DOING A SCULPTURE ROUTINE AT LAICA

An exhibition of six sculptors at the L.A. Institute of Contemporary Art is the first flourish of LAICA’s new director, Ben Marks. Perhaps it is the first glow of the sunset for LAICA’s quarters on Robertson Boulevard, since they are looking for a more felicitously placed facility. That aside, “Sculpture Part I” (through Feb. 15) is such a routine survey of local artists it takes on a kind of universal quality, as if one might reasonably expect to find a virtually identical show in any city where contemporary art has a purchase. Cleveland Sculpture Part I. Lyon Sculpture Part I. Dusseldorf Sculpture Part I. It’s kind of comforting, like knowing that if worse comes to worse you can always find a Burger King.

It’s the sort of event that sets the mind scavenging about outside the thing in itself in hopes of striking associations that will lend it significance. The attempt does not merely result in the expected wan trickle of serendipity but in a huge flood of cultural linkages that identify this modest exercise as yet another symptom of a culture in the grip of a long, pervasive and irreversible sea change from the Modernist sensibility to that of the Post-Modern.

Art used to be linked to the overworld in such subtle ways that the connection was invisible to most people causing art to seem separate and esoteric. Today, if you want to find out what is going on, the information is available in the comic strips of the daily paper. Recently, Garry Trudeau’s wonderful “Doonesbury” delighted artniks with an episode in which Michael’s wife J.J., an “emerging artist,” receives her first commission. She is to decorate the johns in an East Village club. Despite the fact she gets no fee for this task, she sets about it with the calculated energy of Bernini designing the baldacchino for St. Peter’s.

If one insists on being such a bore as to analyze this delightful nonsense, it yields a picture of an art well on its way to becoming something far more public and functional than what it has been and of artists more than willing to conform to the new situation. This aside from the larger implications of the fact that Trudeau and newspaper editors could entertain reasonable expectations that art’s popularity ensured that the J.J. episode would be understood by rank-and-file newspaper readers.

That situation makes the intent of much of the work at LAICA seem too clear to require much explanation. Therman Statom, for example, is represented by a gallery full of architectural details rendered in glass and arranged in a room that has been transformed into an “environment” by splashing floor and walls with scrubs of bright color that also slops over onto his glass chairs, classical columns, arches, ladder, dice, cross and tower.

Everything about this work is familiar, especially its slavish adherence to a Post Mod aesthetic where architectural concerns have become so much more persuasive than artistic ones that artists by the score have adopted builders’ manners. One can no more stop this drift than Canute could shout back the ocean. It simply remains one’s obligation to note how well and how meaningfully the new script is followed. In Statom’s case, meaning is canceled by deja vu and conceptual sloppiness. What remains is undisciplined energy and more tattered evidence of art trying to become something else.

Architecture is not the only alternative, even though it is also pursued here in a pathetically undercooked arrangement of paper pyramids and a pole by Ewa Osinka. There is Neo-Expressionism. For a while, it seemed this style was an art-making strategy with proper concerns for honest expression. Now it appears more and more as a placebo replacing art with a product to fill a consumer demand. Here, Lynn Henkel’s reliefs of hanged men do nothing to disabuse one of the notion.

Corey Stein tries harder than anybody to make art into something else, possibly Disneyland or mad motorized window displays for whacked-out department stores. One work depicts an giant mechanical hand poking a finger endlessly in and out of a banana, transforming a jokey phallic symbol into a jokey vaginal one. Well, androgyny is in the air, too.

There is something likably and authentically dinged-out about Stein’s work with its flimsy facture of sticks and papier mache. There is skill and wry inventiveness in a little tableau of a showering figure that reminds one of early Robert Graham and a delicate melancholy wit in a monkey trying to play a broken violin amid autumn leaves.

But Stein’s attempt to be a nonconformist runs into the familiar cliches of Surrealism and a sophisticated knowledge that modernism made lovable eccentricity into a street corner commonplace.

This is a helluva time to want to be a real artist.

Bill Dwyer evidently wants to be a real artist but his little wire cage variations on Sol Lewitt’s brand of mathematical Minimalism lack both internal interest and a surrounding theoretical apparatus to make them look like much more than intellectual chain-link fences.

Even sadder, somehow, are the carpenter-fetish box constructions of Bill Tunberg. He is by all odds the most experienced artist on view and it is a rueful comment on the current state of things that the highly accomplished quality of his work is precisely what lends it an elegiac air.

It is an expressive vector that echoes in the poetic content of the boxes. One beautifully finished wooden vitrine contains a paper wedding bell on a pull fashioned of a ringed clothespin. Hanging nearby are three broken white coffee cups.

The work might be a melancholy eulogy for a modest dream of domestic contentment gone wrong. It might be mourning, too, for a shattered belief in the efficacy of honest artistic conviction. Other boxes whisper a muffled anger in pleasant, ordinary artifacts that get ugly. Baseballs bristle nails or turn to smashing rocks. Hammers show their capacity to turn from constructive tools to bludgeons.

Somehow the circumstantial neutralization of Tunberg’s restrained virtuosity brings to mind another comic-strip-world event that went largely unremarked over the holidays. A strip called “Rudy” by William Overgaard put itself out of business. It was a wonderful, offbeat odyssey concerning the adventures of a talking show-biz chimpanzee named Rudy. The whole thing was set in Hollywood. The strip’s script was wildly uneven but Overgaard’s drawings were the comic-strip equivalent of great Renaissance draftsmanship and a daily delight for anybody whose artistic teething was done on great strips like Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates and Johnny Hazard.

Well, “Rudy” just didn’t vanish. Lots of strips do that. Overgaard staged a weeklong exit for the strip implying that the whole game was just too much trouble for the candle. The wry and dignified self-immolation of the strip gave one the awful feeling that Post Modernism is overseeing the end of both the avant-garde and the traditional master comic strip.

Hang in there, Richard Diebenkorn. Hang in there, “Apartment 3-G.”