"Las Vegas Diaspora".

Markle, Leslie

Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach CA March 9 * June 1, 2008

"Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland," fresh from its premier last year at the Las Vegas Art Museum, features the work of 26 artists who attended the graduate program at the University of Las Vegas between 1990 and 2001 under the tutelage of Dave Hickey, who is also the curator of this show and the partner of Las Vegas Art Museum director Libby Lumpkin. Seeking to testify, by example, to the living legacy of this influential art world couple, it must therefore contradict the truism, mostly touted by academics, that art cannot be taught, while simultaneously reaffirming art's equally preposterous claim to personal freedom and success.

For sheer pizzazz, much of the show is a knockout. Ranging from Tim Bavington's retro-formalist striped painting Step (In) Out (2007) to Carrie Jenkins's wryly fanciful watercolors Cherchez la Femme (2007) and The Burnet Rose (2005), the only thing Beaux Arts about these UNLV graduates is both the scale of their work and their indifference to obsolescence. Gajin Fujita's Ride or Die (2005), which juxtaposes an East L.A. tag with the gilded age of Japanese screens, and James Gobel's pseudo-Rococo tapestry Ridicule is Nothing to be Scared Of (2005), seem to indicate that the program keyed into these artists is far closer to a Black Mountain College of the desert than Warhol's Factory so often invoked by Hickey.

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For all its brash style and Desert Sands motifs, the Vegas school displays some obvious similarities to other contemporary practices, such as appropriation and thematic foregrounding. Its fondness for Op art, minimalism, and mid-century industrial design links it to the Young British Art movement, with which many works in this show can be compared. Principal among these are Tommy Burke's Vasarelyesque painting, Like a Heat Wave (2005); the aforementioned work by Tim Bavington, a Bridget Riley on steroids; Bradley Corman's Tropo III (for Anssi) (2007) and Jacqueline Ehlis's Lifted (2005) series, minimalist hybridizations akin to signature works by Tony Delap and Peter Alexander; Yek's Double Novella (2007), as commanding a piece as anything by Ellsworth Kelly; and Sherin Guirguis's modular Untitled (echo) (2005), evidently inspired by the work of Jim Isermann and Jorge Pardo.

At its core a blustery paean to conservative aestheticism, "Las Vegas Diaspora" nevertheless displays recurring contemporary philosophical themes, which were going strong in Vegas during the 1990s. This is hardly surprising as Hickey teaches the "relevant" French critical theory at the University of Las Vegas, endeavoring to make, in the words of Lumpkin, "'spectacle' and 'entertainment' relevant to the philosophical discourse of contemporary art." In many ways this can be seen as Hickey's answer to the neutralization of critical theory's cultural mandate by the institution of the academy, a process which he has likened to an episode of Survivor: a conspiracy of mediocrity. Apart from encouraging his students to make "special, smart, worldly, and archival" work, Hickey also directs them to parallel literary movements to aid them in inventing new forms and reviving old ones. In Vegas students of Hickey try harder.