ART REVIEWS : Mordant Observations on Life From Rothenberg

“Bathroom Doors, Greeting Cards, Trophies and a Test” is the title of Erika Rothenberg’s new batch of mordant observations on life in these United States. The test is the best part. You walk into a gallery that has a free-standing sign at the entrance that reads: “If you do not feel any of these things, you are not human. If you feel too many of these things, you are insane.”

Arranged on the wall are black plastic cutouts that look like Rorschach test blots. Each cutout contains statements taken from the Hoffer-Osmond Diagnostic Test for Schizophrenia. It seems that some of these statements are positive (“I stand up for my rights”), some are deplorable but not necessarily irrational (“The world would be better off without the weak”) and some are pretty nutty (“Someone is making copies of me”). But many of the phrases call into question the difference between sick and sane. “I sometimes taste sound,” for example, has an appealingly poetic quality; it is a description of the sensory phenomenon known as synesthesia.

Rothenberg’s piece plays with the great American love of self-scoring tests (on the order of “Is Your Marriage Working?”), which probably stir up more anxieties than they resolve. But in this case, no answers are provided. How do we know whether we feel “too many of these things”? Do we have to depend on a psychiatrist administering a test? Who creates these tests, anyway? As usual, Rothenberg probes underlying insecurities, feelings of powerlessness and wishful thinking.

Her brightly illustrated greeting cards are designed to be sent from such varied special-interest groups as abusive spouses (“Sorry I beat you last night”), anti-abortion crusaders (“Hope you rot in Hell, Murderer!”) and affirmative action beneficiaries (“Thanks, boss”). These over-the-edge examples point up the emptiness of the canned, customized greetings we rely on to do our emotional dirty work and mock the notion that massive perceived wrongs can be righted in convenient token ways.

Rothenberg’s sarcastic “trophies” combine pop-culture marketing with conservative values, just as right-wingers have learned to do. While the bathroom door installation, “Differences,” is a look at popular distinctions between the sexes that doesn’t quite jell, “Media Story” offers an amusing demonstration of the way hyped descriptions, stereotypes and cliches homogenize the news.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery: 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (213) 652-9172, to Aug. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Remnants of Culture: A body of new work by British sculptor Tony Cragg is always an occasion. The current group (mostly large floor pieces made up of discrete parts) has an archeological, elegiac tone. It’s as if, centuries from now, God dug up vanished remnants of culture that had suffered a sea change but he couldn’t remember what they used to represent.

“Forminifera” is a title Cragg used a few years ago for a group of cast sandblasted plaster objects riddled with small holes. The new group form an equally odd, but larger community: a human head, an angular School of Paris-style torso, a satellite dish, a crater, a tower, a double-eared shape that imitates a found industrial object in another recent sculpture. Divorced from their normal scale and formed out of the same material, these elements project an aura of decorative unreality. The piece is also kin to other Cragg sculptural groupings of the mid-’80s--”Lens” and “Birnam Wood”--in which common objects are uniformly covered with plastic particles.

Another piece (Cragg hasn’t supplied all the titles yet) seems to take a long, judicious view of the impact of successive civilizations on the Earth. The sculpture consists of two large, half-hidden jars embedded in a weathered chunk of stone that was once carefully drilled and carved. The function of the stone is no longer evident, while the jars have given up their common use (holding liquids) and acquired another (holding up the stone).

“Eroded Landscape” (another title with a recent antecedent in Cragg’s work) also has an archeological presence. A group of attenuated white frosted jug and vase forms balance on flat, coffee table-like sheets of glass “torn” here and there to signify erosion. Made from sand, glass itself was once part of a landscape. Vessels are familiar images in Cragg’s sculpture. Here, they recall ancient glass implements--ordinary items that are now exotic, “survivors” recovered from a remote world.

Cragg offers a morsel of undergraduate humor in “Subcommittee,” a bronze piece in the shape of a giant desktop rubber-stamp holder that imprisons broken stamps with handles that look like bald heads. Obliged to “rubber-stamp” someone else’s opinions, members of this featureless subcommittee haven’t a thought of their own.

Most puzzling are two small plaster leopards, peppered with holes, that roar and recline on a pedestal. Perhaps they embody a curious meeting place of kitsch and nature--a stubborn insistance that even cliche and artifice are rooted in the realities of the observable world.

* Fred Hoffman Gallery: 912 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (213) 394-4199, to July 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Verbal Agility: In any group show, Richard Pettibon would shine; in “Dangerous,” the gulf between his work and that of the other two artists (Mark Heresy and Richard Roehl, represented here by lame assemblages) is impossibly large. Pettibon is a mild-mannered colossus roaming freely through the worlds of literature, dime-store novels, religion, sex, philosophy and art history. He joins terse phrases borrowed from these worlds with rudimentary images drawn or painted in various styles.

It doesn’t seem possible to isolate just one Pettibon bon mot. The work seems to exist only in multiple examples--so many images, so many quotes from unseen speakers, each one tweaking the meaning of an image in a different direction and spinning the germs of fabulous stories out of thin air.

To take just one example, a billboard in one small painting reveals a rough-and-ready inscription, “JW slept here,” and a crudely drawn face. “You run us like railroad trains,” protests one voice in Pettibon’s jottings. Another intones: “His root is in the earth, built with iron and brawn.” Together, these remarks let the viewer imagine a salt-of-the-earth Depression Era working man, determined to leave his mark and angry at being pushed around by Big Business.

Other pieces in this show conjure up such wildly divergent situations and states of mind as those of an 1890s aesthete, Renaissance-era lovers, God creating the universe and an Edwardian Englishwoman who seems in danger of confusing romance with her partner’s lust.

* Richard/Bennett Gallery: 830 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 962-8006, to July 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.