La Cienega Area

It’s an article of piety when writing about art that is funny to quickly reassure everybody that it’s not just funny but also contains profundities of cosmic significance. Since it is hard enough to just be funny, this sometimes seems an unnecessary quibble.

New York artist Erika Rothenberg is extremely funny. She is more risible than most “Evening at the Improv” programs on TV and more irreverent than “Saturday Night Live” at its riskiest. She makes paintings in Comix-Pop style that emulate ads and television commercials under the general theme Ideas for a Better World.

One gooney painting promotes surgical implants to put Jesus in your heart, another hypes nasal spray that will cure racism. A video screen announces a special news report called “Is God Punishing Us?” All are in a viciously naive cartoon style with little pretention to refinement.

Rothenberg offers graphic food for thought with statistics stating that pornography makes up 30% of newsstand sales, that our kids have seen 18,000 TV murders by the time they are 16 and that most teen-age girls would rather shop than date. The information seems at once bogus and true, appalling and petty. Maybe she is profound after all.

She certainly is good at making us think that the Jello-brained, puritanical world that would result from this characteristically American way of solving problems might be worse than the mess we’ve got.

She also reminds us that the coercive Blanding of America has progressed so far that a humorist these days must retreat behind a bunker of aesthetic immunity to get away with a bit of ordinary nasty satire. We live in a thin-skinned epoch that lends true shock value to a piece in which Rothenberg uses muscular female manikins, fancy packages and a painted story board to advertise panty hose with penises to give self-confidence to ladder-climbing female managers. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to April 16.)