ART REVIEWS : Pruitt-Early Take Aim at American Teen Males

Employing a tactic similar to the one Warhol exploited so brilliantly in the ‘60s, Brooklyn-based art team Pruitt-Early transform the dross of popular culture into blazing social critique. But, whereas Warhol aimed his guns at the culture at large, Pruitt-Early zero in on a specific target: the teen-age American male.

Defining a desperately macho blue-collar aesthetic revolving around fast cars, beer and fantasies of compliant women with big breasts, Pruitt-Early are members of a coalescing school that takes the avant-garde into the world of vans, heavy metal and adolescent rage (artists Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Jim Shaw, Cary S. Liebowitz, Richard Prince and Robert Williams are poking around the same steaming compost heap). A criticism leveled against many of these artists--including Pruitt-Early--is that they fail to take a clear position on the volatile terrain they explore, however, this show at Stuart Regen Gallery in Beverly Hills makes apparent that Pruitt-Early view this faction of society as tragically naive.

Working with a relentlessly vulgar visual vocabulary that references Mad magazine, cardboard cutouts and promotional displays of the sort used in music stores, novelty dolls, T-shirt transfers, decals and beer logos, Pruitt-Early exploit the language of sales with unerring accuracy--the bright colors, the goofiness, the obsessive pursuit of fun are perfectly replicated here. Their paintings are made of heat transfers on canvas, which they then shrink-wrap and present in groups of six, which are referred to as “six packs,” and 24, which are called “cases.” The centerpiece of the exhibition is a full-size cut-out of a van decorated with a painting of a nude girl straddling a column of beer cans. Empty beer cans are stacked to form sculptures (a little green plastic troll whose eyes become X’s when he’s hung over hangs from several of them), and the gallery walls have been painted a shrieking Day-Glo orange that increases the wow factor of this show considerably. The underlying implication of Pruitt-Early’s work is that Venus De Milo has devolved into Spuds McKenzie, the local 7-Eleven is an emporium of high culture, and buying and consuming is a mystical act.

Getting wasted is the central ritual for this subculture, which seems to regard beer as a masculinity-enhancing magical elixir--one needn’t look too hard to see that most advertising campaigns for beer are designed to appeal to a not terribly mature teen-ager, and this show really hammers that point home. In cranking up the volume on this weird world, Pruitt-Early reveal that lurking beneath male teen-ager’s hysterical assertion of sexual prowess is a terror of impotence, feelings of alienation and loneliness, and most corrosive of all, bone-rattling boredom that breeds a diabolically aggressive nihilism. Rebellion is a normal part of the adolescent rite of passage, however, in Pruitt-Early’s view, the distorted value system of mass media has transformed it into something diseased and strange.

Stuart Regen Gallery: 619 N . Almont Drive, Beverly Hills; to May 15; (213)-276-5424. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Toons in Trash: Like Pruitt-Early, L.A. artist Anthony Ausgang is a cultural bottom feeder who constructs philosophical conundrums out of materials largely dismissed as trash.

For the past six years he’s been investigating the language of cartooning (Warner Bros. cartoons--those by Tex Avery in particular--are a major influence for him), and in a body of new work at the Walker & Walker Gallery in Santa Monica, he adds a new element to the mix; he’s now painting cartoon characters into amateur paintings found in thrift stores. For instance, he paints a hot-rod into a corny landscape of an idyllic country lane in one piece, and a wolf going goo-goo eyed over a sweet young thing walking alone through the woods in another.

In the past year or two, thrift store paintings have been resurrected from the cultural scrap heap and been examined as important artifacts with a lot to tell us about ourselves (L.A. artist Jim Shaw was one of the first to recognize their value and has amassed a large collection of thrift store masterpieces). Consequently, Ausgang’s alterations of these canvases--done without the consent of the anonymous artists--might be seen as vandalism by some viewers.

Moreover, you needn’t be an aficionado of thrift store art to see that a few of these paintings are so fantastically weird that it’s impossible to add anything to them (a canvas of a singing paper bag takes top honors as Ausgang’s most surreal find). Mostly, however, he’s working with generic scenes, and his embellishments transform them from kitsch throwaways into thoughtful and witty reflections on cliches in art.

Also on view is a conceptual prank by DNA, a four man art team from Holland. Their visual one-liner involves a painting kit, instructions on how to make an authentic DNA artwork, and a few completed examples which hang on the walls with dangling price tags. This cynical piece is neither smart, funny or original--the commodification of art is hardly late breaking news.

Walker & Walker Gallery: 1748 Berkeley St., Santa Monica; to May 11; (213)-829-9505. Closed Sunday and Monday .

Glass Goes Baroque: In “Tutti Putti,” an exhibition of spectacular pieces by Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly on view at the Pence Gallery in Santa Monica, an art form currently out of vogue is given a new lease on life.

Chihuly has been taking glass into uncharted territory for 27 years and he’s really outdone himself with this body of work. Once hailed as the noblest of crafts, glass has degenerated into the province of cheap souvenirs and strictly utilitarian objects--you might admire beautiful glassware on a dinner table, but it’s certainly not considered high art worthy of a gallery exhibition. This show, however, makes a strong case for the notion that glass has the same range of possibilities as paint and canvas.

Revolving around the form of the putti-- small, chubby male cherubs common to Baroque art--this work is wonderfully over the top. Unabashedly sexual, decadent and occasionally a bit kitsch, the work explodes with an irreverent humor one rarely sees in artworks rooted in the world of crafts (when was the last time a rug or a basket made you laugh out loud?) Chihuly couches his fresh point of view in flashy displays of technique, and the 14 works on view are all extravagantly big and colorful. Chihuly is quite a showman and the work in this exhibition really lives up to its title--this is rock ‘n’ roll glass.

Pence Gallery: 908 Colorado Blvd., Santa Monica; to May 25; (213)-393-8864. Closed Sunday and Monday.