La Cienega Area

A keen theme exhibition that would grace a small, smart museum is called “Artschwager, Peers and Persuasion 1963-1988.” The idea was to bring together artists who share something of the aesthetic of furniture-maker-turned-artist Richard Artschwager whose recent retrospective at the Whitney Museum set the art magazines humming.

The present show juxtaposes artists who look at life with workmanlike objectivity that equates a vacuum cleaner enshrined by Jeff Koons to paintings by Malcomb Morley, Neil Jenny or Joe Zucker who admit that a painting is just blobs of paint sloshed around on a surface. They all rely on the idea that aesthetic revelation is just some kind of side-effect of the way something is made and what it is made of.

Joe Goode is represented by an object from 1971 that could be a pure minimalist sculpture. The fact it resembles a staircase vanishing into a wall calls up a whole range of feelings. Nancy Dwyer talks about the overlap between words and things in a sculpture that looks like two striped tables shaped like the letters “E-Z.”

They are unpretentious, wise and wry, like old carpenters and electricians that turn up around the house to fix something and leave you with the feeling you’ve encountered a minor deity who holds you in friendly contempt.

The workman’s mystique can be vaguely annoying but that’s part of the fun of this compendium that includes Allan McCollum, Meyer Vaisman and Haim Steinbach, along with Artschwager and several others. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 619 Almont Drive, to Saturday.)