Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Lizards and monkeys and sex, oh my

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, March 23, 1999 | 10:25 a.m.

"They're definitely involved in a human act," Eric Murphy says, standing in UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery. "Lizards don't do that." Well, yes and no. Real lizards do copulate; they don't normally do it in the missionary position, as Murphy's lizards do. And one doubts that true reptiles flick their tongues over one another in such a soft-core display. One can be even more certain that, if real lizards did, in fact, do such things, they wouldn't do them atop large Creature From the Black Lagoon heads.

Obviously, we're talking about art. Specifically, a piece from "Carnival of Love," Murphy's exhibit of sculpture at UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery (on view through Friday). The show is about love and biology and animals and pop culture and a few sly winks at artistic convention -- all topics the UNLV grad student can address at length in his deep, slow baritone -- but first there's this thing with the stupid bubbles.

A machine in the gallery's loft is supposed to be wafting delicate, disappear-on-contact bubbles down upon the six pieces in "Carnival of Love," upon the curious who step in for a peep, upon the great, gleaming dome of Murphy's shaved head itself. Instead, it's blowing thick, ploppy bubbles that have left a soapy residue on the gallery's wooden floor.

This'll have to be fixed, and soon. Issues of mood and ambiance are vital elements in any good carnival of love; note the dim gallery lighting, the romantic standards on the sound system. All so you experience the work in a context conducive to thinking about the biological manifestations of love (the exhibit is the last of those required for Murphy's graduate degree).

"Amorous feelings cause certain reactions in our body," Murphy, 36, says. No kidding. But he doesn't mean those reactions. For "Carnival of Love," he's curbed any impulse to make this an exhibitionistic exhibition; even in his ceramic depiction of a sea-monkey orgy, private parts stay private. "I used a lot more explicit genitalia in my midway show," he says. The risk in that, of course, is that the viewer's eyes and brain freeze on the plumbing instead of its implications.

No, he's more concerned with exploring the biology of love in relation to the artificial culturescape of modern life. The way the products and energies of our minds can't entirely suppress the rude vitality of our bodies. Thus you have the ceramic cardinals sniffing each other's nether regions while trapped in a hanging cage of kitschy beads and baubles. Those beads, like elements of several pieces, are rooted in his mother's love of collectible antiques.

The animal stand-ins are vital, Murphy says. "If I used human subjects," he explains, gesturing to a piece featuring a large monkey, "part of the biology would leave it," depictions of humans inevitably involving so much cultural, nonbiological baggage.

"I've always had a close association with animals," Murphy says. "It's really natural for me to want to use them." Much of that can be said to have started three decades ago, with a monkey. As a second-grader in rural Indiana, Murphy got it into his head that he wanted a pet monkey. He would name it Paco and even envisioned the sort of cage it would occupy. So, he recalls, he started reading about monkeys, working his way through every book about simians in the school library, up through the high-school level. At which point, he says, the librarians borrowed college-level texts.

That affinity for animals never dissipated. "I raised cattle to pay my way through Purdue University to a bachelor's degree," he says. He also killed rabbits on a relative's rabbit farm, leaving him with a lingering distaste for fantasy bunnies of the Bugs and Easter variety. Perversely, some of his earlier work was rabbit-heavy. "I often work from things I don't like, turning them into things I do."

It's usually a kick to stroll a gallery with the artist whose work is on display. That's certainly true in Murphy's case. While the great alchemical process of art takes place somewhere in the fourth dimension between the artist's work and the viewer's brain, as the latter tries to puzzle out everything the former has put in, a backstage pass can be enlightening, too.

He explains the lizards and Black Lagoon head. Note, first, that the Creature head is on wheels and is coated with green automotive paint, allusions to one of modern culture's great artificial obsessions, cars. That the vehicle is also one of the enduring, recognizable symbols of filmmaking alludes to another of man's fantasy realms. "I like the movie glitz that gives it," he says. Topping it off, the lizards are engaging in the most basic act of life and renewal. The creature, in shiny body paint, vs. the lizards, rendered in humble clay. Add it up: "In the midst of all the movie, all the the fantasy, we still have biological responses."

Similar explanations attend the table full of ceramic toucans in the gallery loft, or the scalloped fountain whose centerpiece is the aforementioned pile of sexing sea monkeys. Murphy has put together a consistent visual vocabulary -- "animals, towers, things that are suspended, lights" -- with which to express what he says is a never-ending stream of ideas on the biology of love. "I haven't learned from this stuff all I'm going to learn from it."

So we may as well get to know the guy; he'll be here awhile. "I plan to stay here and make work in Las Vegas," he says, joining Ethan Acres and other UNLV art grads now enlivening our visual culture. Thanks to the lack of serious collectors of local art, Murphy figures he'll show most of his output elsewhere; sadly, that's the defining economic reality of most Las Vegas artists. Nonetheless, he likes the effect the city has on him. His work has the freshness and youthful vigor you'd expect in a boomtown, and an appreciation for the cleanly executed artifice that can be traced to the city's influence. "I couldn't have made this work anywhere but in Las Vegas," he says.