Review: Kathleen Henderson at Rosamund Felsen Gallery

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“What if I could draw a bird that could change the world?”

Kathleen Henderson poses the question in an urgent, childlike scrawl. “In a good way, I mean. In a good way.” The words fan out across the body of a clumsy, angry, turkey-like creature drawn in dense black and blue. “I know this is not that bird,” the text concludes. “I know that.”

If it’s audacious to imagine art having world-changing power, it’s also essential to act as though it does. Art wields whatever power we assign it. Henderson’s recent drawings and sculptures at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery make a devastatingly strong case to assign it more. And then more.

Based in Northern California, Henderson had her first L.A. show at Felsen last spring, and it delivered a resounding punch. The current exhibition feels continuous with the first — equally tough, discomfiting, creepy and compelling. With 58 works, the show is large in numbers and huge in terms of its emotional push-pull.

Henderson draws in black oil stick on stark white sheets of paper, occasionally augmenting an image with touches of red, blue, sepia or putty, a smudge or a fingerprint. There is no fussiness, no shading, no real background or foreground. She draws with rawness and insistence, channeling Goya on up through Golub. Each drawing feels like a brusque declaration: This situation/condition exists; consider it.

Torture, shooting, dancing and praying take place on these pages, over and over. Desperation and hostility seem to dominate the motivations of the characters within. A state of nakedness prevails — not necessarily the unclothed kind, though some figures are nude and a few sexually aroused. The nakedness has more to do with blunt honesty, an unapologetic openness about malignant aspects of human behavior — for instance, the way we find violence entertaining.

One figure pokes himself in the eye with a stick “just for fun,” according to Henderson’s caption-like description on the page. The guy next to him points and smiles. In another drawing, a man hangs upside down from a crude scaffold. One of his captors binds the man’s body with tape.

Henderson’s characters reveal themselves in spite of wearing hoods or masks, or perhaps because of such selective concealment. One of the officers chasing down a pudgy suspect sports a mask with a clown-like nose and exaggerated, cantaloupe-slice smile. His ridiculous expression turns the matter of law and order into a game, at least for the pursuer.

The hoods that so many in the drawings wear reduce their heads to lumpen shapes with simplified features — holes for eyes and mouth, no nose whatsoever. Individuality is suppressed all around, an optimal condition for dishing out pain.

Henderson’s images resonate with the daily news (think Iraq and Abu Ghraib) but also with ancient myth, especially (she relates in a gallery statement) the story of the satyr, Marsyas. Apollo, god of music, felt threatened by the overconfident Marsyas and challenged him to a competition. After the muses declared Apollo the winner, the god promptly hung Marsyas upside down from a tree and skinned him alive.

Arrogance meets arrogance. Power is abused. Blood is shed. An old plot line plays itself out exhaustively through time.

Suggestions of corruption and complicity thread through Henderson’s work, making nearly every scene evoke some sort of dark gamesmanship. The sculptures, in paper pulp and tar or wax, have the same raw, nervous energy as the drawings, as if they were anxiously fingered into existence. The spindly arms and legs and the provisional-looking surfaces recall Giacometti.

In one wall-mounted piece, a Pan-like figure curls like a question mark over his drum, playing “Music for the End of the World.” Another, with mouth agape, turns his head slightly to one side and holds out his lower limbs in a desperate bargain: “Here, Take My Legs.”

Henderson’s work is concentrated to the point of near-toxicity. But it’s not the drawings that are damaging, it is the cruelty and opportunism that Henderson, as a citizen of the world, bears witness to. Next to a simple, sober portrait, she writes in schoolgirl cursive, “I will never be able to draw Benito Mussolini the way he should be drawn.” It’s not a statement about her rendering skills, since the subject is easily recognizable. It’s Henderson again telling us how inadequate art is to capturing truth, but showing us otherwise.

-- Leah Ollman

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Dec. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Above: Kathleen Henderson’s ‘In-Line’ (2006). Credit: Rosamund Felsen Gallery