ART REVIEWS : Ruscha: Goofy, Popular, Profound

Rolling into town in the early ‘60s from his native Oklahoma, Ed Ruscha established himself as the fair-haired boy of West Coast art, and it doesn’t look as though that’s ever going to change. Women love him (he’s handsome, witty and has the bashful good manners of a Midwesterner), critics find his style of Pop Conceptualism suitable for heavy theorizing, he’s extremely prolific, and his work--which is amazingly, consistently good--is wildly popular. Why do people like this art so much? The answer to that question can be found in a survey of Ruscha prints on view at the Richard Green Gallery.

For starters, Ruscha’s work is visually quite yummy. He has an impeccable sense of composition and a delightfully whimsical feeling for color. However, the fundamental appeal of his work lies elsewhere; it’s the posture this art strikes that’s so seductive.

This showcase of 90 works dating from 1962 through 1990 finds Ruscha exploring a diversity of themes (loneliness, language and desire to name a few). However, regardless of where he shifts his gaze, he greets the world with the same wry smile, a goofy pun, a blank stare. It’s hard to think of an artist with a lighter touch, yet his work has soul and the weight of deep intelligence as well--and therein lies the genius of this art. Ruscha acknowledges the considerable difficulties of being a human being in the 20th Century--he’s clearly tuned in to the Zeitgeist--yet his work is virtually Angst free. Consequently, it’s oddly reassuring and soothing.

In perusing this show, one is struck by the fact that despite Ruscha’s high profile, he remains something of a mystery. Like Jasper Johns (whose work Ruscha’s resembles in several significant ways), Ruscha has always kept his own private agenda out of his work and it’s impossible to gauge his ideology or personal travails from his cryptic visual wordplay. It’s safe to conclude, however, that he has a rather black sense of humor. In a 1978 print titled “I’ve Never Seen Two People Looking Healthier,” for instance, we find two minuscule human figures dwarfed by a vast landscape; they look crushed, insignificant and not remotely healthy.

In seeing 28 years of Ruscha’s work marching down the wall in chronological order, one also observes this artist to be evolving in a rather unorthodox fashion. Typically, artists get the heavy Sturm und Drang out of the way during early and mid career, and then go lyrical. Now in his early 50s, Ruscha seems to be growing increasingly bleak and stormy with the years. The bright Popsicle colors of his early work have disappeared, and we now find him working in a dark, chiaroscuro style, doing haunted portraits of howling coyotes and lonely suburban houses, and giving his work titles like “Yesterday’s Treasures” and “Time Is Up.” His work has always had an edge, but the edge seems to be getting sharper as of late. At 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, through Saturday.

From Pop to Pound: Pioneering Appropriationist Richard Pettibone spent the ‘60s turning out miniature replicas of Pop masterworks, and he still resorts to brazen borrowing as his chief mode of art making. But, where he once recycled the work of his contemporaries with a cynical sneer, he now regards his primary sources with deep respect.

In fact, Pettibone’s new body of work on view at the Michael Kohn Gallery, is essentially a mash note to Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, the furniture-making traditions of the Shaker community, and the great irascible crank of American letters, Ezra Pound. At a glance this might seem an ill-matched trio, but Pettibone succeeds in synthesizing them into a cohesive whole by underscoring the fact that they share a common approach to the notion of transcendence; the qualities of rigor, devotion and simplicity are characteristic of each of them.

Fashioning lovingly crafted psuedo-Shaker end tables that are either inscribed with passages by Pound or treated as pedestals for miniature replicas of Brancusi sculptures, Pettibone might appear to have wandered far afield from his earlier work with these pieces--which he describes as metaphors for religious beliefs. In fact, the work makes perfect sense. Pettibone’s work has always questioned the importance of originality, and similarly, the Shaker tradition views art as an act of service and selflessness rather than a vehicle for the assertion of one’s own personality. (Having spent the past 21 years living in the New York countryside alongside various Shaker enclaves, Pettibone is well acquainted with Shaker philosophy and has amassed a collection of Shaker pieces, one of which--a chair--is included in this show).

Brancusi was revered for his ability to reduce natural forms to a simple symphony of volumes and planes, and Pound, of course, was a notoriously arcane and ambitious intellect who spent his life in furious pursuit of the sublime. Pettibone quotes from Pound’s “Cantos,” the epic poem that occupied him throughout his life, as well as from Pound’s controversial translation of the writings of Confucius. Pound showed a slight lapse of judgment during World War II when he came out in support of the Fascists--a faux pas that earned him several years in a mental hospital. Nonetheless, the extremity of some of his ideas and his willingness to scream them to the heavens have made him an inspirational, if increasingly obscure figure to romantic souls everywhere. It’s a pleasant surprise to encounter him in an art gallery, and Pettibone does a masterful job of interweaving the brilliance of Pound with the beauty of Brancusi and the Shaker tradition. The cumulative effect of this show is comparable to Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”; it’s like a profound and encouraging pep talk. At 920 Colorado, through May 14.

Imitation of Life: New York artist Dennis Levinthal, whose work is on view at the Pence Gallery, is one of the current crop of artists smitten with the body of thought popularized by French theoretician Jean Baudrillard. Mass media have infiltrated our collective psyche to its very core, goes the battle cry of this ideological revolution. Movies, history, fact, fiction and our private dreams have merged to form a rancid puddle of second-hand experience. The mythologies that once gave meaning to human experience have been enlisted as sales tools and debased, and Joseph Campbell isn’t around anymore to direct us to a new set of fables. Yes, the water is indeed rising at an alarming rate as the media--voracious beasts that feed on our dreams--grow increasingly sophisticated.

Levinthal expresses his distress about this state of affairs in computer-generated photographs of plastic toys (it makes an odd kind of sense, using patently fake materials to explore issues of authenticity). Previous series found Levinthal exploring World War II, and the West; this time out he tackles eros and the American woman in a series titled “American Beauties.” Little plastic dolls with Betty Grable bodies (some in bathing suits, some nude), Levinthal’s beauties pose on patches of sand washed in eerie lighting--the sky is black over this imaginary beach and these gals appear to be sunbathing on the moon. The dolls are anonymous and interchangeable and Levinthal’s treatment--the lighting, the photographic quality he achieves, etc.--serve to embalm the myth under examination here. Drained of texture and dimension, reduced to a cheap bit of plastic, the fantasy of the American beauty is laid to rest. Admirably skillful though Levinthal is--he makes his point quite effectively--he doesn’t leave the viewer feeling particularly happy.

Also on view are sculptures by James Ford. Gleaming with sci-fi grandeur, the works pulsate with the cruel power of instruments of torture. They feel creepy--as well they should, as they take as their central theme the making and administration of medication. Hard hit by AIDS, the art world is increasingly turning to the themes of human mortality and the failure of science, and Ford asserts these concerns in the forms he favors--basins, flasks, globes, blades, beakers and needles. He then doubles back and disguises his theme in his use of sensual materials--rusted steel, buffed ebony, polished copper and aluminum. An attractively subtle artist, Ford is overt in just one piece; “Big Needle,” a menacing spear with its tip poised against a mirror, is an exquisitely clear metaphor for the rituals of illness. At 908 Colorado Ave., through May 19.