print January 1980

Jon Peterson

In his new work, a series of small shelters deposited at sites around downtown Los Angeles’ skid row, JON PETERSON has neatly grafted function and relevance onto the sadly barren tree of public sculpture, thereby infecting both the milk-fed G.S.A. branch and the adjustably megalomaniacal site-specific one.

Peterson’s work is small, portable, and playfully painted in bright primary colors. It is made to cover one supine body in relative comfort or more if desired. So much for scale, site-specificty, and color.

Intended as refuges for urban vagrants, Peterson made and put out four of the shelters

print January 1980

“Dialogue/Discourse/Research”

“Dialogue/Discourse/Research’’ gathers six people—David Antin, Eleanor Antin, Helen and Newton Harrison, Fred Lonidier, and Barbara Strasen. Despite a rhetorical attempt to consider the six allied by a post-modernist attitude, in that ”they recognize that there is no domain of human investigation that can not also be the province of the visual artist," the evidence as shown here supports no such alliance. Mr. Antin, as a poet, hardly qualifies as a visual artist—his contribution to the exhibition is a transcript of a recitation he made at the museum. Similarly, Strasen’s work is really not

print November 1979

Karen Carson

At least part of the impact of Karen Carson’s new paintings is attributable to their unfamiliarity. In her elliptical oil on canvas pieces and the smaller water-based paintings on paper Carson establishes a series of vortices—configurations of stacked, jagged, overlapping planes of variously colored arcs, ziggurats, L-shapes, triangles, and odd geometric fragments. These paintings are radically different both from her previous work (especially the starkly rendered, illusionistic drawings of objects for which she is best known) and from that of any other abstract painter in town. In the turn away

print November 1979

Christopher Georgesco

Origami comes to mind amidst Christopher Georgesco’s new work, most of it smallish maquettes for large steel sculptures. In fact, origami could serve as a metaphor for the undeniably logical, surprisingly poetic way his forms have grown from one another in his work of the past five years. Georgesco’s earliest pieces, narrow, cast concrete totems about 10 feet high, were elegantly shaped so that each side read in planar counterpart to the other three. These obelisklike pieces subsequently developed into a series of concrete and steel tripods. A single profile of one of the earlier horizontal

print November 1979

Michael Brewster

In the other-than-pejorative meanings of regionalism there must be an entry for indigenous style. Whenever a place is sufficiently nurturing or provocative to engender a look, technical or iconographic, among a number of resident artists what is shared and why should be considered. Los Angeles and its environs seem to foster experimentation with perceptual situations, most of them about light, often sunlight, as is evident in the work of such locals as Bob Irwin, Eric Orr, Maria Nordman, and Jim Turrell, all of them well known. Less well known, but at work in an area congruent with this group,

print November 1979

Mike Kelley

Allegorical syllogisms are the stuff of Mike Kelley’s performances, and a pretense to logic underlies everything he does. Kelley presented three of his latest skits in a recent performance, while a show about poltergeists he had made collaboratively with David Askevold was on view. The simplest of the three pieces, My Space, showed Kelley at his maniacal, cogent best. In it he inveighs against plants since “if my behavior can affect plants/plants can influence my behavior.” The diatribe is punctuated by Kelley’s wild beating of a drum as he circles an unsuspecting succulent. Even as he insists

Richard Armstrong