LA CIENEGA AREA

A lot of yelling has gone on, here and elsewhere, about established artists leaping on the Post-Modernist bandwagon out of venal motives. There are certainly such characters, but the lemming-like universality of the trend is beginning to feel as much like historical inevitability as mere opportunism.

It has happened in the past. The tough Spanish realist Francisco Zurbaran had to soften his style to meet the popularity of the sentimental Murillo. The Rococo master Jean Honore Fragonard modified his manner to deal with the rising tide of Neo-Classicism. Its genius, Jacques Louis David, eventually had to retool to deal with Romanticism. Unfortunately casual historical memory does not yield many examples of artists who where helped by these attempts at rejuvenating compromise.

Bruce Nauman seems to be handling a move away from his pioneering Conceptualist-Minimalism about as smoothly as can be done. His Neo-Expressionist-flavored show consists of just two pieces. An untitled work fills a whole room with an upended ladder-back chair rendered in metal and suspended aloft by four tension cables. It’s a keen bit of levitation and a nice piece of commentary on both the banalization of Minimalism and the topsy-turvy state of the normal today. The problem is that the chair motif has become a kind of Neo-Ex cliche, so the piece feels ordinary.

“Clown Torture”--the other offering--plays video loops on two facing TV monitors. One shows a tight close-up of a painted female clown endlessly repeating, “I’m sorry for what I did. I don’t know what I did.” She wails with angry intensity. The other screen carries a full-length shot of a man in black-face wearing a white-satin suit that recalls Watteau’s great clown Gilles. He soft-shoes cheerfully repeating the same apology except he says, “I don’t know why I did it.”

Poetically the piece is a haunting evocation of free-floating guilt in general and the guilt imposed on minorities in particular. It is also a cosmetic update of Nauman’s own earlier sound piece that drones, “Get out of this room, get out of my mind.”

Nauman gains a measure of new social overtone but mainly it all just goes to prove it is hard to do something new by doing what’s already being done. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to Wednesday.)