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As one of the more inventive sculptors in Los Angeles today, Carl Cheng (aka John Doe Co.) is active in designing such massive public art projects as a work for the new Sheriffs facility in San Francisco and an entire Metro Rail station for the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. It can be surprising, therefore, to those who do not know his early work that Cheng’s graduate study was in photography with Robert Heinecken at UCLA.

A careful look at Cheng’s recent work reveals its photographic roots, however. A commission for the Kaiser-Permanente Mental Health Center in Los Angeles, for example, is a “water lens tower” designed to project sunshine and water patterns on a seating deck beneath the tower. And Cheng’s mechanical “art tools” automatically generate works of art, much in the way the camera is supposed by many to make automatic images. The Santa Monica Art Tool, is an intaglio template on a concrete roller, nine feet in diameter. When pulled behind a tractor along Santa Monica beach, the tool “prints” a two-inch high cityscape complete with freeways.

Both of the works included here, vacuum-molded plastic sculptures built around monochromatic photographic transparencies, were included in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Photography into Sculpture. Cheng’s work of this time is “decidedly serious and evidently pessimistic,” Fidel Danieli wrote in Artforum, and the essence of his subjects “is distilled to an encapsulated, weightless silence.”¹ (8)

U.N. of C., 1967, is a political satire: a swipe at the California state symbol, the bear (in this case, a yellow bear), critical of official ignorance and animosity in the arena of racial and ethnic issues—even in a multiracial “U[nited] N[ations] of C[alifornia].”

Sculpture for Stereo Viewers, 1968, manipulates the concept of depth and volume perception. The word “viewers” can refer to the audience that sees the piece. However, stereo viewers are also optical instruments (like the Victorian-era parlor amusements or the Viewmaster of more recent years). They normally present paired, flat images which, seen through the viewer, create the illusion of a third dimension. In this case, both images are simultaneously flat and volumetric, in a subtle critique of photographic illusionism.

1. Fidel A. Danieli, “Some New Los Angeles Artists: Carl Cheng,” Artforum 6, no.7 (March 1968): 48. ↩︎