Burri My Art in the Hollywood Hills

"Combustione: Alberto Burri and America" at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

Comments (0) By Doug Harvey Thursday, Oct 21 2010

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I can't think of a figurative or representational painting that balances narrative structure and sensual immediacy, the festive and the melancholic, the spatially complex and the graphically dynamic with the economy of means demonstrated in Martedi Grasso (Fat Tuesday), Burri's 1956 accumulation of used paint rags. 1973's monochromatic white Bianco Cretto C1, a rough circle of relative smoothness hovering in a rectangular field of artificially generated cracks, is, for my money, among the most mesmerizing and spiritually potent images of the modern era. These are not distress signals, but simply memento mori — reminders of the unavoidability of decay and death, uttered in a language that, unlike linear verbal discourse, is not wracked with anxiety about reaching the end.

So it turns out Kansas was right after all. But they put it in a song anyway. One of the too-infrequently pondered issues of avant-gardism is, "Where do you leave off leaving things out?" So much art from the last half-century has thrown out the conceptual baby with the sensual bathwater, by following a verbally encoded concept to its logical extreme, with predictably diminishing returns. Exhibits that try to immortalize performative gestures of ephemerality are doomed to redundancy at best, hypocritical betrayals at worst. Burri's insistence on leaving behind artifacts that testify to their own impermanence ensures that they make their statement without making their host institution appear idiotic — and, as artworks, they may be as close to the edge as you can get without falling off. Falling off into what? It's not something you can put into words.