ART REVIEWS : ‘Waterworks’: A Summer Tonic at Long Beach Museum

The lazy days of summer seem to call for no-sweat art shows involving a minimum of mental energy on everyone’s part. But every now and then, a summertime teaser actually has something to say for itself.

At the Long Beach Museum of Art, “Waterworks”--the final exhibit organized by departing senior curator Josine Ianco-Starrels (with assistance from media curator Michael Nash)--offers photographs, videos and installations by artists who deal variously with the sounds, grandeur, mystery, rituals and wanton carelessness associated with water.

Michael C. McMillen’s installation, “Fluxus Naturae”--the only new piece in the show--invites viewers to pass through an old door into a small basement-like room lined with rusted implements and old trunks. This cool, dark place is dominated by the rushing sound of water passing through a series of chutes mounted on the wall. Water also gushes endlessly from a faucet into an old sink surrounded by plants and seedlings. Above the sink, a fat metal pipe serves as a porthole through which the ocean--the real one--is visible.

In an Alice-in-Wonderland twist, a tiny glass door at foot-level leads to the outside, where a “huge” (actually normal-sized) plant looms over a tiny flight of back steps and microscopic garbage cans. An old clock is stopped at eight minutes to 12. It’s hard not to see the piece as a plea for eleventh-hour attention to the crisis of water waste. (Even the spatial distortions and the tacit comparison of sink to ocean suggest the need for a change in perspective.) If this is preaching, it has the atmospheric charm of master storytelling.

Mineko Grimmer contributes one of her sound-sculptures, a blend of quietly austere sculpture and natural process. Black pebbles frozen into a triangular block of ice are suspended above a shallow wooden trough. As the ice melts, the pebbles randomly dislodge and skitter through a pair of fan-shaped sprays of bamboo, making a pinging sound as they hit a metal bar projecting from the water. Unlike Grimmer’s more utilitarian-looking earlier pieces in this mode, “Intermittent Composition” (1988) has a formal elegance that complements its aural allure.

The team of video guru Nam June Paik and Paul Garrin present a twin-pack of rapid-fire imagery in “Two Channel Music Tape: Spring/Fall” (1987). Fashion models strutting, bits and pieces of a smiling nude woman, glimpses of visual and performing artists (Merce Cunningham, Joseph Beuys, Laurie Anderson) and purely abstract gyrations of color and line compete for the viewer’s attention in a weirdly riveting cacophony of fragmented and repeated activities. The only thing that never changes is the sound of pounding surf, suggesting the dynamism linking diverse modes of audience-oriented behavior.

In stark temporal contrast, Doug Hall’s “Storm and Stress” (1986) leisurely tracks the onset and growing fury of thunderstorms in different locations, blending their peaks and valleys into a glorious and terrible symphony of sound and visual effects. “Stress” is shown as the province of ordinary folks and professional storm-watchers, all reduced to the status of passive bystanders beholding a dream.

Bill Viola is represented by two early videos. In “The Reflecting Pool,” (1977-79) the image of the artist’s leap into a forest pool is frozen while the light effects play over the water, marking the passage of time. Gorgeously simple and complexly evocative--Ianco-Starrels finds parallels to the myth of Narcissus--the seven-minute tape is one of Viola’s most accessible works.

Robbert Flick’s photo-grids of repeated surf imagery emphasize the constancy of the tides and the glinting wonder of light on water. In photographs from Richard Misrach’s “Desert Cantos VII: Desert Sea” series, seductive washes of light and color veil the latter-day fallout from a mismanaged irrigation project of the early 1900s. Photo-documentation drains Lewis de Soto’s performance pieces at the ocean’s edge of whatever mystic feelings they may have embodied for spectators, however; the imagery comes across as little more than pretty swirls, bars and scribbles of fire or colored light. (Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, to Aug. 12.)

Signs of art: Look, look. See Paul McCarthy’s art. Everything is painted on electric signs. Some things look like cartoons, but not the kind for kids. A man is crouching on the beach in “Corporate Puppy Love.” He is doing something to another man. A fountain is spraying from the other man. There is also a big blue-and-red design that looks like a target. Did those men make that design? Are they happy? Are they bad? Is Paul McCarthy mad at them? I’m not sure, but I think so.

There are three plain black-and-red paintings, too: a radiation sign and a CBS “eye” sign and a skull sign for “poison.” These signs warn me against the bad people who make harmful things. There is also a bunch of travelers’ trunks piled on a big table. I can’t see into the trunks and I’d better not open them, but it says on a piece of paper that they hold props from Paul McCarthy’s performances. There’s another thing on the pile: a box with two holes, like eyes. A long thing is sticking out from one of the holes. Paul McCarthy seems to like those long things. I never saw any of his performances, but I hope they were more grown-up. (Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 669 N. La Cienega Blvd., to July 28.)

Middle-aged humor: Steve Gianakos makes paintings that are really just super-sized cartoon line drawings translated into a high-art medium. They used to be genuinely witty in a deadpan way. It was hard to resist the “Dead Girl” series, in which a smiling, blank-eyed girl rests her head at the same abrupt angle no matter what she is leaning on, or what the setting happens to be--at the dentist or on a date. But in his recent images, Gianakos seems to have succumbed to flabby middle-aged lechery that looks out of place outside the back pages of “men’s” magazines.

His Betty Boopish nudes are dimwitted innocents, displaying their charms for unseen admirers or fretting--in careless dishabille--over difficulties large and small. The tag lines generally replay the purple prose of trashy novels (“She was trying to recapture the few moments of bliss he had given her”). A number of the images contain cunning arrangements of colored rectangles a la Mondrian--suggesting, perhaps, vestigial evidence of impress-your-date chatter about Modern Art. Everything in this work depends on a knowing wink exchanged between artist and onlooker. If the onlooker happens to be a woman, she’s apt to feel mightily out of place. (Asher/Faure, 612 N. Almont Drive, to July 28.)

Visceral images: Judie Bamber’s new paintings at Roy Boyd Gallery sulk and snarl with an underlying bruised sensibility that derives partially from the imagery and partly from the titles. Each square canvas is a monochrome field with a small, meticulously described object in the center. Some of these are just small (a chameleon); others have a viscous surface texture and erotic or squeamish associations (a side view of a mussel that looks like a female organ, a dead baby bird); and still others are simple man-made objects that coldly represent male anatomy.

Bamber’s titles--”I’ll Never Forgive You For This (Duo Tone Balls),” “I Don’t Want to Talk About It (Mussel)”--inject a contemporary note of relationship-on-the-rocks. The pairings of objects and titles sometimes give seemingly innocuous objects devastatingly cutting significance. Still, the heart of this work lies in the painfully visceral quality of some of the images rather than in the pop psych by-play of the titles, which too easily become vapid one-liners. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, to July 21.)