ART REVIEWS : Cheap Thrills in a Diabolic Realm

In 1985, Dennis Oppenheim, a sculptor who played a central role in the conceptual art movement of the ‘70s, stopped producing work because he simply didn’t feel like making any. Three years later, however, he dived back into the fray with a vengeance and began making art at a furious pace; the results of this recent two-year period of activity are on view at the Ace Gallery through Sept. 8.

The largest U.S. exhibition to date of Oppenheim’s work (which is more widely known and appreciated in Europe), this ambitious museum-quality show is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink installation of the sort associated with Jonathan Borofsky. A disorienting hodgepodge of seemingly unconnected information, the show (which includes sculpture, drawing, painting and photography) is essentially conceptualism shot through a surrealist filter, and non-sensical absurdities abound.

Wearing the shrill wackiness of ‘60s pop like a not-too-convincing disguise, the show comports itself with an exaggerated sense of fun. Everything feels goofy and oversize and many of the pieces are kinetic--heads spin, deer antlers shoot flames, a piano shaped like a pair of hands slowly claps. Giant domestic utensils--salt and pepper shakers, toasters, a steam iron--share quarters with glass bowls giving off clouds of steam, while oversized drums resonate with a steady boom. Noisy as a carnival midway, this is art with a Universal Tours sense of showmanship. There are lots of visual tricks and cheap thrills.

Look closer, however, and you realize that what Oppenheim’s saying isn’t much fun at all. Inflatable cows appear to be devouring themselves, a helplessly drifting toy boat is caught in a swirling whirlpool in the hollow head of a statue, and a pair of motorized plastic heads spin wildly “Exorcist” style. Adjoining galleries house a pair of chairs that appear to be copulating, a toy train track is painted black and twisted into the shape of the number 8 million (an allusion to Jews killed in the Holocaust), and a piece titled “Badly Tuned Cow” involves a life-size plastic cow surrounded by fencing embellished with musical notes a la the Graceland gates. According to a gallery aide, this piece is a metaphor for the genetic engineering destroying the cow gene pool.

The cumulative effect of these tableaux is a feeling of hopelessness evocative of recent work by Bruce Nauman. Oppenheim implies that man is destined to keep crashing in the same car over and over, that he’s doomed by biology to repeat the same activities ad infinitum. Breathing, eating, spinning in circles, copulating, fighting--it goes on forever, pointlessly and at a frantic pace, and the collective weight of these behaviors is crushing.

Of all these behaviors, aggression is clearly the king of the hill, and Oppenheim suggests it to be the dominant sensation of our time. In a tableau titled “Murder in Hawaiian Shirts,” we see a pair of oversized resin shirts, one patterned with fish, the other with boats; on the floor between the shirts plastic fish and boats do battle. In Oppenheim’s diabolic realm everything is in a state of hyper-animation as it either devours or is consumed.

A Mixed Bag: In an adjoining gallery is a survey of recent work by David Amico. Along with Larry Pittman, Amico is one of the few L.A. artists in serious pursuit of the idea of Great Painting, and while achieving those lofty heights is clearly his goal with these very large canvases, he falls a bit short of the mark.

Technically, Amico’s work is absolutely correct--a bit too correct in fact. He handles light, space, color and pictorial space like a master, but he seems to hold something of himself apart from his work--it feels emotionally disengaged and cool in a way that seems unintended and out of sync with the larger ambitions of the work; in other words, the strategy of these paintings upstages everything else about them.

Designed to operate on several levels, the paintings employ the motifs associated with music as a unifying theme. This is a perfectly fine system for Amico to structure his work around. However, it remains unclear exactly how Amico feels about music and what he sees as being its relationship to painting. With the reading he gives it here, it seems little more than an arbitrarily selected vocabulary of symbols.

Though still a young artist (he’s in his late 30s), Amico has already been through several incarnations as a painter and he tends to test out styles and discard them. He’s worked through a figurative phase, a period heavily influenced by Robert Ryman, and a pop/cartoon phase. This body of work is his most mixed bag yet, and one detects the faint residue of all his past styles, plus traces of Arthur Dove, David Salle and Francesco Clemente. It all comes together rather smashingly--these are very impressive paintings. Still, one comes away with the nagging feeling that at its very core, Amico’s work is as yet a bit out of focus.

Pleasure Principle: Also on view are paintings by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Mostly monochromatic canvases exploring theories about pleasure and the sublime associated with Emanual Kant and Longinus, Gilbert-Rolfe’s work is strikingly similar in appearance to that of Barnett Newman. Theoretically, however, Gilbert-Rolfe’s work is an entirely different kettle of fish that combines the ideas of all the heavy-hitting French semioticians (Derrida, Lyotard and that crowd) with good old Sigmund Freud. Gilbert-Rolfe succeeds in wringing the juice out of all his influences in these extremely dry canvases.

Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd.