Santa Monica

“Boys Will Be Boys” is the indulgent title of a show devoted to work by six guys in their 20s and 30s who live in New York, Dallas and Los Angeles. With one exception, these raucous young sports get their jollies from the world of mass production, generic objects and low-brow taste.

Walter Jackson Early Jr. calls himself Pruitt-Early, mockingly assigning himself a ready-made historical period. He turns out multipanel “paintings” made with commercially printed fabric, T-shirt transfers and sew-on patches. Designed either for teen-aged or little boys, in the style of discount chain merchandise, these images come with ornamentation--football team logos, beer labels, a gross novelty doll, slogans--that aptly reflects the blinkered universe of the young unwashed.

One of Gavin Brown’s pieces consists of mass-market paperback books arranged on the floor to spell out an expletive. A note on the exhibit checklist informs the bemused viewer that half of the proceeds of this installation will benefit the Coalition for the Homeless.

On the shrieking pink and yellow Day-Glo enamel ground of Tom Henry III’s painting, “Meet Me in the Lobby,” appears the image of the National Rifle Assn. insignia flanked by a pair of rifles. The baldly symmetrical formality of the image, the grating colors and the quick-hit screen printing are apparently characteristic of Henry’s deader-than-deadpan style.

Jim Shaw’s myriad small works in various media do a double take on groovy ‘60s graphics by mocking opportunism (a mandala-encrusted ad for a lamp store), cliches (“sex to sexty”), and pathetic appropriations of imagery (power-to-the-people imagery on a student council president poster). The multiple images of dinosaurs, mushroom clouds, crucifixions or wild-eyed green monsters in each of his four “Utopian Landscapes” flatly reduce religion, nuclear war, science and science fiction to the same goofily surreal common denominator.

Dean McNeil’s untitled “Consumer Encasement Program” pieces appear to be austerely Minimalist cement sculptures, but their sober, simple shapes are actually created by the consumer goods that serve as armatures. Literally embedded in this work is the notion of a symbiotic connection between a consumer culture and the art it produces.

Lee N. Smith is the odd man out in this company. His paintings of red-skinned folks gravely absorbed in a communal task are eerie, all right, yet their otherworldliness seems to affirm the existence of a higher state of being. In “Preparing for Heaven,” bystanders gather in a house as an animal is lowered into its box-coffin. A male figure who hangs from a sling on the wall gestures as if praying or listening for a supersonic Sign. (Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., to Jan. 11.)