ART REVIEWS : ‘Les Fleurs’ Snipes at Flowery Tradition

Hey, great timing on the “Les Fleurs” show at Parker-Zanic Gallery. Now that Pop art daisies are springing up on smart lapels, it’s the right moment to see what a younger generation is doing to subvert the polite tradition of flowers in art. Among the 34 artists represented, a whole bunch come through with sly devices on a deft small scale.

One successful tactic is to work in a seemingly meek and marginal way. Vincent Shine’s “Untitled (bilateral duckweed No. 8),” looks like a pitiful handful of tiny weeds, balanced on their delicate white roots as if coaxed into submission by a mad gardener. The humor of the piece comes from its utterly ersatz, polysyllabic chemical components.

In Kim Dingle’s painting, “Stupid Little White Flowers,” a field of white daubs under a blank blue sky turns out to be full of names of things, written in tiny script: “one buffalo,” “ant ant ant,” “chicken and rice,” “paint thinner,” “car keys.” Some of these objects are plausibly part of nature, others belong to other spheres of life. But hey, who can keep track anymore? And why shouldn’t art be as random and illogical as life?

Another way to go is with dumb-like-a-fox retro-goofy stuff, like Jacci Den Hartog’s “Poured Flower”--a mound of rubber surrounded by “poured” flat rubber petals, which combines the rarefied interest in natural process of certain ‘60s artists with the blatant Pop style of different artists of the era.

Gay references pop up in Wayne DeSelle’s word game piece, “Flower to Fruits (Come Out)” and Keith Boadwee’s untitled photo-portrait of himself, romping in body paint and phallic flowers against a huge Georgia O’Keeffe painting.

Some of the artists are deadpan observers of the wide, wide world of flower imagery in clothing (photographs by Tom Sicurella and Laura London), commercial photography (Rory Devine) and bank check design (Andrew Winer). Others work in deliberately corny modes (Leonard Seagal’s untitled “bouquet” of giant wrenches in a rusted container, Erika Greenberg’s painting, “Barbie Goes to the Park”).

Throughout, there is much amused looking back at the ‘60s, much chagrined awareness of a world of fakery and broken promises. The mixture of modes and moods is smart and potent, a retort from the world-weary Class of 1991 to a dreamier older generation.

* Parker-Zanic Gallery: 112 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 936-9022, to June 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Nursery Rime: Lauren Lesko’s description of her art is a brief feminist thesis reminding the reader how newborns frequently are tagged in hospitals (“I’m a boy” versus “It’s a girl”). In fact, however, Lesko’s statement about the differences between male “subjects” and female “objects” doesn’t so much illuminate her art as stand next to it and point, like a lecturer. The work has a weirdly compelling post-Surrealist charm of its own, combining aspects of errant sexuality with the pastel calm of the nursery and the girlish secretiveness of a pubescent girl’s bedroom.

Hugging the floor, an elongated upholstered blue moire object contains a long slit filled with black horse hair. Ten swelling pink cotton forms tipped with pearls are piled neatly on a white lacquered platform. Two identical clouds of net petticoats--one edged in pink, the other in blue--surround puffs of pearl-ornamented smocking and stand on skinny plastic legs. It may help to know that the violin case upholstered in gold-tooled pink leather, lying open on a black velvet base, is called “That’s a Good Girl.” But the lusciously tacky invitation was already clear.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art: 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, to May 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Objects of Her Affection: Jessica Stockholder’s constructions have the renegade charm of dumb combinations of junk that are somehow inevitable. But this is not the aesthetic of a Robert Rauschenberg adding a stuffed goat wearing a tire to a painting. There are no puns here; there’s no dialogue between art and the everyday. Things are what they appear to be--in fact, Stockholder’s titles for the works are simply a recitation of each of the objects that make them up (as in “wool blanket, table, barbecue, night light, fluorescent light, two speaker boxes . . . “).

The work has none of the “poetry” of the stuff the Funk artists cobbled together in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, none of the self-righteousness of art meant to lambaste an over-productive society. Instead, Stockholder wills into being an underclass of jury-rigged and manufactured objects with their own logic, as if designed by some alien race with different notions of utility and value. That piece of chicken wire studded with green garbage twist-ties? That scrap of ugly carpet covered in a viscous pool of green paint? Well, don’t move ‘em. They’re fine just where they are, along with the plugged-in wires that may or may not transmit current.

This work is not without suggestions of metaphor. In one piece, for example, a trestle-like construction with a scrap of metal screen on one end butts up against a light fixture attached to another bulky object--as if two ungainly creatures are sniffing each other and deciding what to do next. But any seeming allusion to art--an amateur photo “collage,” a painted shape on a piece of wood--are of a piece with the plastic flowers and the twig stool. There is no hierarchy of imagination here; everything is equally witty and equally dumb. When Stockholder falters--as in the slender piece in the gallery’s anteroom--she gets too elegant and choosy, revealing her art school secrets instead of sagely concealing them under a load of trash.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery: 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, (213) 453-0180, to June 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Shaping Up: Sarah Tamor makes airy three-dimensional works in painted steel mesh. Full of curlicues and arbitrary shapes, these small pieces are translations of architectural ornaments into another medium--essentially a one-shot idea. And yet, the weightlessness of the medium, the possibilities for shadow-play, amusing color and variable placement on the wall all give the work a beguiling effervescence. Recently, Tamor has begun to work larger, most effectively in a set of large mesh banners that bulge into various relief shapes--a set of low-key ornaments that could quietly grace a large interior space.

* Richard Green Gallery: 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, (213) 828-6666, to May 25. Closed Sunday and Monday.