Fountain of truth
Gallery challenges artists to stretch their boundaries
By Victoria Dalkey -- Bee Art Correspondent

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp, using the name R. Mutt, submitted a urinal to an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. Titled "Fountain," the urinal became art simply because Duchamp said it was art, tweaking the concept that "beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder."

Not the first but the most famous of Du champ's "ready-mades," it was an insult thrown in the face of conventional tastes that, ironically, over time came to be seen as a thing of great aesthetic beauty.

Mary Warner comments on Duchamp's urinal in a ready-made of her own on view at Jay Jay Gallery. In a corner of the gallery, Warner has placed a stack of tacky, yellow wax rings used for installing toilets and titled the piece "Grounding R. Mutt." A wonderfully funny gloss on Duchamp's "Fountain," it's part of a group show titled "Cut Ups, Ready Mades and Color Fact."

Guest curator Eric Brandon explains that the show was designed to shake gallery artists out of their comfort zones and challenge them to move beyond the boundaries of what they usually do. For the most part, it worked. Some of the categories, however, are a bit ambiguous in the context of the show.

In the 1920s, Tristan Tzara made a proposal at a surrealist rally to create a poem by pulling words out of a hat. His suggestion caused a riot and prompted Andre Breton to expel him from the surrealist movement. But Tzara's idea of the "Cut-Up" - text cut up and rearranged randomly - caught on with later artists and writers, among them William Burroughs and Brion Guison.

Unfortunately, only one of the works in the Jay Jay show seems to adhere to the true spirit of the cut-up. David J., an English artist and musician, offers a work made up of an appropriated cartoon strip with cut-up and reassembled text from an English unemployment benefit program. It's a wry and wittily subversive comment on bureaucracy and alienation.

The other works in the cut-up category range from collages to paintings and prints that incorporate text in any form, fragmentary or intact. Ellen Van Fleet offers a lithograph of a journal page with drawings of animals and symbolic markings. Sandy Parris offers a painting-collage with images from art and news magazines and fragments of text relating to the war in Iraq.

Roger Yogis' "What's Up," an image of the comics character Nancy walking on a ceiling, is a wonderful tribute to the visually blunt, surreal humor of cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller. I wouldn't call it a cut-up, but it's a charming piece of pop art that does indeed include text.

Perhaps the least successful of the categories is color fact, a concept devised by Brandon to accommodate Jay Jay's color-oriented artists. Brandon believes that color theory should be called color fact, since it is a fact, for example, that placing two colors of equal tint and equal value next to each other will produce a third color. Brandon, though, uses the term whimsically without getting into a serious semantic debate.

What makes color fact the least successful category in terms of the aims of the show is that most of the artists included in it simply have done what they usually do. Mark Emerson produces jumpy, jittery visual vibrations in a small square canvas of geometric shapes placed in a tight grid. Peter Stegall creates the illusion of multiple colors in a curvaceous arrangement of yellow and black forms. Joan Moment explores the pure joy of color and paint in a work from the mid-1990s based on stonelike ovals of lush and dripping color. They are all strong works, yet they scarcely stretch the artists beyond their usual boundaries.

The only artists who really venture into new territory here are John Smith and Thomas Mon teith. Smith departs from his landscape-influenced abstract paintings to offer a jaunty piece that combines painting on glass with collage and text to explore the concepts of color theory (or fact, if you wish). Montieth steps away from his large-scale gestural abstractions to collaborate with an anonymous computer artist. Together they have produced a video installation of an ever-changing, randomized field of squares and circles that explores the variations of the color wheel. It's not a terribly exciting work, but it certainly is a departure for Monteith.

The category that seems to have been the most fruitful for Jay Jay's artists is the ready-made. In addition to Warner's work, there are a number of pieces that function well within the parameters set down by Duchamp and other Dadaists and that differ dramatically from the artists' usual works.

Under the name "J. Catt," Jack Nielsen gives us an old Plymouth hubcap mounted on the wall. Titled "Manifest Destiny," it calls up associations with Plymouth, Mass., the American colony that marked the beginning of ever-increasing westward expansion in the new world. It also connotes the advent of the automobile, which offered mobility and a newfound freedom to Americans, as well as an ever-increasing dependence on oil.

Michelle LeCompte mounts an old-fashioned egg timer, a small hourglass filled with sand, on the wall and amplifies its associations with mortality and the passage of time by evocatively titling it "b. d." for the two dates found on tombstones. Stuart Allen uses reclaimed glass, mat board and picture frame molding to create an elegant minimalist piece mounted on the wall.

Roger Berry offers a rustic ready-made in the form of a bundle of sticks used to make measurements in vineyards. And Terry Berlier uses an old automobile horn to create a sound sculpture that honks when you press a button.

Though "Cut Ups, Ready Mades and Color Fact" is a show with an intellectual and conceptual basis, it's surprisingly enjoyable to look at because the artists included remain rooted in the visual. That's refreshing nowadays.

Cut Ups, Ready Mades and Color Fact
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays through Aug. 7
WHERE: Jay Jay Gallery, 5520 Elvas Ave.
INFORMATION: (916) 453-2999