UAM in the Thunder Dome

LOTHAR SCHMITZ: SURVIVAL STRATEGIES

Every rocket scientist, microbiologist, and physicist I have known (and they are legion; I keep excellent company) has led a double life as a poet, a danseur, a nerdy rock superstar. This always surprises people somehow; they have been led by sterile plastic and white lab coats (and a belief in the left-brain/right-brain divide) to see science as the opposite of the creative arts, and flakey, loopy artists as the opposite of rigid, boring scientists.

Boy, some people are stupid. If I were smarter, I would tell you why.

We’ve just about forgotten our mad scientists today, having turned them, via X-Files, into loveable harmless tech geeks whose greatest threats to us are a sneer and an eye roll when we admit that we didn’t save our work before the operating system crashed. But what artist has held a candle to the discoveries of Leonardo? What artist has claimed a creation as grand as that of Dr. Frankenstein, or even Frank-N-Furter?

Scientists are our overlords, and sexy motherfuckers—at least according to CSI.

And so we come at last to Lothar Schmitz. I do not know if he is sexy, but I am going to assume he wears leather and fucks things up. Because Lothar Schmitz, in his grand installations for “Survival Strategies” at the University Art Museum, will make you gawk at nothing more than fake moss and fake banzai pines, projections of what might be paramecia (liberal arts grad, yo!), pretty grottoes of dead fake palms, and a salt flat. A salt flat!

And I want to crunch across it with my giant Cloverfield monster feet, and roll in it like a thinner Marilyn Monroe, perhaps remote control a very tiny dune buggy across it or compose a toy battle scene like Chris Burden’s installation A Tale of Two Cities.

But a sign says not to walk on it, and so we all are safe from me.

Schmitz’s multiple installations are each dynamically different. One room is given over to boulders topped with fake grass and moss and tiny biodomes. It’s a lovely gambol atop a bizarre hybrid of real and fake: It’s The Future as envisioned in ’77. In that The Future, a plastic bubble could protect not only John Travolta from love’s first kiss, but also an entire threatened Earth from the bubonic plague that was toxic pollution. We could dome-in Ecotopia and the “real blades of grass” in ELP’s “Karn Evil 9,” while outside the edenic domes were the poisoned apples Rachel Carson warned us of (in Silent Spring) and Joni Mitchell bitched about before the big yellow taxi took away her old man.

Large Organism is scarier, a takeoff, Schmitz says, of Newtonian notions of the body as a machine. If the body is this machine, then it’s an icky and disturbing one without any of the pheremones that make bodies’ messiness worth it. Here, we have the sterile lab of a proper scientist, one for whom humanity is divorced from the imperatives of discovery, whether it’s DuPont or Edward Teller. It’s a room with only tubes, cases and powders. The powders are a sickly yellow and the tubes suck a thin red juice that conveys nothing so much as liposuctioned blood. In this machine, there can be no soul. There can, however, be anthrax.

In the fourth room, a darkened one, we can breathe again. There are plants (pretty) and film of coral reefs (pretty), and whatever the import of our squiggly, paisley paramecium friend that’s kicking it on the wall, it can take a back seat to the more pressing concerns of humanity—like making shadow Bunny Foo Foos hop across it, and thinking about how cool it would be to own a projector TV. That the pretty palms are fake is no matter. Just don’t touch, don’t smell, don’t look too close, and you’d never know at all.

In here, in the museum, is our pretty little bubble; it’s not (quite) (yet) Thunder Dome outside. We don’t need to know the way home.

LOTHAR SCHMITZ: SURVIVAL STRATEGIES UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM | 1250 BELLFLOWER BLVD | LONG BEACH 90840 | 562.985.5761 | TUES-SUN 12-5PM, THURS 12-8PM | $4 | THROUGH APRIL 13

Tags: art, cal state long beach, lothar schmitz, science, university art museum