La Cienega Area

Mineko Grimmer’s trademark sculpture-as-Oriental-musical-instrument does not grow tiresome with familiarity. In half a tandem show, she proceeds by nuance and stealth. In her largest piece, a reverse plumb bob of pebbles frozen in ice hangs, as usual, over a shallow basin of water dropping pebbles plock-plock. The surrounding serene skeletal structure of unpainted wood suggests a Japanese gazebo that knows about modern sculpture. The wrinkle here is 150 or so bamboo wands suspended between pond and pebbles like myriad fishing poles. When pebbles hit them, there is a newer music of astringent cracks and muffled plops that would bring joy to the heart of John Cage or Philip Glass.

Small versions that look like maquettes probably do not mean to resemble gallows and guillotines. Some tiny soundless works place rocks on wood pedestals perpetuating the traditional Japanese practice of finding ready-made art in the works of nature.

New Yorker Barbara Schwartz makes funky abstract reliefs in all-too-familiar Neo-Expressionist accents. Actually fashioned of aluminum painted in everything from turquoise tarted up with gold to lavender depressed with black, they look like colored plaster and may owe inspiration to both Frank Stella and Nancy Graves. They belong to the everything-smells-like-something-else persuasion. “Aladdin’s Lookout” vaguely suggests a view of Manhattan’s 59th Street bridge before it dissolves into a series of crazed French curves that are trying hard to attain the estate of a rotting tropical plant in a blowzy house in Silver Lake. Their main significance may come from being New York art that looks as if and wishes it were made in California. (Koplin Gallery, 8225 1/2 Santa Monica Blvd., to April 16.)