ART REVIEWS

Kid Stuff: Secret languages, misanthropic fantasies, angry ripostes, bland gee-whizzisms, vague longings and psychedelic doodles--this is the (kid) stuff of a gargantuan effort called “A Summer Drawing Show” at Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery.

More than 80 images produced by 17 artists--in crayon, pencil, liquid paper, stickers, photocopies, gouache, coffee stains, and ink stamps, ripe with smudges, erasures, feeble gestures and crooked lines--demonstrate what seems to be art’s regression into adolescence.

And why not? When else has one had endless hours to daydream and be merrily unproductive? When else has one not felt guilty about being nasty and doing sloppy work?

Yet the fact that these drawings are pinned up on the gallery wall rather than secreted in sketch pads, scribbled on napkins or buried in the margins of phone books gives one pause. For however intimate and untroubled by the niceties of technique they may appear, they are wholly self-conscious and calculated. What these works announce is not access to the artist’s stubbornly childish mind, but the codification of amateurism as a style.

Cloaking one’s vitriol in a kid’s grubby T-shirt is one way to make it go down more easily. Dani Tull’s coloring-book style drawings of little lambs with peg legs and ducks with glass eyes get at grown-up feelings of bitterness about whom and what society has deemed “aberrant.” Karen Kilimnik’s narcotized retracings of fan magazine images of Madonna, Goldie Hawn and Isabelle Adjani address the media’s insidiously consistent representations of femininity. And Erik Oppenheim’s awkwardly penciled-in lists of “Miss-spelled” names (“Mike Smeally,” “Bum Hellman,” “Fart Fourm,”) rail against the art world’s complex politics, abstruse machinations and obligatory hypocrisies.

However, the show really loses steam with its sheer profuseness. The aesthetic it champions--offering a fix that is perhaps too quick and too easy--is interesting once, mildly clever twice, and tedious by the third go-round. What’s more, that aesthetic’s apogee (admittedly an odd notion in relation to art that is by its very nature anti-climactic) has already been reached in the work of Jessica Diamond and Jack Pierson, neither of whom is included here. What “A Summer Drawing Show” leaves us with, then, is one question: Isn’t it time to move in another direction?

ichard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery, 1630 17th St., Santa Monica, (310) 450-2010, through July 25. Closed Sunday and Monday. Sly Homage: When Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal on a pedestal, signed it “R. Mutt” and submitted it to the American Society of Independent Artists in 1917 as a work of art called “Fountain,” he swapped one myth of the artist for another. Out: the artist-demigod who creates from the raw stuff of nature. In: the artist-demagogue bold enough to make a choice.

In the last decade, this latter myth expanded to accommodate a formerly shadowy figure: the curator. With his or her “privileged” eye, the curator could (and did) define styles, package movements and celebrate trends simply by choosing from the wealth of art-products generated by the wealth of the 1980s.

And so we arrive at “Deja Vu,” an exhibition at Asher/Faure Gallery that pays sly homage to the choices made by curators Richard Heller and Bennett Roberts during the six-year run of the recently closed Richard/Bennett gallery. “Sly” because, as the announcement card’s photograph of Heller and Roberts in movie-star dark glasses indicates, the two are fully aware of the irony of having curated a show honoring them as curators; “homage” because they are nonetheless (and quite justifiably) proud of what they have accomplished.

Their taste runs toward oblique parody, cool paradox and eminently good-natured wit. They offer us old photographs of babies whose little fists sport tiny guns, mini-machetes and baby-sized boxing gloves, courtesy of artist Kim Dingle; shortcut antiques by Tom Colgrove--mirrors, grandfather clocks and commodes whose surfaces are covered with drawings mimicking Biedermeir, Spanish Colonial and Louis XVI-style ornamentation; and an impeccably crafted, double-sided saddle by Leonard Seagal--for lovers partial to mutant horses.

Also featured are Yolande McKay’s soap scum assemblages; Cameron Shaw’s plaid-covered and comic-strip-lined boxes; Raymond Pettibon’s unrelenting drawings; Craig Roper’s mixed-media photo bundles; and Noel O’Malley’s wax-and-steel “life-savers.”

However, this show is not just a compendium of Richard/Bennett’s greatest hits. It tweaks at the whole notion of the “art star” by spotlighting the heretofore “supporting” cast. In this, “Deja Vu” puts us on notice--parodically, paradoxically and wittily--for what one hopes will be its curators’ speedy comeback.

Asher/Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, (310) 271-3665. through July 18 . Closed Sundays and Mondays .