Huntington Gallery, Art Building, UT Showing through March 3

In viewing this collection of works by Dennis Oppenheim, you get the feeling you're looking at a set of blueprints for a future exhibition of actual art; as if the paintings and sculptures have yet to be filled with the artist himself and the aesthetic components of his expression. This sense of distance between art and artist is both a theme and a technique, as Oppenheim looks not to make objects, but to represent in plans and mechanized sculpture the thought process by which art is conceived and created.

His "Study for Badly Tuned Cow," a colored pencil blueprint, bears the inscription ". . . steel fence silk screened video static wax and fiberglass black lights." The inscriptions add to the drawings a literary dimension, a leaning toward a tangible finished sculpture. Still, they are plans for a cow standing in a pen fashioned of large steel musical notes. The drawings serve as plans for conception and blueprints for a three-dimensional model of an object, but also as an after-the-fact document of a finished piece.

The small-scale sculptures share this sense of preliminary development. They depict small, strictly geometric settings, usually surrounding any representation of natural elements with perforated steel and pipes, as in "Blue and Red Garden Enclosure" and "Incubator."

Distinct from these works in both placement and scope is Oppenheim's "The Last Dance," a full-scale sculpture filling an entire room of the gallery. An ensemble of suspended, rotating hard-foam figures (resembling living cacti with the tufts of protruding nails), the sculpture is in constant motion to the accompaniment of a series of audio devices (old radios and a turntable playing 45s at 33 rpms) and seems like some deranged celebration of motion and energy.

The New Spirit:
Pop Prints and
Their Legacy

Various Artists

Huntington Gallery, Art Building, UT Showing through March 3

Pop Art is about images. It lifts recurrent pic-tures or figures from the everyday barrage of mass media and examines them as art objects. More than blurring the line between art and reality, Pop Art seeks to erase it. Andy Warhol said, "Once you got `Pop,' you could never see a sign the same way again. Once you thought `Pop,' you could never see America the same way again." Perhaps the most familiar representation of this ideology is Warhol's "Onion Soup," which is a part of The New Spirit Pop prints exhibition.

The exhibit is a series, divided into categories that offer a thematic tour of Pop Art. (Enter the upstairs section by way of the front staircase and this organization is readily apparent.) For those unfamiliar with the genre, the layout offers a good introduction and a few insights into the often-dismissed form.

The collection is very impressive. In addition to the works by Andy Warhol are prints by Roy Lichtenstein, whose representations of the ideal comic strip female form ("Shipboard Girl," "Crying Girl") are prominent images of the movement, as well as works by Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Audrey Flack, Peter Saul, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, and many others.

Claes Oldenburg's "Pile of Erasers" and Wayne Thiebaud's "Cigars" are minimal, accurate renderings of exactly what they say they are. Richard Hamilton's "Kent State" is a blurry, television-like image of a figure lying, bleeding, on the street. The dissonance of the subject matter is balanced by the simple, familiar rendering of the image.

All of the works here, from advertisements imitated to political commentary, examine our consumer-oriented culture through its visual makeup in order to understand the effects of these images on the ways in which we communicate.

-- Christopher Hess