The Material Pleasures of Sculptor Isermann

On Thursday, the Santa Monica Museum of Art transformed its big, central gallery into a bracing rumpus room for the eye, the mind and the soul, courtesy of a 15-year survey of sculpture by Jim Isermann. The three dozen works in this concise presentation comprise the most satisfying show yet in the museum’s inaugural year at Bergamot Station.

At first, “sculpture” might seem an inappropriate term for the work that fills the capacious, steel-trussed gallery, which has had all interior walls removed for the occasion. Yes, there are typically modern sculptural forms--two cubes, one balancing on a corner point; a large, pill-like capsule; a pair of mobiles, and so on. But there are also chairs, lamps, a clock, braided and hooked rugs, weavings, stained glass and various painted panels.

Isermann’s work is sculpture in an expansive sort of way, one that accentuates any craftsmanship that results in a tangible object. Making is meaning in Isermann’s art, which turns elusive social and cultural dynamics into material stuff. Look at the amoeba-like shape of a fuzzy chair seat, and your visual memory riffles through curious layers of reference: the scientific foundations of modern life, which begat the biomorphic soup of Surrealist abstraction, which filtered into popular styles of middle-class furniture, which here get pulled into contemporary sculpture.

In Isermann’s art, rigid distinctions based on hierarchies of class and taste evaporate, instead becoming fluid, permeable membranes. Certainly it’s odd to look at an organic-shaped pair of vinyl beanbag chairs and a surfboard-shaped wall-clock and find yourself thinking, however obliquely, “Democracy in action!” But, as exclusionary categories of high art and low dissolve, you do--and the experience is hopeful and elating.

Born in 1955, the artist passed his Midwestern youth in an age when the bland but cheerfully narrow optimism of the Eisenhower era crashed and burned in the expansive tumult of the 1960s. The forms he chose for his early work, from atomic-style sunbursts to hippy-dippy signs of flower power, can be traced to a period of head-spinning transformation.

Artistically, the particular sources on which Isermann draws are many and diverse, from Joan Miro to Larry Bell, Frank Stella to Carl Andre, Marcel Duchamp to Kenneth Noland. There is also the legion of anonymous handicrafters--mostly women--who sew, weave and braid rugs. The artist laboring alone in his studio merges with the housewife productively working alone at home.

Most of all, however, there is Andy Warhol, whose category-busting, gender-bending precedent Isermann’s art pointedly acknowledges. A 1985 group of brightly colored pictures of stylized flowers painted in shiny enamels derives from Warhol’s famous 1964 flower paintings. Rather than silk-screen a pastoral photograph of flowers torn from a seed catalog, as Warhol did, Isermann adapted the machine-fabricated “Summer of Love” floral decals that became ubiquitous in Warhol’s wake, adorning everything from bathtubs to Volkswagen buses.

A vivid tension between handicraft and industrial culture is held in delicate balance in Isermann’s art. It resonates against the very building in which his show is installed: an obsolete industrial shed, salvaged for cultural use.

Use of Decals Recalls Earlier Warhol Show

Warhol crops up again in a second pointed reference. For the Santa Monica Museum, one of six stops on the show’s national tour, the artist designed 16-inch-square decals in red, blue and orange. Arrayed in a grid, the decals form a pattern of interlocking “pill” shapes.

The decals have been applied by hand to the gallery walls, floor to ceiling and one color per steel-trussed bay, making a total environment of (and for) Isermann’s art. Meant to recall the Whitney Museum’s famous 1971 Warhol show, in which the late Pop artist covered the gallery’s walls with cow-patterned wallpaper, then hung his paintings on top, the Santa Monica installation effectively domesticates the officious, institutional frame of the art museum.

As originally organized for the gallery at the University of Wisconsin by critic David Pagel (who, it should be pointed out in a spirit of full disclosure, is a regular contributor to The Times), the survey reveals two main phases in Isermann’s work. The earlier objects are somewhat self-conscious in acknowledging their debts, and occasionally feel slight--as if meaning to illustrate their ideas, rather than embody them. They can’t escape a “retro” period look.

The more recent--including such knockout pieces as “Untitled (rug)” (1996), “Untitled (capsule)” and “Cubeweave” (both 1997)--are the work of a mature artist in full command of his sculptural repertoire, making startling objects distinctly his own. In fact, these are easily among the finest American sculptures of their time.

The dividing line between the two phases, figuratively and literally, is formed by the wonderful series of “shag paintings” that date from 1989 and 1990. Eight feet square, each is bisected. One side features an abstract pattern painted in hard, bright enamels; the other is its mirror image, but instead of paint it’s a shag rug, hand-hooked in Orlon yarn.

These works exert an extraordinary push-pull, visually and conceptually. Slick and fast on the painted side, they’re slow and cushy on the shag side. The handcrafted section invites your touch, but the painted aura of art says, “No!”

This conflict is especially strong in “Untitled (rug),” where two braided and joined rugs of nested squares, their bright pattern based on a famous painting by Frank Stella, is spread out on the floor. Museum-goers have dutifully learned that contemporary sculptures like the checkerboard floor pieces of Carl Andre are supposed to be walked on, becoming in effect a functional pedestal for the viewer’s perceptions. Here, however, they’re confronted with an exquisitely crafted, seemingly functional rug that plainly appears meant to remain untouched. Polarities suddenly reverse, circuits short. The rug pulls itself out from under you--which is a function of art, not carpeting.

The audience is playfully thrown back on its own resources. These sculptures pass with flying colors the two-part “Ed Ruscha test” for soul-satisfying art, causing in a viewer an involuntary response of “Huh? . . . Wow!,” rather than the ultimately disappointing, “Wow! . . . Huh?”

Isermann’s art is easy on the eye and difficult on the mind--a combination terrific and rare. His art seduces for the sheer, sexy fun of it, yet finally captivates for the long term.

Show Redefines Museum’s Mission

The show is important, too, for the Santa Monica Museum, which has struggled with something of an identity crisis since its move last May from Main Street, an eclectic thoroughfare for a general public, to Bergamot Station, a singularly commercial destination for the art crowd. Interesting art has certainly been shown, but overall the museum’s program has felt ambiguous and haphazard, often with little to distinguish itself from what you’d also expect to find in the galleries in the surrounding commercial complex.

By stark contrast, the 15-year survey of Isermann’s sculpture, which is accompanied by a concise and illuminating catalog, provides a thoughtful, much-needed overview of a remarkable artist now working at top form. And it’s just the sort of timely, incisive exhibition of a mid-career, L.A.-based artist that we’ve pretty much abandoned hope might become a regular program feature at either of the two big art museums in town.

It’s a show, in other words, that makes the Santa Monica Museum matter.

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Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 586-6488, through May 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.