St. Louis Art Caps

Newly Reviewed
Buzz Spector: Shelf Life This select survey of eleven years' work by notable conceptual artist, writer and educator Buzz Spector is an abridged chronicle of a lifelong obsession with books and their elusive promise of conferring, to any willing reader, the dream of encyclopedic knowledge. Piles of books from the artist's capacious library are photographed in curated and sculpted groups: In Poiesis, the thin volumes that comprise poetry are stacked, with their spines obscured, into the loose shape of a chapel. Piles of canonical novels, pushed forward or receding out-of-focus according to preference, are stacked before Spector himself, suggesting his inclusion amid the tradition of grand personal narratives. In other works on paper, quotes by French theorists Roland Barthes or Guy Debord appear stitched in yarn in the kind of cursive or lowercase scrawl learned in elementary school. Does "high literature" need to be spelled out in the simplest of terms, and if so, to whom? Whether this work translates as playfully generous and illuminating or generalizing and self-reflexive may very well depend on the viewer. Through March 6 at Bruno David Gallery, 3721 Washington Boulevard; 314-531-3030 or www.brunodavidgallery.com. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed.-Sat., noon-5 p.m. on the first Sun. of every month and by appointment.

Old Media/Old NewsYesterday's headlines are re-presented in traditional (old) media by a group of local and international artists in this inventive elegy to the death of print journalism. Idiosyncratic, methodical processes seek to replace or reclaim the generative grind of tangible print: Martin Brief fills in all the O's that appear on the front page of the daily newspaper in hyper-minimalist maps of dots that suggest a concealed but perhaps arbitrary code. Writer Austin Kleon uses a Sharpie to black out the majority of text on a page, suggesting that what's left reveals poetic insight into otherwise prosaic reportage. Lisa Bulowsky recollects her "flash bulb" memories of historic events that occurred during her lifetime, printing half-childlike, half-harrowing abstractions of her experience with otherwise remote traumas. And in the ultimate feat of sustained meticulousness, Xiang-Yang's Newsreel employs entire rolls of scotch tape to peel off the printed faces of celebrities and other media-saturated notables, creating reams of ephemeral, repetitive portraits that resemble unspooled film stock of pummeling propaganda. Fact, here, becomes marginalia, while emotional and personal experiences surface as all that's most articulate, memorable or worth remembering. The exhibit also includes work by Michelle Forsyth and Jihoon Park. Through March 27 at the Luminary Center for the Arts, 4900 Reber Place; 314-807-5984 or www.theluminaryarts.com. Hours: noon-6 p.m. Wed.-Sat.

Ongoing
Critical Mass Creative Stimulus St. Louis nonprofit Critical Mass awarded "creative stimulus" grants to local artists Asma Kazmi, Robert Goetz and two recent Great Rivers Biennial winners, Martin Brief and Cameron Fuller (Fuller is an RFT Mastermind Award winner). This exhibit of new work made within the year since the grant's receipt provides a salient diagnosis of the area's current visual temperament. Goetz's scattered wasteland of guitar parts is the product of an opening-night performance in which several local musicians (himself included) dismantled — with axes, drills, mallets and other tools — several electric guitars, plugged in to amplify the elegantly ambient murmur of willful obsolescence. Fuller displays an expertly handcrafted vitrine containing a diorama in which taxidermied dead howl in mute eternity beneath a blue-hued geometric pattern of stars. Kazmi resurrects another form of marginalized life — the hijra class in India, composed of hermaphrodites, eunuchs, cross-dressers and the transgendered — and films them in celebratory high fashion: bejeweled, clothed in opulent blue fabrics and striking poses that apparently translate globally as model-grade resplendent. In Brief's minimalist drawings, Jenny Holzer's noted Truisms undergo another kind of translation, wherein each of her words is replaced by its full definition and handwritten in minute print on white paper. The effect is as essentializing as it is estranging and embodies the all-but-overt anti-institutional sentiment that unifies the exhibition: that art is not intended to yield practical (read: commodifiable) sense, but to give voice to all that otherwise couldn't be uttered. Through February 28 at the Regional Arts Commission, 6128 Delmar Boulevard; 314-863-5811 or www.art-stl.com. Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. , noon-5 p.m. Sat.-Sun.

It's Getting Light: New Works by Christopher Gustave and Julie Malone Repetitive and multilayered geometries are the basic grammar of this exhibition of work by two St. Louis-based artists. Malone composes glossy oil paintings of the accumulated squares that come of a quick brushstroke, building the surface to reveal similar underlayers of dabbed chromatics and occasionally emphasizing the shape of the painted gesture with a drawn square outline. Gustave cuts small squares of paper and layers them in ascending sizes, creating tiny piles of color that are then affixed to a paper page or wood panel in idiosyncratic grids. Anonymous pills make their way onto these piles, and do formal service to the image by their offsetting pale hues and circularity. The exhibition appears like a chronicle of non-dramatic narratives — the kind inflected by mid-daylight, affective moods, weather in flux and the dim bruise of tedium — that over time manage to implicate something larger or incite a revelation by default. Through February 12 at Hoffman Lachance Contemporary, 2713 Sutton Boulevard, Maplewood; 314-960-5322 or www.hoffmanlachancefineart.com. Hours: 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Wed.-Fri., noon-5 p.m. Sat and by appointment.