ART REVIEWS : Izu Takes On Madison Avenue Icons

When regarding David Izu’s dismantling of advertising and political doublespeak it’s difficult not to think about all the other artists already mining the cultural meaning encoded in advertising. If advertising is ubiquitous, it begins to seem that art playing off it is also everywhere. Izu’s contribution to this postmodern game of self-conscious, cynical, political liberalism is paintings covered with gridded logos and slogans that read like walls from an advertising executive’s dreams.

Most of Izu’s attack on the artifice of the language of signs is contained in a framed window covered in glass in the center of each canvas. Within them are glowingly small still lifes meant to undermine some of Madison Avenue and the Pentagon’s most cherished signifiers. Izu paints well and these tightly rendered images of broken egg shells, rolls of toilet paper or folded origami airplanes struggle nobly for meaning. Unfortunately, the war of the product realities never ignites, partly because the artist’s own symbology is as simplistic as the stuff it’s meant to address.

Only in “Frontman--The Placement of Icons” do we sense that the history of art and representation is being used on more than one level to actively battle the one-dimensional thinking of advertising. Here using reproductions of reproductions of Christ and Mickey Mouse, the artist makes his plays with perspective, bringing up all sorts of wickedly subversive ideas about a “good marketing image.”

In the next gallery space are Terry Schoonhoven’s drawings and a section of tiles from his illusionist Metro Rail tile mural. This is not exactly vintage Schoonhoven. The restrictions of drawing for ceramic tiles has sapped the artist’s trompe l’oeil verve. He tries to compensate by making his usual improbable plays with the architecture and geography of the site more historically specific so all sorts of time-traveling figures and glimpses of mismatched history occupy the image at one time.

Little can be said about the drawings that developed this mural. Most are interesting simply for the small but significant changes that have kept the project alive for the artist. Most startling, however, is the transformation of the flat, simply colored acrylic paintings into ceramic tile. The glaze and intensity of the color make the image, (of which only a small portion is shown) leap to life. It’s unfortunate the drawings couldn’t make the same leap--we’ve come to expect that kind of surprise from the artist.

Koplin Gallery, 1438 9th St., Santa Monica, (213) 319-9956, to April 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Another Part of the Forest: It’s difficult to say why Christina Schlesinger’s “Paintings From the Birch Forest” are so appealing. On the face of it, her imagery--white tree trunks and peeling logs with fecund looking joints and running sores--are so direct about being metaphors for human feelings and psychological scars it’s almost embarrassing. The painting style, too, is slightly naive with the trees and forest being rendered in a colorful, juicy primitivism that pushes emotions to the forefront. Yet the emotional directness stops just short of being maudlin.

Perhaps it is the work’s patent theatricality that makes them enchanting. The color is cool and bright, shadows are rudimentary. Her use of space suspends and supports her subjects while cutting them off from outside interference. Nature here is clearly the symbolic entity that motivated painters like Marsden Hartley, but Schlesinger’s images are strongly feminist. Her trees with their wet, pubic crotches and spread-legged roots are imminently feminine and sexual. They are also decidedly human. Just as German folk artists saw gnarled, ancient Earth spirits in the bark and roots of the trees from the Black Forest, Schlesinger’s birch trees are alive with human expressions.

Floating all these schmaltzy elements around without sinking proves Schlesinger is an artist of strength and ability. The connections she makes between human drama and nature’s cycles is unavoidable yet only seeps in slowly. First, you are caught in the homespun charm of a storyteller weaving a tale about walking by fallen trees in a forest. Only later does that story meander into a memory of a battlefield named “Antietam.”

In the next room are precise, mixed-media, two point perspective constructions of Steve Tannen. Strongly reminiscent of the wall-mounted, material-rich optical illusionism of John Okulick, there is little in these industrial cities of wood, cement and copper to get excited about. Of some interest is the spatial contradiction Tannen uses on some pieces where he literally pushes a frontal block slightly forward, yet still keeps the disappearing perspective intact. It’s a difficult trick to pull off but that’s hardly enough to hold our attention. Nor is the suggestion by the titles that all this urban renewal is meant to critique architecture and industry’s unkept promise of Utopia. Unfortunately, the craft and materials mimic rather than confound architecture’s use of veneer and scale “models” so that illusions remain stronger than incipient disillusionment.

Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, to May 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Leaking Ideas: Paul Knotter is a cynic with a great sense of humor. Looking at the weird assortment of cultural trash he deifies as painting, you have to suspect that he considers civilization to be a marvelous trash heap of ideas-encased-in-products and art a kind of mental archeological dig. From the moment you enter the 12-year survey of his work at Newspace Gallery you are struck by the pack-rat simplicity of his way of painting that places objects in front of bright, flat painted grounds and lets them leak possible meanings slowly into the atmosphere.

Knotter’s re-presentation of objects-as-painting is hardly straightforward. Frequently the objects he selects are themselves abstractions of something else. A funky pair of commercial black and white boxer shorts, for example, is emblazoned with tacky zebra stripes. A tiny hut made of split bamboo and an equally small, global relief map each have the glitzy artifice we have come to accept as representing reality even while they create their own kitschy actuality. Knotter further pushes at the mental boundaries of representation by using photographic reproductions and trompe l’oeil paintings of objects he’s used in the past. The result may look simple, but the way the illusion and representation keep doubling back on themselves is initially as entertaining a banter as anything seen in MOCA’s “Forest of Signs/Crisis of Representation” exhibition.

But the replay of the modern confusion between art and allusion or illusion has worn a little thin over time, and the artist’s videos and use of texts seem freshest. From his scrawled poetic ode to unattainable desire on one wall to the carefully lettered text, “ART IS A MARKET,” punctuated by bits of symbolic disjuncture such as 7-Eleven market signs, Knotter welds satire with something of Oscar Wilde’s disarming, penetrating wit.

Only in his videos, however, is the artist able to make art and product really “interface” with all the hyperbole of mainstream Western business and culture. “Big City of Things” is a marvelously clever and entertaining weaving of MTV and trendy advertising techniques. Amid the rapid cuts, ponderous voice-overs and motivational music are old film clips and images from Knotter’s paintings that mimic memory while trying to redefine style. Equally engaging, “Enigma” and “We Are Things” laughingly put art making into the self-important public relations realm that business uses to sell itself to stockholders. Within the videos the deft demystifying of culture and its signifying objects is easy to understand and appreciate. Here Knotter’s humor undoes the hype and puts art and industry back on a basic level of symbol and assigned significance.

Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353 , to May 4 . Closed Sundays and Mondays. Delicate Power: Pat Steir has chosen to take the high road in her art, but not without some puffing and panting. Her “Breughel Series (A Vanitas of Style)” from the early ‘80s was flawed by the effortfulness of trying to think up a rigorous intellectual approach to art history, which is not her strong point.

Happily, her current series of “Waterfall” paintings seem to be more about painting than about ideas. They invoke art history without lecturing about it by translating the majestic infinitude of Chinese landscape paintings and the energy of the traditional brush painter’s strokes into patterns generated primarily by the pull of gravity.

Each of these radiant works contains rivulets of milky white paint organized into meticulous repeating rows against a field of black. The only relief is provided by a flotilla of spurting white horizontal arcs, whose regular rhythm seems rather too calculated. The intriguing aspect of these paintings is the way they achieve a majestic presence without involving a grand gesture. Instead, their power comes from a rhythmic structure of simple, repetitive forms, in the manner of contemporary minimal music.

Within the tightly structured compass of this series, Steir does allow for some variations in size and spirit. In “Small L.A. Waterfall,” the canvas divides in half, with a smooth gush on one side and a willful, geyser-like burst on the other. Much larger and grander, “Monk Ayko Meditating Waterfall” contains five bands of rivulets that fall in an expansively staggered and layered array that bring to mind the overtones of some unearthly choir. Size definitely improves Steir’s vision--the largest painting in this group is more than 14 feet tall--and gives the delicate massed strands of paint the authority of an unstoppable natural phenomenon.

Linda Cathcart Gallery: 924 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (213) 451-1121, to May 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays. A Witty Look: While we’ve been serenaded by pop myths of cool dudes and their plastic machines in L.A. art of the 1960s, the ‘70s remain oddly mysterious. Although the myth-makers kept singing the same old siren song of sun and surf, the most arrestingly subversive art abandoned traditional formats for performance, video and conceptual work.

Recognition for this newer wave of art as a historical phenomenon is hard to come by and always welcome, especially when it contains work as clever and amusing as the contents of “Los Angeles 1970-75.” The exhibit brings together work by seven artists working in the city during those years. Each made photographs of deceptively ordinary things that are really about the way we receive and process information.

John Baldessari puts in a token appearance--with a deadpan sequence of color photographs of a finger pointing to one of three turnips in a row--and the show also includes William Wegman, Allen Ruppersberg and Dutch conceptualist Ger Van Elk, who studied art here in the early ‘60s. The other artists--Robert Cummings, William Leavitt, Bas Jan Ader--are not as widely known.

Cummings’ photographs-and-texts mingle art and life in idiosyncratic ways. “Ten Unique Article ‘A’s” shows a rack holding 10 sculptural letter A’s supposedly made by 10 people (the accompanying “key” lists well-known artists as well as other people who are either unfamiliar or “unidentified”).

Not only is the “subject” of this art a lowly indefinite article, but the rack is “exhibited” in a tiny suburban back yard. We are also obliged to take Cummings’ word for the authorship of the different pieces. So much for the cult of the artist’s unique, personal gesture.

Leavitt’s works are inscrutable-looking photo sequences without texts that seem to work primarily as catalogues of possibilities. In “The Tropics,” a painting of a leopard, a woman’s jewelry-encircled neck and an artificially lit arrangement of palm trees all operate on the level of suggestion. They are representations of representations of an idea, at least two steps removed from the thing itself.

Ader’s “I’m Too Sad to Tell You” is a big photograph of a tearful woman bearing the title remark as a scribble on the print surface. The autobiographical quality of the handwritten message stops well short of being confessional; the miserable face is seen in searching detail, yet it reveals next to nothing.

The artists generally seem to start out with bits of data (like the contents and styles of suburban houses in Ruppersberg’s “Seeing and Believing”) or quirky suppositions (like the goofy “re-creation” of the history of a basic slang expression in Van Elk’s “The Co-Founder of the Word OK --Hollywood”).

The dominant impression that emerges from this body of work is of generalizing from the specific. The artists seem to be playing around with chunks of life--stuff that always seemed pretty strange when you got right down to it--rather than setting out to illustrate theoretical concerns about art and culture in an East Coast manner. But does it still make sense to point out regional differences in ‘70s art? Perhaps the exhibit catalogue, due later this spring, will expound further.--CATHY CURTIS

Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery: 1634 17th St., Santa Monica, (213) 450-2010, to May 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.