La Cienega Area

John Baldessari has become the head wizard of the Word-Made-Picture game. A museum-worthy show of some 20 works consists, as usual, of large blow-ups of commercial photographs--movie stills, magazine shots and the like--placed in juxtaposition.

At their simplest they are pure visual wit. A diptych called “Arm” places an image of a lumpy flexed biceps next to the curved armrest of an upholstered couch. It is quite funny enough as a sight gag, but it doesn’t end there. Our minds make word associations like macho and overstuffed and decorative and we come out with a nice satire on exaggerated machismo while the shade of the artist stands by, benignly bearded, with a wide-eyed “What? Who, me?” expression.

You get these words, but not all at once. “Rollercoaster” shows one of those Japanese loop-the-loop toys next to a tangle of barbed wire. Right. We play silly electronic games in a dangerous and complex world. Maybe the next work appears to be about glamorized violence, and the one after that about our brutal treatment of our world and our fellow creatures. All done deadpan, of course.

Eventually you begin to feel a theme lacing the whole. It has to do with the way this culture is said to turn everything and everybody into a commodity through the mass media. One work is framed with side panels of men holding tridents by the sea. In between is a fancy display case full of seashells, a faceless fop standing in an ornate picture frame and, above, a generic glamour girl who’s a kitsch version of that masterpiece sometimes referred to as Botticelli’s “Venus on the Half-Shell.”

Baldessari’s work at best is taking on an epic aura. At a forgivable stretch of the point it touches the spirit of Max Beckmann’s great triptychs. It has long since ceased to be merely the tiresomely inbred illustration of smug theories of semiotics. It is outgrowing its function as hermetic social criticism. That vague, powerful entity called “The Media” that makes packaged goods of us all is now seen less as a caricature of social forces and more as a kind of prime mover, capricious and awesome as a Greek god.

Baldessari compares a captain of industry to a trained seal. While we clearly prefer the seal, the CEO is conferred a measure of blamelessness as just another specialized organism. There is real wisdom here. Unhappily, the very substance of the public imagery on which it relies gives an aura of flimsiness. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 817 N. Hilldale Ave., to May 14.)