ART REVIEWS : Shaw’s Wildly Funny Narrative Saga : Jim Shaw’s pencil drawings and mixed- media works generate a good deal of surprising-- and surprisingly poignant--heat.

Got a record player? If you didn’t chuck it out at some point during the successive waves of new technologies that rolled over recent decades--eight-track tape, cassette, CD--can the player that you kept accommodate a 45? Does it have a fat spindle that fits the big hole in the middle? If not, did you keep the spindle adapter?

And if records themselves are today an endangered species, has a spindle adapter yet made the transition from plain household object to precious, hard-to-find antique? From artifact to collectible?

These and other pressing questions hang heavily in the air at Jim Shaw’s current exhibition. Together with 30 mixed-media works and two dozen pencil drawings, the show includes a new 45 r.p.m. record by the Dogz (Shaw and friends), who sing “It’s Easter in My Brain” and “Willy Nilly.” How does their music sound? I don’t know. I don’t have a record player, never mind a spindle adapter.

The front of the record’s slip-jacket features a white rabbit standing tall against a yellow-and-violet ground, printed with psychedelic type. The back, also done up in crocus colors, features a cross-hatched Easter egg decorated with the sorrowful face of Jesus. Like the 45, the jacket’s Flower Power design-motif is also very ‘60s. Locked inside this mysterious object, with its packaging’s promise of hidden spiritual truth and mystical revelation, is The Answer to The Question.

Similarly, at the entrance to the show is an imposing, leather-bound volume, whose gilded title reads: “The Book of Life.” Inside the locked book, the name Billy is scrawled repeatedly across each page. This teen-age ballpoint-mantra surrounds a cut-out space in the center, which holds a glass bottle. Inside is a slip of paper. “Paul is dead” declares the hidden message, sent by an unknown castaway and here consecrated as gospel inside a weighty tome.

That the essence of the matter is remote or unavailable seems central to Shaw’s enterprise. So is the fact that while analyzing rock ‘n’ roll for clues to the meaning of life may be an adolescent’s resourceful way to keep from going under during rather traumatic years, it’s disreputable for serious adults. They must find other means--such as high art.

On one hand, Shaw’s mocking work debunks the modernist myth of art as keeper of an ultimate, essential truth or meaning, while on the other it’s sincerely obsessed with the perfectly human search for spiritual peace. The artist has found a way to rub the two together in his work to generate a good deal of surprising--and surprisingly poignant--heat.

Wildly funny, Shaw’s format plays traditional literary and philosophical treatises against such new pop culture forms as comic books, board games and TV. Baseball cards intersect with the Tarot, Parker Bros. “The Game of Life” travels the Stations of the Cross, Veronica’s veil is an Archie comic printed on a handkerchief and an earring stand takes the form of a many-handed Dancing Shiva. The Bible, Freud, Eastern religions, William Blake and more get tangled up in mass culture’s dizzying web, in mixed-media works that make up mostly recent additions to an on-going epic dubbed “My Mirage.”

This narrative saga, begun in 1985 and now numbering more than 100 pieces, tells the nominal story of Billy, a suburban-’60s kid in Middle America whose generic life is a trash-heroic battle between the forces of good and the minions of evil. All of uniform size (17x14 inches), each work in the series is like a page in a book of indeterminate length. Melding Minimalist regularity with Pop style to make Conceptual riffs, their structure is of the period too.

Setting “My Mirage” in the past accomplishes several things. History is claimed as a moral battleground. The decade of the ‘60s is asserted as a cultural shift that cannot be merely wished away or trammeled under foot, as some would like to do. And the present is established as the adolescence of an era born in that decade. The moral dilemma of history thus becomes the moral dilemma of today, as Billy’s youthfully disoriented experience reflects our own oddly parallel universe.

Linda Cathcart Gallery: 924 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (213) 451-1121, to Jan. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Going Down to the Crossroads: Sex is at the crossroads between play and power in Ann Preston’s “Expulsion,” an installation of about 80 beautifully articulated relief sculptures that cover the walls of a 14-square-foot room. Cast from clay models in fiberglass coated with zinc, they have a dull, silvery surface that recalls such modern artifacts as airplane hulls and skyscraper decorations (think of Noguchi’s reliefs at Rockefeller Center). The designs, however, are positively archaic.

Ancient Sumerian and Assyrian reliefs are echoed in the highly stylized, ritualistic silhouettes of men, women, animals and plants, which are laid out in three horizontal tiers and two borders that wrap around the room’s interior. Four floating columns in the corners suggest official scrolls that have been unfurled, or perhaps the stamping seals (rather like archaic rolling pins) with which clay tablets once were marked.

In the reverberation between modern and ancient models, Preston’s decorative reliefs recall the work of sculptor Tom Otterness, but in a manner less toy-like and more quietly sinister than wild. Reading from left to right: Figures dancing, jumping and dreaming populate an Edenic world of “Bliss,” followed by the copulating reveries leading to “Birth” and, inevitably, to the struggles of “Aggression.” The fourth wall, through which you entered, chronicles “Death.”

In Preston’s familiar cosmology, with which she has worked for several years, bliss and aggression face each other off, as do sex and death. A circle is closed when death is followed by bliss, as Edenic images are transformed by the narrative sequence into intimations of heaven. The characters that tell the tale are nearly uniform, their gender often ambiguous. Not individually emotive, they are fashioned in a rhythmic, incantatory style. Through formal repetition, the cosmological cycle is deftly conveyed as an operating principle of life.

Where the installation wobbles is in its scale. The room is small, a kind of meditation chamber or tempietto , which insists on close scrutiny of reliefs that would do their most compelling work as a casually glimpsed decorative backdrop--a relentless visual-drumbeat for the cacophonous melody of life.

Pence Gallery: 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (213) 393-0069, to Jan. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.