San Francisco
FRI FEB 4 00 05:08:20 FROM MARK VAN PROYEN
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Victor Cartagena at CATHARINE CLARK. 2 December-15 January
Bruce Burris at BRAUNSTEIN/QUAY, 11 January-12 February
Luisa Kazanas at JENNJOY. 2 December-22 January
 

Two days after San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown won his controversial reelection, I was greeted with a grim reminder of what was at stake in the political contest between 'old Frisco" and the rapid proliferation of new money. It came in the form of an apparently destitute homeless man holding a cardboard placard while sitting motionless upon a traffic divider. The placard read, "Will hold sign for food," indicating that the conceptual ideas of Joseph Kosuth and John Baldessari had somehow influenced this down-and-out representative of the invisible other half who cannot partake of the IPO bounty offered by the Silicon Valley/multimedia-gulch wealth engine, or the newly yuppified San Francisco that has become the sterilized playpen for that engine's fortunate beneficiaries.

Now, the important question is, How will this most recent reconfiguration of wealth and privilege affect the art that is seen and produced in the area? Judging from Victor Cartagena's quartet of large multimedia works on framed sheets of large coffee-stained paper (the best in an exhibition entitled "Collector As Curator,  Cartagena's work was selected by art  patrons Ellen and Sun Hui Chang), money  may now be doing the talking, but in this  particular case, the art that it is talking  about is as psychosocially conscious and  topical as ever. Like the aforementioned placard holder, Cartagena uses signage to exhort and extort--only here it is for the viewer's engaged and thoughtful attention rather than food. Each of his works features a centrally placed male figure depicted in graphite or charcoal, most often directly facing the viewer. The recurring figure is without hair and often seems to be in a state of confinement that is underscored by sinister, collaged leather straps. The figure is a "subject" not only because of his emphatic centrality but also because he is depicted as being subjected to nebulous torture, which is intensified by the viewer's vicarious observation of his plight. The figure in one work holds a crude sign on cardboard reading,  "Happy New Year--God Bless Us All!" looking very much as if it were made by the aforementioned homeless person, while two of the four works feature small loudspeakers placed over the figure's mouth, one audibly whispering the words, "We are all prisoners undergoing a life sentence."

The art's verbal component is echoed by Cartagena's recurring use of Spanish inscriptions and annotations, which stems from an anxious repetition-compulsion to resist and challenge the toxic imperatives to homogeneity that are enforced on any given minority by technobureaucratic society. Of course, the braying declarations of signage, signage everywhere has been a sin qua non (pun intended) of both the American cultural landscape and American art history since the time of the colonial limners: Witness the lineage that runs from Charles Demuth and Stuart Davis to Pop and Lari Pittman as one grand case in point. Ostensibly, this longstanding obsession might indicate the market economy's reliance on advertising to create a cultural mythos where none exists, but I think it runs deeper. The depths of which I speak are, indeed, religious, as if it were the evangelical mission of American signage not only to sell us the stuff of desirable lifestyles but to remind us that we will burn in some homespun perdition if and when we buy it.

This kind of schizophrenic religiosity is brilliantly captured in the work of Bruce Burris, who now lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky after having attended art school in the Bay Area. The northern California influence in Burris's work is easy to pick out in his exhibition "White Boys!" a large array of recent paintings, drawings, and sculpture. It resides in the obstreperous maximalism of shape, image, and bright color that we might associate with the work of Roy Deforest or Viola Frey. Undulate patterns of brightly colored dots proliferate, as do ornate beadwork and cartoonish vignettes featuring "bleeding Jesus" and other stock characters displaying a host of peculiar quirks. Where Burris's works differ is in the complex culture that they reflect, for he has gone to great lengths to scavenge telling pieces of text and script from his adopted bluegrass home.

Bruce Burris Revival, 1998, Mixed media on canvas, 52 1/2" x 48" x 5 3/8"

Included is quasiliterate religious homily of both genteel and viscous types, the kind of contradictory declarations that rednecks and hillbillies proudly display in their backyards so that passing motorists can be reminded that "the end is near." Burris pulls off a neat trick in the way that he re-paints the overdone profusion of signage to appear as some Ozark tourist trap, perhaps a clapboard Las Vegas reconfigured into some cracker's dysfunctional miniature golf course. This profusion comes across as a typographical speaking in polychrome tongues (think Jed Clampett on methamphetamine), and it is rich in moments of riotous hilarity. But this hilarity is in touch with a kind of poignancy and pathos, for these works bring us close to the atavistic sense of mortality of their original inspirations, suggesting that the fool's paradise of homegrown religion is not quite so full of fools as we might wish to believe.

Is there visible signage in Luisa Kazanas's exhibition of silicone, cast urethane, and plaster sculpture? Not of the scripted or typographical kind, but these works clearly do divide along culturally stable lines--signifying the archetypal female as a headless, hypereroticized body and her male counterpart as a remote disembodied gaze shrouded in a prosthetic stand-in for a body (that being a hazmat suit and accompanying helmet with tinted faceplate). Through a condensed deployment of strategic exaggeration and affective withdrawal, Kazanas brilliantly turns these clichés on their heads, and comes up with works that are as surrealistically uncanny as any I have seen. Many have the look of high-gloss ceramics, their candy colors infused with a kind of eye-popping sweetness that looks untouched by human hands. Her works made of urethane, the quintessential man-made material, feature a baked-on red or yellow that any sports-car owner would be proud to have applied to his Ferrari.

Other works make equally astute uses of industrial materials. Untitled (1997) presents the downside-up lower torso of a female figure made of translucent silicone. Through the translucence, we see what looks to be a fetus, made of another cast of more opaque silicone. If this seems eerily haunted in a manner of a laboratory experiment gone awry, then take a look at Untitled (1998), a large white plaster potato perched on a pedestal. Its smooth white surfaces are a good foil to the bright color of the other works, but surprise comes from Kazanas's use of one of the oldest tricks in the surrealist's book: realistic glass eyes that subtly peer out from the potato's nodal points. Just when we content ourselves with the convenient deadness of art, it looks back in a manner that shocks us into a brief but memorable recognition of its own uncanny life.