Vija Celmins.

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA January 28 * April 22, 2007

Because of her technical prowess, Vija Celmins is an artist whom even those who rarely look at art can admire. Yet there are other people who look at little else but art that think her work is overrated. Their reasoning may be partly that if Auntie Em likes it, there must not be much to it. Even if you acknowledge that there's more going on in her work than exceptional skills that fool people into thinking that her drawings are photographs, you still might not be impressed by her conceptual program.

In a show of nearly 70 Celmins drawings that originated at the Pompidou in Paris, the Hammer Museum provided an opportunity to reassess her dogged approach to art making that began in Los Angeles in the 1960s. The earliest drawings, which include exact copies of magazine clippings of disaster scenes, are easy to admire for their mastery of detail. But they're almost equally easy to dismiss as clever and ironic, pop-influenced riffs.

But in 1968, she made a dramatic shift when she started making her detailed drawings of clouds and choppy seas, followed by lunar landscapes, night skies, and desert floors. Through these vast subjects, she addresses notions of the sublime, which make a viewer feel what it must be like to stand on the edge of a cliff. I don't know many other works of art trapped in a frame that can so easily transcend their subjects to affect such gut-wrenching emotions. There are other artists who can do that for me--I'm thinking of Richter, for one--but they don't provide such a direct and immediate journey as Celmins does. It takes no effort at all to enter her work.

But it seems like Celmins was never satisfied giving her audience an epiphanic experience. She wants you to think about the relationship between the actual scene, the photograph of that place, and her drawing of the photograph. Ironically, part of her attempts to make the drawings more cerebral--such as overlapping identical images at different scales, or pairing galaxies with desert landscapes--undermine the experience of viewing the work. They become tricks, like the drawings titled Ocean with Cross #1 (1972) and #2 (1971), in which she erases a barely visible "X" in the middle of two ocean drawings. It's an admirable feat, but it ultimately seems like an unnecessary attempt to show off, when the basic work is impressive enough.

Once she had tackled one ocean, one starry night, a lunar landscape, and one desert with its amazing detail of rocks and shadows, I don't know how she motivated herself to do them over and over. How did she convince herself that there would be something gained by drawing the Coma Berenices constellation four times in different shades of graphite? I'm not sure there is a wildly different experience to be gained from the exercise, but the attempt strangely makes it more potent. This is one case where her obsessiveness loses itself in the work rather than subverts it through showmanship.

Perhaps this obsessiveness got the better of her when she gave up drawing for painting in 1983. Remarkably, when she returned to drawing about ten years later, reversing her method to a reductive approach by covering the paper with charcoal and then erasing, it hadn't lost any of its impact. Only her recent series of spider webs looks forced, as if she set out looking for a subject challenging enough to measure up to her pantheon of grand imagery rather than something that intuitively moved her. In this case, the particular can't compete with the universal. It's as if she is returning to the intimacy of the first drawings of news clippings, which never transcend the subject matter or actual events.

There's an element of nostalgia in "Vija Celmins: A Drawings Retrospective" that may be one final drawback. The recent amazing color images of Mars and other planets coming back to Earth thanks to NASA's advances in imaging make Celmins's lunar landscapes seem like documents of the early days of space exploration. They lose the timeless nature of the ocean and desert drawings. But these are quibbles. In the end, I have to side with the uninitiated viewers, who gaze at the work and admire.