble-like composition begins as a cheery ditty (“LU-RU-DU”) and ends with stuttering (“ST-ST-ST”). Faster than a blinking eye, it leaps from Dr. Seuss silliness to Samuel Beckett seriousness. Smith has tipped each letter “U” at a sharp angle, reminding viewers just whom her efficient memento mori addresses.

Jo Ann Callis’ gigantic painting of a baby’s face similarly draws people into the picture. Rather than treating viewers as if they were infants--by instructing us just what to think--her portrait presents a child whose inscrutable expression elicits a wide range of responses, all of which say more about the viewers than Callis’ provocatively mute painting.

Likewise, Linda Stark’s potent little paintings and prints show that art’s consequences are more important than an artist’s intentions. Each of her abstract images is a square black field on which floats a pair of lipstick-red shapes. Inspired by the marks found on the bellies of female black widow spiders, Stark’s vivid emblems also recall hourglasses, party dresses and lips, either pursed for a kiss or prepared to whisper a secret.

For their parts, Robbie Conal and Meg Cranston focus on art’s relationship to entertainment, and the political implications of each. Conal’s hand-painted photomontage, which juxtaposes an image of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger with one of Archie Bunker yelling at his son-in-law, suggests that politicians and actors have more in common than we usually assume. Cranston’s installation--six soapbox-size stages, eight stools and five useful diagrams--invites viewers to finish five archetypal narratives. Spurred on by small clues, the real dramas unfold in your imagination.

In contrast, Hilja Keading’s video projection is tedious and overbearing. Shot at a rodeo while the national anthem was being played, her work brings a bit of the outside world into the museum only to suggest that the outside world is a lot more interesting than what she has done with it.

Margaret Honda’s “Exercise for Untitled Sculpture” falls flat for different reasons. Formally, it’s boring. And the story behind her sprawling polyethylene piece doesn’t help. Discovering that Honda’s monochrome blob once occupied an entire room in a friend’s home fails to redeem its timid self-referentiality.

Attractive landscape paintings by Constance Mallinson and Frank Romero provide a bit of respite. And Daniel Wheeler’s odd landscape sculpture takes those conventional pleasures into three dimensions. Titled “My Pompeii” and made of linoleum tiles that have been cut to follow the faceted contours of a digitized mountain range, his piece provides a strong link to C.O.L.A.’s design and architecture category.

Of the works by the four award winners who are in this category, Michael Worthington’s are the most engaging. His playful posters have much in common with Smith’s “Lust/Rust/Dust.” Each of the graphic designer’s light-jet prints consists of a pop song’s lyrics, printed in a typeface and palette that put a curious spin on its tempo and thrust. For example, the words to “All the Young Punks,” by the Clash, collide in superimposed colors.

The other works, by architects Frederick Fisher, Warren W. Wagner and Cameron McNall, are not as compelling. Part of the problem is that the curators who selected them have installed them to suggest that architecture and art are indistinguishable. The press release puts it this way: “A one-time grant from the NEA has funded additional awards this year for four artists working in design and architecture.” That’s just plain wrong.

By any measure, Wagner is an architect working in architecture. His display of models, floor plans and elevations addresses the relationship between a home’s materials and the amount of sunshine that hits them. His comprehensive presentation may be a bit pedantic, but it’s not art.

The same goes for Fisher’s six drawings and digital prints. Although his images of a development in Berlin are tasteful, they are still architectural studies, sketches made to get a job done.

And McNall is the opposite of an artist working in architecture. He is an architect who has completed an outdoor art project. On the rooftops of seven buildings in Hollywood, he mounted the silhouettes of characters from such movies as “Easy Rider,” “North by Northwest” and “The Wild Bunch.” At sunset, McNall’s homemade billboards cast shadows on nearby buildings. At the museum, a dozen photographs, four models and a videotape document his amusing pieces of in-the-street theater.

Although architecture and contemporary art are profoundly social endeavors, they’re not the same things. Architecture is the highest form of building. Art is the highest form of object-making. “C.O.L.A. 2002” would make more sense if its organizers clarified these differences rather than making a muddle of them. Just because art is accessible doesn’t mean that everyone’s an artist.

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“C.O.L.A. 2002: Individual Artist Fellowships,” Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., (213) 625-0414, through June 30. Closed Mondays. Adults, $6; students and children, $3.