Thursday, June 05, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Art: Serious fun

By Gregory Crosby

"Fun," like "beauty," is one of those words that has a bad rep in art circles these days, because if you're fun, you can't possibly be serious. The playful, the joyous, the inventive have more often than not received a curt and obligatory nod from those who feel art should always have a complicated conceptual underpinning or a politically correct "meaning" that makes you feel good and is probably (you tell yourself in the back of your mind) good for you, like some sort of aesthetic ruffage.

Fair enough. But fun is not a concept to be taken lightly, no matter the initial temptation to do so. Fun is more than embodied in the works of sculptor Curtis Fairman and painter Jack Hallberg, whose new show at Dust, titled Circle Square and on view through June 29, is pure fun, and no less serious or satisfying for entering the world of highly refined play on no other terms than "This looks cool." It's one of the signal features of the Las Vegas "school," and Fairman and Hallberg are among that loose conglomeration's most engaging practitioners.

Fairman's ability to re-combine mass-produced consumer objects into futuristic objects of obscure desire is unparalleled. Walking through a selection of his wall assemblages is akin to wandering the aisles of some super design market, filled with utterly attractive goods that draw one to them, even though you have no idea what their function is. Their function naturally is simply to look mysterious and electric: their bright, rounded, plastic surfaces combined with reflective, concave centers that catch light with an intensity, as in "Roeg," that seems to be coming from some hidden light source within the object.

"Roeg," and pieces such as "Kiff" and "Brox" and "Darph" (each named after some person or character associated with science fiction), are deceptively gorgeous creations where the sum of their parts has conspired to create an otherworldly whole. Even after one has identified the various elements Fairman has used--an orange taillight, a plastic scrunchie, silver lugnuts, day-glo fishing bobbers, sleek white toothbrush holders--the works retain their new identity as industrial fetish. Taking them apart with one's eyes, which is in itself fun, does nothing to diminish their integrity.

Perhaps the strongest purely sculptural forms here are "Andro" and "Sinc," mirrored globes sprouting polished steel and brass doorknobs like puffer fish. They cry out to be touched, the way any doorknob would, and they're so obviously polymorphous and sensual (without being crude) as to be faintly yet thrillingly embarrassing to look at.

Jack Hallberg's untitled paintings continue and somewhat refine his obsession with tactile, semi-opaque dots of intense color that raise off the canvas like oozing drops of sweat. It's difficult to precisely express Hallberg's visual universe. Candy-colored strands of DNA? The swirling surreal landscape of Steve Ditko's Doctor Strange as re-imagined by Willy Wonka? A particularly chromatic visual interpretation of quantum superstring theory? Hallberg's strands, loosely knit or tightly serpentine, give his canvases a busy tension, each strand ridged with dots and bumps that cut through each other, slicing some dollops in half. The dynamic is more patterned, favoring intersecting loops over the chaotic free-form abstractions Hallberg favored in the past, and the palette is almost overwhelming at times.

For instance, in perhaps the most formally structured piece in the show, the combination of colors is nearly eye-repelling: white bands with fuchsia dots cut with blue bands covered in huge milky white, uneven dots and tiny orange ones, all against a shimmering green background. At any moment, the whole construction tips toward ugliness, until Hallberg's compositional skill holds it together, giving off a pure sense of joy in such gaudy abstraction.

So yes, indeed, Hallberg and Fairman are having fun. But it's a serious kind of fun, directed and thoughtful, the sort that at the base of everything fuels an artist's underlying creativity, no matter how ponderous or un-fun the ultimate product of that artistic process might be. It would be a shame if either artist made concessions to current tastes that demand an unfrivolous approach and conceptual austerity and correctness (the only thing that might do the trick is if either Fairman or Hallberg increased their scale, moving into full-fledged installations). Right now, "That looks cool!" is more than enough justification for their work.