Exhibitionism

"Embracing the Present: The UBS Art Collection": Connecting the Dots

There they are, peeking in from the edge of Roy Lichtenstein's Post Visual, across a pillow on one of the Pop Art master's blocky cartoon sofas: dots, a vertical spray of the Ben Day kind that provide shading and texture on the comics page. Look closely at Andy Warhol's photo-silk-screen painting Cagney, and there are more of them in the shades of gray playing across the actor's face as he grips a pair of gats and stares down the barrel of a Tommy gun -- hundreds of dots, tiny black ones clustered in various densities that make up the shadows and skin tones of the image. Turn 180 degrees, and in Chuck Close's Large Mark Pastel, a portrait of a guy considerably less tough than the one Warhol painted, there are still more of them -- in fact, the image is nothing but dots, tightly packed into rows and rows with careful variations in color creating the photographlike face sporting aviator specs and a toothy smile. There's one in the corner of Elizabeth Murray's Southern California, beneath the looming red apple/face that dominates the painting, like a pearl earring in a thicket of brunette hair: a tiny white dot. There are colored ones hovering over the human figures in a photo collage; large black ones in a grid joined to a painting of a young woman on a chair; constellations of white ones in the pencil re-creations of astronomical photographs. They're all there is to Damien Hirst's large-scale Albumin, Human, Glycated, and if you stare long enough at his grid of colored dots on a white field, a trick of optics will have you seeing dots that aren't there.

As all these dots swim before your eyes, they take on the feel of those cascading zeroes and ones in The Matrix -- technological code that represents or takes the form of something in the natural world. And maybe there's something of that at work in this show of late-20th-century art collected by the corporation UBS PaineWebber and organized for exhibition by the Portland Art Museum. Certainly, humanity's relationship to technology and its products has played a huge role in the art of the past hundred years, as a means of making art and as a central theme in the art that has been made. In a collection that contains a broad sampling of contemporary sculpture, painting, and photography from the past 40 years -- and the full collection contains 830 works -- it's only natural that the influence of technology be felt.

Now, the 50 pieces shown here are far too diverse to be contained by any one theme; here are paintings that are figurative and abstract, photographs of landscapes and staged scenes, sculptures cast from life and those composed of collected objects, and they comment on urban life, consumerism, racism, sexism, pop culture, international relations, shape and color, the passage of time, and the human form in motion, among other issues. Even the works that use those ubiquitous dots are radically different from each other, dots in an abstract grid and forming a human face, faces photographed, painted like photographs, and abstracted. And that is actually part of the joy of "Embracing the Present": the jubilant range of concerns and expressions and types of experimentation, the riot of form, scale, color, and style, so concentrated in one space as to leave you giddy.

Still, even among all these varied works one thing that can be glimpsed again and again is that tension between the technological world and the human one. In photographer Gregory Crewdson's Untitled (Sewer Mystery), the staged scene of firefighters responding to an automotive emergency in a New England subdivision reveals not only the danger posed by machines (and something unseen radiating light from below ground) but by human sprawl, which is spreading across and consuming an otherwise pristine countryside. In Frank Thiel's large photo Potsdammerplatz, an urban landscape is dominated by cranes erecting a series of skyscrapers, testimony to humankind's ingenuity and technological mastery but one that appears to have obliterated any sign of nature. For Catalog: Terra Firma Nineteen Hundred Eighty Nine #2, Ashley Bickerton has taken pieces of the natural world -- seaweed, hair, sand -- as well as some less natural objects -- cigarette butts, cheese doodles, broken glass -- and sealed them in 16 yellow cylinders with glass lids, evidence of our desire to reduce the world to products, ordered and classified. Then there are all those dots -- the geometric form laid out in precise grids: so formal and mechanical, and as is clear from David Salle's My Subjectivity, which pairs them with a painted human form, so different from us. How do we as human beings live in this technological world? What does it do to us? "Embracing the Present" offers no single answer, but it allows us to find answers for ourselves by connecting the dots in a whirl of whimsy, imagination, color, and form.