The Heroic Doodle Pinkney Herbert’s new abstractions, found objects, and – finally! – good public art. by Cory Dugan bstract painting has to go a long way these days to be more than simple decoration or simplistic allegory. In his current exhibit at Ledbetter Lusk Gallery, Pinkney Herbert doesn’t go far enough. Herbert’s paintings often flirt with pictorial anarchy. Not anarchy in the sense of chaos; that might be interesting. Herbert’s sense of anarchy is rather more mundane, simply a lack of order or direction. This new body of work doesn’t add much to his repertoire; Herbert seems to have a limited stock of forms and ideas at his disposal. PHOTO BY JOHN LANDRIGAN Pinkney Herbert, Double Gender, oil on canvas, 1998. In his larger paintings (the largest here are somewhat modest by previous standards), Herbert still seems preoccupied with the doodle made heroic, the intuitive squiggle rendered on a majestic scale. Intuitive squiggles can be interesting – one obviously thinks of Twombly or de Kooning – but Herbert’s intuition seems only able to muster a few predictable shapes. Jagged geometries are pitted against amorphous organics in a clumsy two-step, less dance than wrestling match. At times, in pockets, it almost works. Double Gender, for example, manages to create some visual tension in spite of its prosaic forms and offers a few truly juicy passages of painterly prowess, especially in the upper half where Herbert paints out the lazy drips and splotches that otherwise ruin the painting. Herbert’s tendency is to paint too much or too little; the two tendencies do not cancel one another out and make the whole well-painted. I have often wished to isolate passages in Herbert’s large paintings, to literally excise them from the unspectacular whole. In a series of small canvases in this exhibit, the artist almost does just that. In paintings such as Leap Frog, Desert, and Tangerine, he is forced into a smaller window, to relate to his forms from less than arm’s length, and the results are telling. These are cohesive (if still predictable and decorative) compositions, less macho bravado and more pensive study. There is an almost Picasso-esque sense of form at work here, an easy line and a certainty of color. The mud and muddle of the larger works is missing. Swimmer, one of these small paintings, actually stands largest in the exhibit. A small orange shape, vaguely figurative, floats off-center in a faceted field of blues – a simple, jewel-like, sophisticated exploration of color and abstract composition. Would that there were more. Simple – and sometimes jewel-like – also describes the companion exhibit at Ledbetter Lusk, mistakenly given second billing. “Found” – comprising works by Paul Arensmeyer, Gabriel Manca, and John Salvest – is a considered counterpoint to Pinkney Herbert’s slovenly intuition. All three artists use found objects in their work, to witty and elegant and startling effect. Arensmeyer usually employs small wooden blocks, vaguely rustic or post-industrial in origin, notched or drilled or carved or just found with some sort of easily utilized orifice. In most of the pieces, an object or assemblage of objects – metal balls, canvas belts, springs, mirrors – is either inserted into or dangles from the orifice. At once whimsical, absurdist, and heartily Freudian, Arensmeyer’s wall constructions are like post-Fluxus memorabilia, private yet universal, artifacts from an edgy existence. Gabriel Manca’s Hide series is akin to the literary tradition of magic realism, wherein logic and beauty and dreams become inextricably intertwined. Manca takes antique silver serving platters, ornate but still tarnished, and turns them into shell-like shadowbox frames – soldering them together, cutting holes into them. Inside these frames he places tiny pieces of clothing – dresses usually – carefully wrought and molded from sheet lead. Little girls’ dresses, little black dresses. The visual effect is both arresting and disturbing, elegant and yet somehow shabby. The title of the series is a double entendre in itself – hide, as in skin (or clothes, for us naked animals); and hide, as in concealment in a closet. These works are gorgeous little perversities. John Salvest is suddenly in danger of becoming over-exposed after all these years, with work also in the Delta Axis-less exhibit at the University of Memphis (previously seen locally at Rhodes College and Marshall Arts). But, if anyone deserves belated overexposure, it’s Salvest. Coffee Calendar consists of 365 used coffee filters – each one mounted, stamped with a date, and framed. The result is somewhere between wallpaper and an exercise in forensics. Each brown-stained circle of paper representing a particular day, like a metaphysical fingerprint, each one different. I personally found myself looking for my birthday, just to see what pattern Salvest’s coffee maker made that day; it was brown and circular just like the rest. (I am only surprised that Salvest drinks only one pot of coffee per day.) Pinkney Herbert/Found Ledbetter Lusk Gallery 4540 Poplar, 767-3800 Through July 18th   If I might make a presumptuous suggestion to all the influential names that compose Mayor Rout’s Art in Public Places Commission: Get over to Rhodes College and take some notes. Installed in a common area in the center of campus, Greg Shellnut’s Garden of Manual Text was commissioned by the school to mark its 150th anniversary and will be on view for the upcoming year (hopefully, the college will see fit to make it permanent). It is impressive that Rhodes chose Shellnut, a faculty member at the University of Mississippi, known for sculptural work involving actual books and the written word, to celebrate a history of education; doubly impressive because of Rhodes’ image as a conservative Gothic enclave seemingly more at ease with conventional bronze-figure monuments (although I admit the grotesque statue of the snarling lynx is a personal guilty pleasure). Garden of Manual Text rises from an enclosed lawn like ruined columns in the Roman Forum or a weathered Druid henge – except the neglected antiquity in this case is an enormous manual typewriter, buried iceberg-like and rusted, like a post-apocalyptic relic. A few keys have risen to the surface and a grove of hammers stand frozen like dead saplings in striking pose. But the most completely unearthed segment of the vast extinct machine is its spool of used ribbon – an unwound strip of sheet steel with convincing “typed” letters expertly cut out to approximate double-strikes and imperfect carriage alignment. The final message typed on this buried ruin, read from the ribbon, is a quote from James Agee’s Now Let Us Praise Famous Men: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here... A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.” This is not perhaps the optimistic, congratulatory message one might expect from a public sculpture; it is instead honest and realistic in its mood, harsh and equally honest in its conception and depiction. Shellnut’s piece is a memorable, haunting work – not only site-specific but content-specific, thoughtful and evocative. This stunning work celebrates not just a place and a time, not just a history; it also candidly celebrates the future – the future of the students who pass by every day and who hopefully put a piece of their body into the future of our waning civilization. This is a far cry from the fluff thus far certified by our local body of public-art arbiters: a troop of connected artists and usual suspects for the new library, an innocuous piece of limp deco signage for Ballet Memphis’ new headquarters. Memphis already has enough bad public art (all of it) and we don’t need more. Ms. Jernigan, Ms. Hussong, Mayor Rout, take a little trip to Rhodes and see how it should be done.