ART REVIEWS : A Plea and Visual Punch in ‘Artists and the Environment’ : Exhibit: Sounding the call for ecology takes a new twist: Works are less concerned with aesthetics.

Art is pressed into service in “Artists and the Environment” at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts. The message is that our planet is in trouble, and if artists can’t fix it they can at least alert their audience to the problems.

This is not a new idea. American artists have been passionately involved with nature since frontier days, and some of the artists in this exhibition have pursued environmental projects since the ‘60s, as curator Jay Belloli points out in a printed statement. What has changed is that the tone seems to grow increasingly desperate while the art becomes less concerned with aesthetics. What we have now is environmental art for an information age.

Inevitably, it seems, viewers are given the task of reading lengthy lists of statistics or soulful pleas to save disastrous situations. Accompanying visuals tend to be clinical documentation in the form of photographs, drawings, charts and models. In that regard, “Artists and the Environment” is fairly predictable. Helen and Newton Harrison, leading artists of the genre, are represented by a numbingly dull display on “Devil’s Gate Transformation/A Refuge for Pasadena.” It calls for a more ecology-sensitive method of flood control, specifically proposing the restitution of a debris basin in the San Gabriel Mountains. Unfortunately, many viewers will probably miss the significance of the project because the exhibit is so dry and forbidding.

Sylvia Bowyer solves part of the visual-aids dilemma by installing a big display case of real hamburgers in her work, “American Grade Meat.” The point is that Central America is being deforested by cattle ranching to supply the American market, primarily for fast food. Bowyer lists facts on a printed panel--it takes 55 square feet of rain forest to produce one four-ounce hamburger, for example--and offers brochures on her research and sources. But she also delivers a visual punch by pinning fast-food flags on maps of Central America and Pasadena, and setting out rows of hamburgers as properly labeled symbols of gluttony.

John Fekner’s black-and-white photographs of industrial wastelands depict such appallingly ugly places that they need no explanation beyond the occasional words--toxic, fluorocarbons, preservatives, asbestos--that pop up on buildings in his pictures. Alan Sonafist’s illustrations of a proposal for reintroducing vegetation and wildlife on a dead strip of land in Dallas are clumsy paintings, but they bring some life to his ideas.

The other artists address less specific problems, leaving more to the imagination and giving their work more artistic latitude. Tom Jenkins’ paintings of a polluted city and a freeway fire are apocalyptic diatribes, slightly relieved by a sense of humor. Rebecca Howland’s “Toxicological Table” screams against pollution in an Expressionistic table setting that includes a lung cancer ash tray, toxic cups and poison plates.

George Geyer, on the other hand, makes quiet, dignified work that reveals an abiding curiosity about natural processes as well as concern about ecological issues. His “Partially Submerged Pyramid of Cause and Effect,” could be transplanted to an exhibition of process art or formalist sculpture. It also belongs in “Artists and the Environment” because the top of the pressed-earth pyramid will dry and crack during the exhibition--and possibly collapse into the surrounding water, demonstrating erosion.

Photographers Robert Glenn Ketchum and Richard Misrach also show powerful bodies of work that never lead viewers to question whether they are in the presence of art. Ketchum’s color photographs compare lush landscapes to tire dumps, abused forests or sooty industry. Works from Misrach’s “Desert Cantos” series are unforgettable portrayals of deserts on fire and dumps for dead animals.

Also on view is a Wilson High School project on the Los Angeles River that is more affecting than much of the work in the professional exhibition. The compelling centerpiece of the student show is a “river” of video monitors that runs across the floor and presents a dizzying rush of trash-filled water on up-turned screens. (Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, to May 13.)

Dynamic Dualities: Abstract Expressionist Adolf Gottlieb’s work has rarely looked fresher than in a museum-quality show of works on paper from 1966 to 1973. As Mary Davis MacNaughton notes in the exhibition catalogue, works in the current show expand upon themes developed in his “Imaginary Landscape” and “Burst” paintings of the ‘50s. Generally referring to landscapes through horizon lines or binary compositions that float a sun-like disc of color above a flurry of brush strokes, these small works also speak of a world of opposites. His paintings can be seen as visual essays on such dualities as containment and explosion or order and chaos.

In “White Halo,” a white ring prevents a fuzzy black blob from disintegrating in space while a black burst of brush strokes struggles in all directions. “Black Ground,” on the other hand, pictures a large white C-shape floating above a field of smaller shapes, as if it had risen above the crowd, weightless and inflated. If Gottlieb yearned for a life free of troublesome dualities, his art drew dynamic power from the tension that he portrayed. (Manny Silverman Gallery, 800 N. La Cienega Blvd., to April 21.)

Nature Subverted: Robbin Murphy communes with nature through art, but his work has a fearful context, triggered by a 1988 incident when he was chased and beaten by police while watching a riot. Nature is a metaphor for freedom, controlled by emblems of arbitrary force in his work. The force, in turn, is undermined by poetic subterfuge.

Murphy’s paintings look rather like washed out newspaper reproductions in pale chartreuse and gray. Lines from Henry David Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” set in transfer type, run across many of the works, submerging the images in unreadable text or drowning them in rhetoric. It’s a subtle effect, compared to the keep out signs and upside-down police badges that intrude on some of Murphy’s other painted images of nature. The irony is that the sympathetic writing functions as a screen, keeping viewers at a distance.

This is conceptual painting fueled by social criticism, but everything cannot be accepted at face value and that’s what makes Murphy’s art interesting. Smokey the Bear, for example, is a “subversive element,” who “lost his job with the Forest Service for doing it too well. He learned the hard way that we need the small fires to prevent the big ones like those in Yellowstone,” Murphy says in a printed statement. (Meyers/Bloom, 2112 Broadway, Santa Monica, to May 12.)

Romance With Landscape: Nature is a romantic vision, a magnificent force that is best understood in generalities, according to Katherine Bowling. Primarily a painter, she debuts here with uncommonly beautiful charcoal drawings of landscapes. They can be read as abstractions, but they also suggest real scenes--say, country roads bordered by tall hedges, a cluster of towering trees or the lush edge of a pond. High in contrast but fuzzy edged and almost devoid of detail, Bowling’s great black forms and penetrating light patches seem to teem with life and latent images. Viewed up close, some of them also reveal an unexpected flurry of artistic activity in scribbled lines and block patterns. (BlumHelman Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, to May 5.)

Ordinary Absurdity: Zizi Raymond conjures a world of ordinary objects that are off-balance, stretched out of shape or paired with strange partners. In her show of 11 sculptural installations, a swing hangs from the ceiling but sits on the floor, trampled by a wide swath of rubber soles. A tall metal cabinet leans on a folding chair that holds a black sculptural head with a white handkerchief attached to its nose. Among the most arresting images are an overturned bin of plastic rabbits and a headless figure composed of a bundle of white ruffled paper.

What does this art mean? The bottom line has a lot to do with absurdity and art’s transformative power. But Raymond also talks about the tyranny of the mundane and how one thing turns into another--as when a faucet attached to a green garden hose emits a shower of black cord. Working mostly in black and white, her work has a classical reserve that only heightens its perplexing humor.

Glistening paintings by Adam Ross are many layered abstractions made of oil, alkyd and enamel on wood. Building up multiple coats of pigment, Ross repeatedly sands the surfaces and makes the most of chance effects. The results vary from images of root-like forms to wavy-striped fields that resemble out-of-focus video pictures. Perfect packaging masks intense labor in artworks that seem to have been lovingly created. (Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., to May 12.)