The Musculature of One Body of Work

Given all the theorizing during the past decade or so around the subject of art about the body, it would be easy to assume that the body was a new artistic issue. In fact, it isn’t. Body metaphors constitute one major tradition of painting, especially abstract painting, since the 1950s. Painterly surface and structure have often been considered in terms of skin and bones.

Patrick Hogan (1947-1988) is one artist among many whose paintings are productively seen in this way. An insightful and well-selected survey at Otis Art Gallery shows how. Organized by Anne Ayres, director of the gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, and painter Roy Dowell, chair of graduate studies at the school, the assembly of 28 paintings and 40 works on paper is an unexpected but timely look at an important chapter of recent history.

Hogan, a Los Angeles native who graduated from art school at Cal State Northridge in 1969, entered an art world where the very practice of painting was in jeopardy. Some saw painting as old-fashioned and not useful for an emergent era of electronic technology and explosive mass culture. Others regarded it as hopelessly representative of a restrictive and even authoritarian status quo. Still others believed that the volatile 1970s spirit of energetic artistic experiment was antithetical to daubing colored pigments onto pieces of cloth.

Hogan, it seems, shared a certain sympathy with this skeptical regard of painting. He was anything but disengaged from the larger artistic currents of the day. Rather than set painting aside, however, he chose instead to apply his skepticism to painting itself. Smart move. It endowed his work with a lively tension and a tenacious rigor.

One of the earliest works in the show, an untitled piece from 1969, is cobbled together from long, narrow, vertical stripes of acrylic paint woven into a loose piece of styrene plastic. Paint and its support are regarded as wholly separate entities, which can be pulled apart and played with. The result is an awkward but strangely cohesive polychrome relief.

From there it’s a relatively short jump to Hogan’s first mature paintings, which date from 1972 and share an affinity with the work of artists as disparate as Frank Stella and Ed Moses. Wide, translucent slathers of thick acrylic, which look like fat, free-floating brush strokes, are tinted in pale colors and laid on top of, or embedded into, loosely hanging fields of shredded fabric or cottony kapok.

The colors of the fabric and the acrylic paint tend toward browns and beiges. This deliberate choice seems to nod toward early 20th century Analytical Cubism, which emphasizes Hogan’s pursuit as an intellectual rebuilding of form. The artist was nothing if not ambitious in his goal.

With these compelling works, Hogan was tearing painting apart and reconstructing it from scratch. It’s as if painting had unraveled, or its component parts had exploded and been stuck back together as best they could. Which, given the vivid social and artistic tumult of the early 1970s, pretty much describes what was in fact happening in every corner of American life.

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Pick an event: the bombing of Cambodia; the publication of the Pentagon Papers; the conviction of Lt. William L. Calley Jr., for premeditated murder in the My Lai massacre; the beginning of a wrenching constitutional crisis with the Watergate affair; the attempted assassination of the racist governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace; and more. Hogan’s abstract paintings don’t illustrate anything. But neither can it be an accident that the thick, translucent slathers of acrylic have the brutal look of flayed skin, while the shredded fabric support appears to have been through some unspecified but dramatic trauma.

By 1975, Hogan had begun the work with which he soon became identified. His “rope paintings” were made by nailing unbroken lengths of painted rope to wood panels, usually by starting at the outside edge and following the rectangular contour, then breaking from the pattern in the jagged, often layered composition that evolved within the field. Sometimes, empty spaces between the rope lines would be filled with pigment, which cracked when it dried and looks like the arid, rugged surface of the Mojave.

Finally, the finished work would be painted over with Rhoplex, a clear, thick acrylic that Hogan tinted with white paint. (A helpful video, produced for a 1980 exhibition of Hogan’s paintings at the old Newport Harbor Art Museum--now the Orange County Museum of Art--and shown continuously at Otis, elucidates his method.) The Rhoplex tamps down the color and evens out the irregular surface patterns. Its waxiness also lends the paintings an embalmed feeling, like a fly trapped in amber. Visually, this look aptly embodies the tenuous position occupied by painting in the 1970s.

The patterns of rope in these works constitute a kind of internal linear drawing, except that the two-dimensionality of drawing has been made physical. You could hold the line in your hand.

Drawing in fact assumed increasing importance to Hogan. The Otis survey includes a substantial selection of small drawings on paper, most executed in ink or watercolor and dating from 1980 to 1986. Hogan’s drawings frequently employ a delicate, feathery line, repeated in tight rows, so that the image appears somewhat like a medical illustration for musculature highlighted with the sheen of polished metal. Some of the drawings loosely recall torsos, others the shifting of tectonic plates. Almost always there’s a sense of light emerging from within.

Remarkably, these drawings were made with a “mouth stick.” Hogan was paraplegic, a victim of a rare and progressive neuromuscular disease called Werdnig-Hoffmanns syndrome, which left him in a wheelchair from the age of 10 and increasingly restricted the use of his arms. As artists have done for centuries, Hogan employed assistants to fabricate paintings at his direction, but the works on paper he made himsel Ayres writes in the exhibition’s useful catalog, which will be published later this month, that Hogan’s art “was never reducible to psycho/physical autobiography.” Surely she’s correct. The work’s rigorous formal emphasis on color, light and materials obliterates any sense of painting as a record of an expressive self.

Yet, just as surely, Hogan’s daunting physical condition must have informed the bodily analogies that so clearly guided his paintings. The limitations inherent in his own failing body are one thing. The vivid possibilities to be found in tearing apart the body of a painting and reassembling it anew are quite another.

* Otis Art Gallery, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Westchester, (310) 665-6905, through Feb. 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.