The Washington Post

Galleries: Art That Seeks Its Higher Purpose
By Jessica Dawson, Special to the Washington Post
Saturday, April 1, 2006; Page C01


In the 1960s, a crippling case of anxiety drove American artists to the couch. What, they asked, makes art art? Must it be painting or sculpture, or will an idea suffice? How can art be political -- and should it be? Artists sweated over these issues until their symptoms abated, but their conflicts were never fully resolved. More recently, symptoms returned. Anxiety, listlessness, ennui. Art's identity crisis isn't over.

To see what I mean, check out "Other Than Art," a show curated by Milena Kalinovska and on view at G Fine Art, Curator's Office and Provisions Library. The provocative exhibition invites introspection and watches art indict itself for ineffectiveness, or trumpet its role as societal savior, or just tune out.

(Though "Other Than Art" is at three locations, your enjoyment won't require a marathon. The dense hang at G Fine Art is the show to catch. Down the hall in the same building, the tiny gallery at Curator's Office offers a mini Virgil Marti exhibition you'll be happy you saw. The handful of works at Dupont Circle's Provision's Library, however, feel like an afterthought. The works discussed below, unless otherwise indicted, are at G Fine Art.)

Kalinovska assembled a blue-chip group of 16 young artists whose work echoes the '60s in form and attitude. Yet the show is no throwback. In that earlier decade, artists making waves in America were more than likely Americans themselves. Participants in "Other Than Art," on the other hand, hold an array of passports -- German, Slovenian, South African. And their critiques are more biting because of it.

Marjetica Potrc, based in Slovenia's capital, Ljubljana, shows works on paper that take aim at a strategy common in the '60s (and just as frequent today): co-opting everyday objects for artworks. The series's loose narrative proceeds in comic book style. One panel tells of a young architect who steals a toilet seat from an art exhibition. Text explains that she "would rather see the toilet seat put to good use than exhibited." An adjacent panel finds the modern-day Robin Hood ensconced in a taxi, toilet seat in hand. In a world where many go without necessities, why should artists waste our resources?

Of course, a toilet seat isn't exactly a barrel of crude. But what about fluorescent tubes, Dan Flavin's signature medium in the '60s? Chilean-born artist Ivan Navarro made a stepladder from yellow fluorescents tubes, a nod to Flavin's sculptures but also, perhaps, a jab at them. The ladder sure looks sturdy, but I wouldn't trust my weight on it or any of the other contraptions Navarro shows here. His works seem to ask if art can deliver on its promises.

Navarro's harshest indictments come in the exceptional video "Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker," which might be the best work in this show. The piece opens with two men wheeling a grocery cart made from fluorescent tubes into New York City's Chelsea gallery district. On a sidewalk outside the tony clothing store Balenciaga, the fellows jimmy a street lamp to reroute electricity to fire the cart's bulbs. Day turns to night as the cart feeds off municipal juice.

The power-sucking art object amounts to a minor act of civic disobedience, yet it shames art and artists by implication. Captioned with lyrics from a traditional Mexican revolutionary song that appear on-screen, it suggests revolution -- but it's unclear who the enemy is. It's hard to tell whether artists come out heroes or parasites. As for art markets, they can hardly be blamed for homelessness and inequalities of wealth, but greedy Chelsea isn't exactly helping the problem.

Lucy Orta's installation and drawings posit what she calls "Nexus Architecture," which consists of plans for the alteration of clothes and camping gear that bring new life to the term "social body." An extra arm is sewn into a shirt to accommodate attachment to the hand of a child -- a sweet, utopian notion. Her large-scale tent installation has a more cynical cast. Six sleeping bags are sewn into a central tent, jutting out like spokes in a wheel, suggesting a hermetic body without entrance or exit. Or a place where pod people grow. Claustrophobia is the downside of profound attachment.

Over at Curator's Office, Marti offers a hallucinogenic distraction from the self-examination. A spiritual descendant of '60s art's most drugged-out members, Marti encourages escapist fantasies. He set up a kind of faux bedroom scene, with a rumpled quilt, pillows, a tissue box and lamp hanging overhead. The fabric covering all these items is printed with images from a '70s-era self-help book for couples; the pictures indicate grief, guilt and angst -- plus a dose of melodrama. Pillows and quilt are backed by silver fabric, a nod to Andy Warhol's inflatables. Gallery walls are papered with a shiny silver print of sleeping pills. Though the empty "bed" has an air of melancholy expectancy, there's little genuine feeling here and a lot of flash, shine and irony. Perhaps the work reflects the art world's escapist tendencies.

I've made "Other Than Art" sound pretty grim. Yet there's a countercurrent of utopianism here, in Orta's clothing, Navarro's jaunty ladders and in the form of the exhibition itself. That three venues share the show eradicates ownership and makes this a communal enterprise. Navarro's stepladder stands in a common area outside G Fine Art's glass door, Elissa S. Levy's "Soldier Doily Trim" runs in syncopated rhythms along corridor walls. Artworks literally bridge two venues, collapsing the differences between them. To its great credit, "Other Than Art" may have touched on art's most important aim: challenging boundaries.