Small-time critic checks out Las Vegas Art Museum’s big move

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, Feb. 18, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

Our man the Curious Skeptic slips quietly into the new Las Vegas Art Museum, note pad in his pocket, cautious optimism in tow.

He wants to like what he's about to see, but he's not sure he will. What he remembers of the organization's past exhibits -- average, largely unimaginative -- hasn't heightened his expectations. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst goes the oft-embroidered maxim, and he's prepared, all right: Hadn't LVAM's press release noted that among the invited special guests for the Feb. 1 unveiling of the new facility was "Andrew Lakey, the world's foremost angel painter"?

Curious Skeptic generally gets quite arch about angel paintings and the people who love them. That it appears such people have been given the keys to the museum at the Sahara West Library, the 30,000-square-foot jewel of the local visual arts scene, makes it that much harder for him to come across with $4 of his lunch money for admission. But he pays.

He has to see it for himself.

He was not the only one curious and skeptical when the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District announced last year it had granted tenancy of the multi-gallery complex to LVAM. Many eyebrows were raised. For most of its existence (first in a city building in Lorenzi Park, then in a storefront on West Charleston Boulevard), LVAM has been widely seen as a genteel, largely unambitious league of amateur artists. Now that they're making a play for the bigs, what would they do with that gorgeous space, and what would it say about them?

The answers to those questions, to Curious Skeptic's great relief, involve no angel paintings, at least not yet. Rather, the flagship exhibit is "Art After Post-Modernism," a attempt by new curator James Mann to crystal-ball the direction of modern art now that it's petered out. It's an exhibit that finds LVAM thinking big.

Mann's conclusion: Back to the future, and step on it! His theory can be nutshelled like this: Modern art has been eating itself for most of the 20th century, with styles rising to overthrow their predecessors -- cubism knocking off impressionism, pop art taking down abstract expressionism, and so on.

With each wave, Mann believes, art narrowed its scope of concerns, arriving at '70s minimalism -- which was largely about stripping the meaning of art down to its physical components -- and culminating with conceptual and performance art, which was largely about doing away with those components altogether. At that point, in Mann's view, art's creative momentum had effectively rolled to a halt.

Make that "reductively dead-ended" after "an extreme or even total divestiture of the former expressive and technical resources," as he writes in the exhibit's statement of purpose. Posted by the entrance, this dense slab of Artbonics lays out Mann's theory of What Comes Next: artists going back to all the stuff that's been discarded -- recognizable imagery, color, line, perpsective -- and combining it in new ways. Make that, "reclaiming innovatively the lost and abandoned resources of technique and content." It will be the art of the new millennium, Mann insists.

He might be right, but despite all the polysyllabic big-think, Curious Skeptic -- no art-appreciation major, certainly, but a major appreciator of art nonetheless (making him probably an average museum-goer) -- can't escape the feeling that the theory has bitten off more than this particular exhibit can chew. It doesn't deliver to his retinas the hard aesthetic whomp you expect from an exhibit that claims to represent the future of art, nor does it feature any of the high-profile artists routinely included, for instance, in shows by the Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art.

It's not that he doesn't find some pieces interesting. For instance, a pair of sassy blue canvases by one Jay Watkins catch his eye. Busy, hard-edged, collage-y, they have a spunky appeal, as does Olja Dobrovic's untitled painting featuring splattery, mummified figures.

And Christopher Dodd seems like a nifty find; his five pieces -- heroic portraits of such modern culture icons as Freud, Jung and Sergei Eisenstein -- are to Curious Skeptic the strongest part of the show.

But there are some puzzlements. Why eight pieces by Mark Anderson, whose boldly rendered landscapes would make good backdrops for inspirational verse on posters of the type sold in Christian supply stores?

Some works -- one titled "Crucifixion, Cremation," in which a Christlike figure, splayed on a cross, is being engulfed by tongues of reddish paint -- seem pointlessly enigmatic. Despite Mann's talk about recovering technical whatevers, Curious Skeptic has the feeling that several pieces might prompt the cliched my-kid-could-do-that response even in viewers who don't have kids.

The exhibit also feels shoehorned into the gallery. So much stuff! You can't view the Watkins pieces without kibitzing from the bright abstracts of Ann Stoddard on either side. And, just in case Las Vegans unschooled in museum etiquette feel the urge to reach out and touch the art, the place is papered with signs warning "Please Do Not Touch the Art" -- in one notable instance even hanging from an artwork itself.

All that aside, Curious Skeptic leaves still cautiously optimistic. One giant step for Las Vegas Art Museum, one somewhat smaller step for Las Vegas arts.

Later, our man calls their Mann.

The curator turns out to be an earnest fellow, a Ph.D in English from the University of South Carolina who signed on with LVAM at "a modest level" because he wants to ground-floor it with a museum in a city he thinks will have a big role to play in the coming art epoch.

Mann assembled the exhibit himself. He's been working on his "art after postmodernism" idea for several years and is wrapping up a book on the subject. "It's clear that the dismantlement phase is over," he says, "dismantlement phase" being his term for the modern art that sought to strip itself down to some theoretical essence. It's time to pick up the pieces, he says.

"The job of art now, although not in any prescriptive way," Mann says, sounding like his mission statement, "is to reconstitute the various fine arts. All the paintings in the show are in one way of another reconstituting painting."

But he doesn't just want artists who ape old styles: "It's not that the clock is being turned back." You can't ignore the lessons of modern art, primarily the way it removed the boundaries between high and low culture; pop subjects and techniques have been accepted into the fine-arts realm.

"Now it's interesting and legitimate to use anything from the past one choses to," but from a futuristic point of view.

Perhaps understandably, he has a high opinion of his exhibit. "In my mind, it's of international caliber, it's simply that the artists aren't well-known. At the Las Vegas Art Museum we really audaciously aspire to try to seize the moment in art and kind of seize the leadership from New York."

That's big talk from a museum with a shoestring budget reported to be just $75,000 and little expertise in the large-scale fund-raising it takes to run an international-caliber museum. Mann admits his show is full of unknowns because he couldn't afford to include brand names.

"But there's more to say about it," he insists. For a new art, you need new artists. "We're convinced that excellent artists of international caliber to be found all over the country. They're waiting to be discovered."

The art after postmodernism movement is "sort of in the position that Picasso and Braque were in in 1912 -- only a few people knew about them and knew that they were the most important thing going on."

And he clearly thinks it'll be going on importantly in Las Vegas. "I would have come here at any salary because Las Vegas has enormous potential." From the city's vitality and, more specifically, its architectural diversity, he senses "an artistic sensibility, an environment prepared for advanced developments in the arts."

"I think Las Vegas can really do it. It's the only city anywhere that can pull it off."

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