“To stimulate responses . . . to all these events thru strange and enjoyable devices—a game with a serious purpose,” so Larry Halperin introduces his “Visual Landscape Maze” at the San Francisco Museum of Art. It is a peculiar game, most limited by its set of rules. The game is strictly confined to the visual aspect of our environment, neglecting any design reflection of the psychological or physiological senses such as taste, touch, smell or sound. Also, this visual presentation relies upon static 2-dimensional images to represent the dynamic multi-dimensional human environment, omitting all 3-dimensional forms, space, or space-time relationships. The form of the game is chaos (“A state of things in which change is supreme”); the format a large collage of art and non-art, without beginning, middle or end.
Bound by these rules, the success of the game depends upon communication. These 2-dimensional scraps from a landscape architect’s wall are but dead images of previous live events; which are analogous to the theatre stubs a college girl pins to her bulletin board. The college coed recreates the previous moment in her memory through the aide of the symbol—the ticket stub. The viewer, however, lacks the coed’s direct memory as a guide and must rely solely upon his imagination to conjure up from these small fragments the living reality of the human environment. Thus, on the playing level, points are won or lost as the various images create or reflect this energy of life.
Amid the clutter of grotesque novelty machines and senseless peepholes, the two-dimensional images in themselves range from the stimulating and meaningful to the dull and meaningless. However, exhibited along with these more conventional graphic pieces are several very interesting sketches of landscape design proposals for public places. Emitting a strange Kafka-like glow, these drawings consist chiefly of empty people moving in vast places, within which planting, textures, and forms all dissolve into blank, formless, lifeless, spaces. The sense of “Anti-Life” as created in the sketches reflects and underlines the whole exhibition. A collage of many diverse parts devoted to the human environment is not necessarily a composition without radiating a sense of life as a binder. Blinking lights and jarred pictures do not suffice by themselves to breathe life into dead images: the communication depends upon the empathy of the viewer to create this sense of vitality. Without it, the game is lost.
Considered as essentially a series of visual experiences, the “Maze” interests and stimulates; as a simple game it is possible for both the viewer and Mr. Halperin to “win.” The landscape architect is one of many working within the total human environment and the visual aspect is only a part of the total scope of his expression. The only danger inherent in an exhibition such as this is that the simple little game becomes confused with the more serious, disciplined work involved in creatively shaping man’s total environment.
––Bruce David
