Santa Monica

Kippenberger Kids: What kind of artist would mock himself by making a life-sized namesake with bright red skin who stands sheepishly facing a corner of the gallery? Martin Kippenberger is by turns provocateur, genial comic, faux- naive and sniggering malevolent whose riddles and observations come clothed in homely materials.

Kippenberger’s “Japanische Gartengestaltung fur Innen (Memphis Version)” (“Japanese Indoor Garden Arrangement”) offers free-form, dirty foam rubber “stepping stones” arranged on the floor. Other foam pieces rest inside a brightly painted triangular-shaped shelf. The piece combines two mutant forms of post-modernism--one, a crude parody of a classical Japanese form, the other, an airy approximation of post-modern high style as personified by the Italian furniture design company, Memphis.

The Cologne artist’s grand machine (in the 19th-Century salon sense) is “Mecca: Backward Forward,” a group of raw wood racks holding huge, sagging pieces of colored and discolored foam cut into wild parodies of architectural ornament and a length of material printed with a Valley Forge motif. The ensemble seems to be an image of the “dustbin of history.” Reaching the goal implied by the title is merely a matter of rummaging around in the sloppy holding area of the mind where aesthetic innovation and historical events are consigned. (Luhring Augustine Hetzler, 1330 4th St., to April 7.)