Apples, Oranges and Striped Cloths

THE CARPENTER CENTER is a bastard of a building, a concrete monolith flanked on all sides by the peculiar combination of colonialism and conservatism that makes up the Harvard red-brick style. The department it houses is another sort of aberration, grudgingly giving credit for work with paper, brushes, paint and wood instead of work with words.

And the results of this non-literary effort--objects produced by the students who work in the weird building under the auspices of the off-key department--make up a strange kind of art exhibit. The First Annual Spring Show of Student Work, put together by the Carpenter Center Students Association, doesn't center on any special theme or expose any new trend in modern art. It's a bunch of stuff done by people who like to create in a visual way and are learning new ways to do so. Some of the works are class assignments, some aren't. Some are exciting, some trite or boring. There are lithographs and photographs, mylar and plastic, oil painting and silkscreening, hung mostly according to genre in a loose, disorganized way--with corrections penciled in on nametags that keep falling on the floor.

What makes the best things in this show work is an intangible quality of excitement. For some artists a drawing exercise remains only an exercise. Excitement comes when something more is added the idea of personal observation or commentary: the special oddities of line or color or intensity that add life to an exercise: the spark of creative that can be traced to nothing but raw talent.

This excitement doesn't come from witty titles like Dean-Askin's Bottcellis parody. The Dearth of Venus of Ta Kuang Chang's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mouna L a. Nor does it show up in Carlo G. Brogna's paating of a toilet with an accompanying roll of toiled paper tacked to the wall. Julia Allard's say of three mouths-obviously an assignment from a drawing class-is less striking than any of these but also more hosest. Because it's good--she's taken a simple exercise and brought life to it, in the positions of the mouths she's chosen and the way she's drawn them.

This ability to take a standard assignment and make something more out of it comes through most clearly in the exhibit in one work--a traditional study of a human head. William Maroni's charcoal head of a woman is a study in how to make three dimensional forms by light and shading, and also in how to bring a piece of paper to life with a pair of powerful eyes. It is a very fine, sensitive drawing and one of the high points of the show.

In general, the most successful parts of the show are the odd media--the lithographs, the photo-silkscreens, the photography--rather than the more conventional forms of drawing and painting. The oil paintings--one whole wall given over to still lives with apples, oranges and striped cloths that have been drawn by art students since the world began--are abysmal, technically competent but visually boring.

IT'S LOT MORE interesting for a student to tackle something never tried before--and the works that come out of this are a lot more interesting, too. Walter Bender's color lithograph of Central Square. Rich Diamond's two large mobiles. Mykal Castro's abstract paintings in acrylic on canvas, the photography of Mark Lenihan or Sage Sohier or Paula Bonnell--all these works have a style that relies on neither words nor props.

In one corner of the cavernous exhibit hall there's a small photosilkscreen of two nudes by Kathryn Miles. The figures, leaning on each other, are made up of blendings of the three primary colors, reflected in a bathroom mirror. The subtle coloring and molding of the two rolling forms is exquisitely done and deserves far more recognition than it will get, hiding in its corner.

A small sign at the entrance to the hall emphasizes that everything there is student work, and must be judged as such Learning and discovering and experimenting are supposed to be exciting processes, but to have them succeed as such requires a boldness and bravery on the part of the student in other words, it's scary to stick your neck out and sometimes you do and you flop miserably. Sometimes the artists in this show flop miserably--but usually because they've fallen prey to the modern student syndrome of not experimenting, or staying in a rut. Those who move beyond the strict confines of a teacher's assignment, if nothing else, escape the mortal sin of being boring. When you're exhibiting in a building that has been likened to two grand pianos fucking, that's something to avoid at all costs.