THE Magazine - Los Angeles

Upon early word getting around that noted artisan print shop Hamilton Press was planning a masters' portfolio dedicated to baseball, and that famous aficionados of that sport like Terry Allen and Ray Pettibon, not to mention Hamilton co-founder Ed Ruscha, were on board with the project, folks began anticipating a good time. It would have been reasonable to assume that baseball, that most wholesome of American passions, beacon of sportsmanship and fraternity, when taken up as a common thread among artists of multifarious sensibilities, would yield a kind of unifying optimism, revealing transcendent commonalities, coaxing enthusiasm out of the pensive and innocence from the jaded. Instead, what emerged is a collection of unforeseen potency that shares little but a narrative armature, wherein, even as the stylistic prowess and individualism of the participants' contributions flourish on their own terms, the expected optimism gives way before a juggernaut of dark obsession and ruminations on visceral mortality.

Post-punk contemporary art icon Ray Pettibon's fascination with baseball is well documented, and in fact, as a Hamilton Press regular, his work was part of the initial inspiration for the project. However, as his own style has become increasingly dense, frenetic, and even caustic in recent years -- even more so than usual -- his contribution's fearsome, heavily worked line drawing of a bat obscured by gripping hands in a pre-game ritual moment and his troubling assertion that "to win is to get hit" strikes a jarring opening chord, sounding the first warning that this is to be no day at the ballpark. Similarly, Terry Allen, whose multidisciplinary practice involving not only painting, sculpture, and installation but prose and song has taken baseball as a central theme for decades and posited it as both an autobiographical entry point and as broad-based metaphor for the American experience, also chose a shadowy path of acerbic wit -- one in which the tale of a seventy-three-year-old protagonist who prefers death to the ungodly spectacle of another Yankees pennant is rendered in endearingly diaristic form.

Robbie Conal, one of the project's most ardent early supporters, offers an interpretation of the famous tale of Pittsburgh Pirates' pitcher Dock Ellis pitching a 1970 no-hitter against the Padres while tripping on LSD, using his admirable mastery at rendering creviced flesh and bone in black and white lines, and his penchant for using skeletons as stand-ins for living humans. Paul McCarthy manages to work quasi-pornographic, sexual imagery into a ball-and-bat tale; Mark Licari offers an entropic, overripe leather mitt as a heartbreaking metaphor of the flesh; and Greg Colson puts his obsession with mathematical coordinates to good use in his musical, expressively harmonic calculation diagram -- all of which demonstrate focus and familiarity with the nuanced underbelly of fanaticism that shoots through this portfolio like stitches in leather. But although this portfolio's compendium of masterful contributions from a who's who of Venice-associated modern masters and emerging stars has enough to recommend it to any serious art lover -- even the most sports-challenged among them -- the clearest expression of joy, and perhaps the project's biggest surprise, is the crisp, retro-futurist robot dream girl dreamt up by erstwhile baseball neophyte Victor Gastelum. He took on the project without so much as a favorite team, much less adolescent emotional baggage, and produced an L.A. Fury fans of women's ball can only dream of. Ironically, or maybe due to the relative newness (read: purity) of Gastelum's fanship, his image remains infused with the first rushing blush of a true love that has already broken the hearts his colleagues, year after year, for as long as they can remember. (Damn those Yankees!)

Line Drive is available for viewing by appointment only. For more information, call Hamilton Press at (310) 396-8244.