YOU CAN JUDGE LOWES BOOKS BY THEIR COVERS.(Pasatiempo)

The Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe, NM) December 1, 2000 Byline: Ellen Berkovitch Installation tells inside joke about art as text For all the proximity and shared sunlight of New Mexico and California, galleries here hardly exploit the connections between the two states. That makes Encinitas, Calif., artist Jean Lowes show Selected Books and Related Ephemera an initiative in Route 66 ambassadorship brought about by Margeaux Kurtie Fine Art in Madrid, N.M.

And what other than the highway is a better route for diplomacy culminating in a collision between the handicraft preferences of Northern New Mexico and the messy-mindful work that is Lowes?

Lowes art raucously reaches out a beckoning finger to the consumer, the tourist and the insatiable story-hound the global armchair traveler is at the turn of the 21st century. Her work encompasses both a narrative and a satire on the notion of narrative. Lowes installations frame the question, Wheres the story if you cant finish it yourself?

In Lowes hands even the word “installationo — that vague art-world catchall — is a moving target for puns. Selected Books and Related Ephemera is, as the title implies, an exhibit mainly comprising bookshelves on which groupings of lavishly illustrated tomes suggest you can judge a book by its cover. here lowes printable coupon

Each of Lowes books, constructed of papier-mch and painted with shiny enamel, combines direct modes of communication, namely a title and a painted image adorning the cover. Lowes effects further speak to conceptual underpinnings embedded in 20th-century art.

Principal among those underpinnings is the legacy of the ubiquitous Marcel Duchamp, maestro of puns and plays on words. Beginning in 1913 Duchamp proposed the unsettling notion that multiple meanings can reside inside even the most evidently recognizable object.

In a clever nod to Duchamp and more recent critical art theorists, Lowe sets up, all in one disarmingly funny package, an inside joke on the notion of artwork as “text.o The art-as-text argument put forward by French theorist Roland Barthes holds that within the text, multiple meanings — none original — blend and clash. Hence Lowes book arrangements, including Beauty Books, Religion Books, Aging Hippie and Poultry Books, evoke a giggle and also a kind of content-based Rorschach test for the places youve been and the people youve known. website lowes printable coupon

Lowe, a boomer born in 1960, had a 2000 solo show at Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. The exhibit catalog proposes manifold potentialities Lowes show, The Evolutionary Cul de Sac, may suggest to future arrivals on Earth.

Picture the cryogenic technicians in Woody Allens Sleeper. Picking through photographs and old headlines for clues about us, the white-coated men quip, Hard to believe they thought steak and ice cream were bad for you. Having vaulted forward into the microchip-sanitary future, Woody bops around a recreation yard, dressed in a spacesuit.

Although Lowes artwork is not exactly a melting pot where everything becomes soup, elements in her work surely do melt down. Yet they change shape, becoming not so much indistinct as even more emblematic of best-loved ideas.

As heir to Duchamps pun-proposing predilection, Lowes conceptualism plays out as a firm conviction that along will come the spectator to complete the artwork with his mind (games).

The word-image pairs in Lowes books provoke a game-playing sensibility because theyre funny.

A brightly painted aborigine illustrates Global Beauty Secrets.

Poultry Books features the strange white body of a supermarket chicken.

The Aging Hippie series of books employs the wavy graphics of 1960s album covers.

And Religion Books has a Christ figure doing dangerous work near power lines. Playing with matches, he will get burned.

Lowe is like an art director of an imaginary public sanctuary. We can visit but we cant live there.

Consider the place — visible at Margeaux Kurtie through Thursday, Dec. 7 — a sort of way station we can reach only after scaling mountaintops of media and spelunking canyons of kitsch.

In an interview for the catalog accompanying her San Diego museum show, Lowe says shes after a wide viewership, using familiar and accessible materials without the high-art pretensions of abstract or minimalist painting.

What that reveals among other things is something we in Santa Fe could see more of — the tension, common to California art, between the very slick and the self-consciously funky.

Smooth art is what critic Dave Hickey has called the extension of minimalism for 30 years after its original six-month incarnation. Inside the clean white walls of the museum cube, smooth art is right at home as a fatuous high-culture parallel to Californias smooth roads, beaches, bodies and light.

Funky on the other hand is much less seamless and much more frank.

“Franko is a word Lowe uses in the museum catalog interview.

“The thing about doing books (is that) you can slip something frank and straightforward into a grouping and not be too heavy-handed,o Lowe says.

Heavy-handed is something you never could accuse her of being.

Jean Lowe Installation Margeaux Kurtie Fine Art 2865 N.M. 14 Madrid, N.M.

Ongoing through Thursday, Dec. 7 Gallery open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday-Monday 473-2250 CAPTION(S):

1. Jean Lowes’ artistic message is frank and straightforward, but never heavy-handed