His Own Man

H.C. Westermann (1922-1981) never fit the mainstream profile of a great American artist. That’s one reason (among others) that he was in fact great--as is plainly demonstrated by the large and absorbing retrospective survey of his sculpture that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary. Westermann’s art has a singular eloquence.

Westermann was born and raised in Los Angeles and went to art school in Chicago. He resided there and in Connecticut, but he never lived in New York, where career-minded artists once gravitated.

Like many veterans of World War II, he took advantage of the GI Bill to pursue art studies (at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago). Unlike most, he then promptly reenlisted in the Marines and served in Korea. Death, not surprisingly, is a constant theme in his sculpture, but it’s always rendered in a deeply personal, unheroic sense.

Westermann’s work is informed by a critical admiration for artists as diverse as the elegantly stylized Elie Nadelman and the puckish Marcel Duchamp, both European expatriates to the United States. But his sculpture never seems concerned with wrestling dominant School of Paris styles to the ground, as much art of the 1950s and 1960s did.

And his work is craft-intensive. Who else would--or could--make a 6-foot sculpture of a sailor’s knot from cut, laminated and polished sheets of Douglas fir? Westermann’s sculpture has the look of having emerged from a tidy workshop out in the garage, not from an urban atelier or studio.

Westermann, in other words, has many of the hallmarks of an eccentric outsider. These alien qualities even underscore his embrace by the Whitney Museum of American Art, which championed folk art, regularly included him in biennials and organized the last Westermann retrospective, a quarter-century ago. (Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art assembled the one now at MOCA.) The artist’s departure from an aesthetic standard set and monitored in New York has always been important in assessments of his achievements. It’s been used to set him apart.

Until now. Today, through the forces of globalization, our perception of art and its relationship to cultural centers and peripheries is changing drastically. Simultaneously, as Manhattan’s well of new art runs dry, Westermann’s place in history is beginning to look quite distinct. He’s gone from being an outsider on the inside to being just a terrific artist. He’s exotic no more.

Westermann has instead become a father of us all. In the end, what important 20th century artist was not eccentric, alien and outside the routine norms of contemporary social life?

“Memorial to the Idea of Man if He Was an Idea” (1958) is a key American sculpture of its decade, and only partly because it breaks from established formal traditions of casting and carving and moves aggressively in the direction of assemblage. It’s key because it’s a searingly apt portrait of its American moment.

Suitably, the body of Westermann’s memorial is a pine box. Built with the finesse of a skilled cabinetmaker, the body is topped by a head in the form of a castle. A single bloodshot eye stares out from the center of the face. A palace built on mortality, it’s part lumbering Cyclops, part sly One-Eyed Jack.

Beneath the staring red, white and blue eye hangs a distinctly phallic nose, which dangles above a ruby-red-lipped orifice. A digit rises straight from the top of the head, while a tiny globe is perched like a basketball on the finger’s tip. The crenelated castle wall that rings the head doubles as a crew cut.

With hands on hips and mouth agape--a silhouetted figure can be glimpsed inside the mouth, gesticulating wildly--this cheerfully monstrous cartoon-figure seems ready to declaim. What is in its heart? Open the cabinet door and two chambers inside its body are lined with pop-bottle caps. On top, a shelf holds two toys: a headless tin baseball player and a circus acrobat. On the shelf below is a sinking battleship.

Westermann wove autobiographical elements into all his work. He was an antiaircraft machine-gunner aboard the USS Enterprise in 1945, during attacks by Japanese kamikaze pilots, and after the war he traveled through California, China and Japan working as an acrobat. But you don’t need to know his personal story to read the simple symbols in Westermann’s lovingly crafted memorial to Everyman. Its soul is light and gay, but below deck things look grim.

The retrospective is filled with works like this--feisty, funny, heartfelt, blunt about human failings, obsessed with mortality and generous in spirit. Many works have a toy-like quality--boats and robots are recurrent favorites--which asserts art’s role as play for adults. Their careful craftsmanship makes them seem like gifts: “I made this for you.”

Boxes are another subset of Westermann’s work. “Untitled (Sardine Box)” (1973) features an inlaid silhouette of a dark ship on its lid, which is held open by a brass chain. Inside, glass-topped wooden compartments are lined up in rows and stacked in layers. Each one holds an opened sardine can, its own lid rolled back on a metal key, empty like an expectant coffin.

The allusion to death in the hold of a ship, packed in like sardines and swimming with the fishes, is clear. The work links the artist’s memories of War World II and Korea with the then-current horrors of Vietnam.

What’s touching, though, is the listing of materials Westermann imprinted directly into the wood, with their discreetly considered vernacular references: “The death ship is a purple heart wood from S[outh] A[merica]. The other inlays are pine, as is the box.” Material craft becomes a humanistic signifier of prudence, care and thoughtful responsibility.

There’s also considerable wit and wry sexual innuendo in Westermann’s art. “Walnut Box” (1964) is a box made from, yes, walnut, and it’s filled to the brim with unshelled walnuts, too. It’s a treasure chest of nuts, deployed for their sexual punch and as a psychological description of its maker: nuts!

On the other side of the coin, “Great Mother Womb” (1957) is a lozenge-shaped cavity, somewhat like a boat tipped on end, amazingly crafted from wood and raised on a pedestal. An incantatory poem is stamped into the open wooden door, while chicken-wire glass at the back allows radiant light inside the mysterious tunnel. It’s a flabbergasting object.

The exhibition is large--about 90 sculptures--although a number of works, several of them important, were pulled from the show by lenders. The Geffen is a much-loved exhibition space, but it is not climate-controlled. When MOCA decided to add the Andy Warhol retrospective to its schedule, the Westermann show had to be moved from the Grand Avenue building to the Geffen warehouse.

Missing are the menacing little totem “The Evil New War God (S.O.B.)” (1958) and the death-ship steering wheel “Antimobile” (1965), both from the Whitney and among the artist’s better-known works. Most disappointing is the elimination of seven of the 11 bound sketchbooks. The four that remain give some sense of Westermann’s aggressive, animated style of drawing, where he worked out the ideas that became sculptures.

Still, there is enough here to give a full sense of Westermann’s development as an artist. It’s a show not to be missed. And if you caught Mike Kelley’s exhibition last month at Patrick Painter Inc. in Santa Monica, you’ll know Westermann’s relevance for major artists today. His memorializing sculptures and Robby-the-Robot-like figures are direct ancestors of Kelley’s strange, poignant monument to astronaut John Glenn, cobbled together from broken crockery dredged from the Detroit River.

Artist Billy Al Bengston, a longtime friend of Westermann, designed the Geffen’s spare installation. Its pearl gray walls, mustard yellow floors and wood-framed window displays are given an appropriately surprising twist: The yellow paint on the floor is feathered at the edges where it meets the wall, creating an ethereal yet vaguely toxic cloud of unobtrusive color.

But there’s a drawback. Several sculptures are shown on shelves or on pedestals pushed against the walls. You cannot see them in the round, which turns sculpture into graphic design and unnecessarily limits our experience.

Take “They Couldn’t Put Humpty-Dumpty Back Together Again” (1980), a monumental tic-tac-toe board of exquisitely crafted exotic woods and one of Westermann’s final works. He placed the three Xs and two O’s on the game board’s grid in a pattern that lets you know that, no matter what your next move, you lose. More than a simple graphic marker, it’s a lovingly crafted material object whose physical presence redeems our fate.

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“H.C. Westermann,” Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo, (213) 626-6222, through Sept. 8. Closed Mondays.