Art review: 'Nathan Mabry: Armature' at Cherry and Martin

Six weirdly elegant sculptures by Nathan Mabry at Cherry and Martin play fast and loose — and very effectively — with culture. The L.A. sculptor uses art as a multipurpose tool that scrambles conventional ideas about meaning, identity and humanity as  it rearranges visitors’ relationships to their surroundings as well as to their selves, which suddenly seem significantly more malleable and at home in a world that was once unfamiliar, alien and other.

At first glance, Mabry’s steel, aluminum and bronze sculptures appear to be gags, cheeky jokes that nod knowingly to famous artists, like Picasso, Rauschenberg and Judd, famous movements, like Primitivism, Assemblage and Minimalism, and famous works, like “Monogram,” “Tete de Femme” and “Untitled.”

The humor provides real pleasures. It also paves the way for more serious considerations without letting the art get heavy-handed or pedagogic.

Most of Mabry’s hilariously jerry-rigged sculptures begin with stuff he finds online: a kitschy knockoff of a statue of she-wolf-suckling Romulus and Remus, Baga D’mba shoulder masks made for the tourist trade, novelty sausages for market displays and an industrial-strength transformer box. To these he adds a car tire and wicker baskets, all cast in bronze, and homemade pedestals, one with a mechanism that pumps tears through the eyes of its weeping fertility figure.

The results are taut, formally refined sculptures that are more than the sum of their sources. Mabry’s rich, user-friendly fusions demonstrate that meaning migrates more freely and unpredictably than anything  else out there; that all forms of culture are part of the mix; and that individual identity never sits still.

Think of Mabry as a master of giddy globalism. His hybrids transform everything they touch into a generous invocation of worldly civility.

-- David Pagel

Cherry and Martin, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 559-0100, through Feb. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cherryandmartin.com

Images: Top, Nathan Mabry, "The Week of Kindness." Bottom, Nathan Mabry, "Tete de Femme." Credit for both: Courtesy of Cherry and Martin.

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

Um, more like a cartoonist plagiarisms of others cultures as an effette voyeur.. Modern art IS world art, from Braque to Tamayo to its musical incarnation Jazz.

This relies on the works of others for effect, that is the definition of plagiarism as embodied by todays inept artistes of no developed instinct or skill. Certainly nothing new, rather conformist inbred, and as usual these days, depleted of all color, the passion of art.

Sigh, art collegia delenda est

[Elegabalus]

The Baga tribe live along the Atlantic coast of Guinea Bissau. This area has been in direct contact with Europe, particularly the Portuguese, since the 15th century. Traditional Nimba masks are often embossed with brass metal furniture tacks acquired through trade with European merchants. As such, the original reference could itself be interpreted as a cross-cultural fusion, the hybridized product of a globalized trade.

In other Portuguese colonies such as Goa and Macau, one finds sculptures featuring foreign (i.e. European Christian) subject matters carved by native artisans using traditional materials, methods, and forms. A sculptor well versed in carving traditional images of Guan Yin, through a few formal adjustments and iconographical additions and subtractions, created images of the Virgin and Child, a type itself originally adopted from Ancient Egyptians images of Isis and Horus.

In Ancient Egypt, one also finds traditional Egyptian style representations of foreign rulers, be they Persian, Nubian, Greek, or Roman. Furthermore, Egyptology as we know it was founded during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt; he himself a Corsican-born, ethnically Italian, Frenchman whose forces were opposed by the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, two ethnically Georgian, culturally Turkish former slaves and Muslim converts named Murad Bey and Ibrahim Bey.

So what exactly are the conventional ideas about meaning, identity and humanity that Mabry is scrambling?

[william wray]

Yeah I don't understand the the reviewer either. It's easy to say what a visceral reaction encodes, harder to explain why it does. As for the second generation stealing of symbols from African cultures... it's kind of slickly done at least, but I'm not sure if it's evolving the influences much further than Picasso. I like the smashed together garbage bin boxes better. Stark, but warm forms based on simple design with a rusty texture always evoke some kind of nostalgia for industrial eras gone by. At least see why this work is in a gallery and is considered some reasonably skilled forms of art... a big plus compared to a lot of "art" today.

[Donald Frazell]

None of it is worket together as one, its like he took a basic stolen form and then rolled up some playdough and stuck it to it, to look like sausages and donuts, sorta like a lame Arcimboldo. The fist is kinda amusing, but the upside down Romulus and Remus looks like kitsch statuary he bought and then glue together, turned upside down and mimmicked Rauschenberg to be even cuter, then put some baskets from Pier One on top. then hired someone from a foundry to take it and replicate it. Really, i bet thats how it came about, artistes these days are way too weak, of mind body and soul, to work on anything themselves. But they sure are "clever' and "smart".
God help us. we are pathetic.

Save the spiritual and creative Watts Towers(It took him 33 years and incredible vitality) storm these Bastilles of Academic Ivories.