ART REVIEWS : Calder Unloads Some Zingers at Rutberg Gallery

An artist sometimes becomes such a household name, you forget why he’s good.

Alexander Calder, who will forever be known as the guy who invented the mobile, also brought a wide-eyed zing to painting and stationary sculpture. An exhibition of some of his pieces dating from the 1920s to the ‘70s (he died in 1976) reminds us what a disingenuous tinkerer he was--and how fully he absorbed the European Surrealist ethos and Americanized it into a brashly lyrical fanfare. A couple of pieces also reestablish Calder’s credentials as a political commentator.

An exquisitely finished untitled painting from 1945 shows the artist at full Surrealist throttle. What appears to be a sprightly imaginary landscape is filled with portents of nuclear disaster.

White-hot light illuminates the underside of the cap of a tall mushroom plant that softly dissipates into the earth. A striped hourglass form hovers in the yellow sky, not far from a phalanx of horizontal, airborne shapes that look like escapees from a molecular diagram. A snake--one of Calder’s favorite images--wiggles ominously through the brown earth.

Similarly, a cheerful-looking 1969 gouache, “Pennants to the Bird,” seems to be about the Vietnam War. The “bird”--which rears up on its hind legs, alongside a row of waving red pennants in Calder’s inimitable scribble-style--is surely a belligerent American eagle. A dove, symbol of peace, is painted black.

Other works are simply dogged investigations of forms in space. “Hollow Fish,” from 1929, is a doodle in brass wire--the sort of thing Calder had been doing all his life. (When I interviewed his sister years ago, she unwrapped a group of tiny wire animals he made when he was a small child.) A series of irregular spirals fills out the body of the fish and hints at its flickering movement; the tail is a flat design that incorporates the artist’s signature.

There are some mobiles and stables on view, too, though their appeal has become somewhat dimmed by the ubiquity of Calder’s industrial-sized pieces. Even so, some of the small, handmade versions--like “Duck,” a zoomorphic stabile from the mid ‘40s--still can be appreciated for their delicious economy of means and suppleness of wit.

Jack Rutberg Gallery: 357 N. La Brea A ve., (213-938-5222), to Jan. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays , and Dec. 23 through Jan. 1.

Buzz Word: Aficionados of Los Angeles artist Buzz Spector expect his work to yield a delicate combination of humor, erudition, worldly commentary and subtle visual pleasures. A group of eight new works by Spector does not disappoint, though it contains a couple of one-liners (“Tear” and “Leer”) along with more meditative pieces.

Half of “French Letters” consists of postcard-sized photographs of the Eiffel Tower alternating with photographs of a debonair chap; on the other half, the Eiffel Tower alternates with a woman posing by candlelight.

The title of the piece is a reference to the epistolary romance hinted at by the photos as well as the English term for condoms: The distance between the lovers effectively serves as a prophylactic. The Eiffel Tower, symbol of the country synonymous with romance, is an iron framework--and so is a chastity belt.

In the photographs, both of the lovers play with hoary romantic motifs--candlelight, stagy poses--to create intrigue. But then again, Spector creates his own intrigue by juxtaposing the images of two people who probably never met and fitting them into a checkerboard pattern suggestive of the games lovers play. The piece is a visual jeu d’esprit , offered in the demurely allusive terms of the lovers’ vanished era.

The activity of collecting is the subject of two pieces. “Re: Collections (shells)” consists of a collection of individual shells and a “collector shell” (which picks up other shells on its travels), all neatly filed in wooden pigeonholes.

The accompanying text describes the collector shell’s habits in human terms, as if it really feels “the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition.” The death rattle lurking in those words and the tacit suggestion that seemingly sophisticated human habits are no more significant than those of a mollusk gives the piece a fine sharp edge.

“Re: Collections (boxes)” is simply a set of old metal-framed glass boxes of various sizes, nested inside one another. A metaphor for thought (the way an idea leads to a subset of itself), the boxes also suggest the increasingly specialized categories devised by the owner of a burgeoning collection, as a means of maintaining power over it. These boxes are empty, though; the urge to collect is quite independent of the specific objects collectors lust after.

R oy Boyd Gallery: 1547 10th St., (213- 394-1210 ), to Jan. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

TV Portraits: Allan McCollum’s set of “Perceptual Photos” are blown-up photographs of undecipherable shadowy forms. The subjects of these images, photographed from a TV screen, are works of art hanging on the walls behind the main action in sitcoms and films. McCollum crops out the action and setting from the photo, enlarges the work of art to typical painting size and reframes it in utilitarian black.

The action of isolating these images calls attention to the dogsbody’s role a work of art plays in a TV show or film--as an anonymous symbol of prestige in an office or invisibly appropriate furniture for a middle-class home. The subject matter isn’t important; any traditional landscape or portrait will do. Nobody cares who painted it. The point is simply to stock the set with a product that registers generically as “art.”

“With all of my works, I have always meant to withhold the creation of specific meaning,” McCollum has written, “because I am so much more interested in the quality of meaningfulness in and of itself.”

McCollum’s point is not to pick nits with the media per se, but to examine in a larger sense--and without overt moralizing--the role of art as commodity in contemporary society. The uniqueness of a work of art is contradicted by the interchangeability of all works of art in the popular mind. The specific theme of a particular work evaporates under the far more intense identification of art with money and power.

Finding the works of art he photographs in the midst of TV dramas is perhaps also McCollum’s way of drawing attention to the way art is the locus of all sorts of human desires--to communicate an idea, to enjoy oneself, to make a good investment, to gain the respect of one’s peers. Somehow, we all want to be in the picture.

Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery: 1634 17th St., (213-450-2010), to Jan. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.