ED KIENHOLZ WISES UP

L.A.’s art scene is doing a dervish dance with new museums ready to open, galleries sprouting round and about and big art trade fairs in the works. Anybody, however, stubborn enough to cleave to the belief that art is about artworks finds a lull in the days before the trombones and kettle drums commence.

A good thing. When there are obvious exhibitions in plenty it can be like being fed intravenously--nourishment without flavor. A little sensory deprivation makes us savor what we might otherwise gulp.

Take the Ed Kienholz exhibition at the L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice until Nov. 22. Take the sculpture exhibition at the Laguna Beach Art Museum’s satellite space in South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa until Jan. 4.

The Kienholz show recalls 20-odd years slipped away since the artist loomed to larger public notice in a huge headline flap over his first retrospective at the then-brand-new County Museum of Art. The County Board of Supervisors leveled obscenity charges at his life-size assemblage, “Back Seat Dodge ’38.”

Now the County Museum of Art is about to be brand-new again with its Robert O. Anderson Building for modern and contemporary art opening in a couple of weeks. Naturally, “Back Seat Dodge” is now in the permanent collection, a cherished icon. It’s like the time the Dadaist Man Ray fixed that photo of an eye to the pendulum of a metronome and called it “Object to Be Destroyed.” It was destroyed in good Dada style but somebody re-created it for a museum show decades later and Man Ray named it, “Indestructible Object.”

Art has a shot at secular immortality but artists are vulnerable. Kienholz left L.A. after the LACMA show and has since divided his time between a spread near Moscow, Ida., and West Berlin, where he is revered as a great man, and for good reason--his amazing early track record as the leading Baroque assemblagist and stage-setter for later environmental art. He has also done the occasional masterpiece like “Sollie 17.” But all too often his later work, encountered unexpectedly, caused one to think, “Uh-ohh, somebody doing a Kienholz imitation.”

The nice thing about the L.A. Louver spread--aside from the fact that it is of museum scope and quality--is that it shows a marked change in sensibility considerably reducing the art’s sense of self-caricature.

Surely this has significantly to do with the artist’s partnership with his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Their pooled sensibility softens the sense that this art was made by some satanic TV evangelist with Beelzebub eyebrows shocking the flock into rebirth with low-down rock hymns hammered on the piano with the naughtiness of Jerry Lee Lewis.

The present group of “Grey Works” includes a feminist-edged “Model” tableaux and a satire on right-wing fundamentalism. Both play like knee-jerk homages to stereotypes, done without conviction.

Pieces like “The Grey Window Becoming” represent the new Kienholz team. A nude girl with a long black braid sits at a beat-up dressing table regarding herself in the mirror, family record book and a pistol before her. A banjo is propped on the mirror with a big pink boar’s head sticking out of it. Suddenly we are in the realm of fairy tales--of “Beauty and the Beast” sung with sad wit and wisdom by Burl Ives. She killed the beast and now she don’t wanna live no more.

“Briefly the Silver Buck” continues the refrain. A headless manikin in a bathing suit sits by a painting of herself nude. The scene is reproduced on a TV so you get the feeling of past events leading up to now. She rests on the pelt of a silver buck deer. She destroyed the beast and her life is empty.

There is a wider wisdom in this work. Nothing is anybody’s fault anymore. Old works like the bordello tableau “Roxie’s” seemed to say, “Somebody is gonna pay for this!” There is no guilt now, only universal conflict leading to regret and sweetness.

These days when the Kienholz’s try one of his old social satire shticks like “The Newses” or “Mercedes Bronze” they are just silly and seem to know it. Youthful jeering and posturing are inescapable and bracing in their time, but once it’s over you can’t go back. At 59, Kienholz is at his best in “The Dark” where poetry makes fear bearable or “Cat With Blue Shadows” where death is regarded with affection and respect.

Down in South Coast Plaza five lesser-known sculptors are still fudging half-formed feelings behind winceable punny titles like “Henry I Couldn’t Love Ya Moore.” The show packs broader insights into pinched space. The title “Sculpture Forum: Illusion as Content” does not seem to get down to the nerve-center of what is expressed here. It is not about illusion.

Each of the five artists dip differing recipes out of the same two crucibles to the point where one thinks the main artistic inspiration of the moment comes from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and the “Star Wars” trilogy. It is bad luck that the weakest work on hand is also the largest. A cave entrance executed by David DiMichele and presumably leading to Punkville would have a hard time in an antiseptic shopping mall even if it worked by itself.

A selection of rugged rock hunks by Norman Grochowski is typified by “Cool Wind Blue,” where a handmade boulder is cracked with spooky neon. Here are the metaphysics--and wonderful trashiness--of Carlos Castaneda.

Jake Gilson is more restrained but he too is magnetized to peasant-level primitivism and magic in pieces that look like architectural fragments of rural Mexican houses suddenly impaled on large pastel-colored wedges.

The show drips with irony that may seem stylish to teenies but can only inspire the aging wanderer to wonder at the necessity for these flip conceits. Right, the true tender ego must be protected behind an armor of nonchalant sarcasm. What it effectively accomplishes is to mantle the work in an aura of purposeful artificiality that calls its emotional authenticity into question.

Craig Cree Stone achieves superficiality with a wall relief that evokes the shade of M.C. Escher and a skewed box that calls forth primitive ritual and then takes a humorous pratfall by calling itself “Masculine Ties.” Naturally there is a foulard in the box.

Richard Godfrey presents an installation whose metaphysics are so patently phony they have to be malicious. A niche containing a shallow pool of water houses a hovering double white pyramid bathed in Warhol shades of red and blue. It looks like it’s waiting for Scotty to beam it up.

Just when you are about to dismiss the lot as callow poseurs you realize there is real talent here and that basically it all harks back to the more extreme and obscure forms of Romanticism, the apocalyptic paintings of Hubert Robert or the visionary architecture of Etienne Louis Boullee. The Picturesque. The Sublime.

It’s all resurrected in South Coast Plaza. The only difference is that the old guys didn’t seem embarrassed by themselves. We like their outrageousness because they were straight about it. We will like our own outrageousness better when it stops acting like it’s about to say, “Just kidding, folks.”