Seeing Things

THE MOST IMPRESSIVE PORTION OF THE EXHIBIT, both formally and conceptually, belongs to Richard Shaver, an independent researcher who achieved a modicum of fame in the '50s with his nonfiction accounts of subterranean colonies of devolved malevolent aliens plaguing mankind with technology left behind by a prehistoric master race, published in Amazing Storiesand other pulp magazines. Although Shaver's public star dimmed, he continued his research until his death in 1975, shifting his focus to the imagery he found in "rock books." Certain rocks, Shaver discovered, were actually a visual record -- made with a lost "3-di" technology -- of hitherto unsuspected antediluvian races of Mer-people and Amazons. By slicing the rocks into cross sections and staring intently, Shaver was able to tease out the elaborate, multiple-register imagery. The exhibition title comes from one of Shaver's remarkable explanatory captions, which states that "PERFECT PORTRAITS, PERFECT FIGURES OF PRE-DELUGE PEOPLES EXIST IN ENDLESS ABUNDANCE IN OUR ROCKS. THEY NEED ONLY A LITTLE APPLICATION OF OUR MUCH-TOUTED KNOW-HOW TO THE PROCESS OF MAGNIFICATION, OUTLINING WITH LIGHT THE VERY ANCIENT 3-di photography used by the forgotten peoples of the past." Predictably, such application was not forthcoming from the scientific community, and Shaver became increasingly frustrated as even his closest allies failed to be able to read the rock books correctly. To facilitate the knack, he began projecting his rock slices onto canvases and painting thickly textured interpretations of the complex scenes he had excavated.

Curator Tucker has put together several exhibitions of Shaver's work in previous years, and it's apparent in the succinct and satisfying selection of paintings, documentation and working photographs included here. Also on display is a copy of the hard-to-find fringe-book collector's prize catch The Secret World -- a hardback collection of Shaver's rock-book documentation and commentary, which raises the question of why this fascinating work -- which on visual terms alone ranks with the Surrealist paintings of Max Ernst and Jean Dubuffet -- hasn't been afforded a more complete retrospective.

It was another Surrealist, Paul Klee, who once said that the function of art was "to make the invisible visible." The cultural workers assembled in "Much-Touted Know-How" are doing just this, and doing so in a radically literal way that undermines "art for art's sake" more effectively than any cramped academic art-world deconstruction could hope to. Without the contextual rationalization of art-world privilege, or reference to the conveniently unverifiable realms of spiritual or psychological experience, these painters, photographers, draftsmen and audio artists insist on locating their visionary experience in the physical, historical consensus version of reality. If this isn't art, it's only because art so seldom conveys such urgency and engagement toward anything outside the boundaries of its own safe and comfortable belief system.

A LITTLE APPLICATION OF OUR MUCH-TOUTED KNOW-HOW At the GUGGENHEIM GALLERY, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange Through March 30