ART REVIEWS : Irvine Center Showcases Eight Inventive Tinkerers

“Imperfect Order” exposes the home as both refuge and trap. Thoughtfully curated by Tim Jahns for the Irvine Fine Arts Center, the exhibition suggests that we organize our immediate environments to fulfill two basic purposes: physical comfort and psychological stability. The most intriguing works set these goals at cross-purposes. They show that the impulse to maintain order can be as irrational as the desire for chaos.

The eight artists Jahns has brought together are not social misfits in the Romantic tradition, nor social activists of the avant-garde. Instead, they define a loose group of inventive tinkerers.

Tim Hawkinson, Erwin Wurm, Buzz Spector and Carrie Ungerman form the core of the show. Their recycling of ordinary household items fuses the familiar with the unfathomable.

Hawkinson is a remarkably deft rearranger of mundane domestic stuff. His “Key” looks like the awkward, teen-age cousin of an elegant Modernist sculpture, or an oversize distortion of the object named by its title. The piece is actually made of all the metal elements needed to make a door: knobs, locks, keyholes, tumblers, bolts, screws, hinges, clasps, knocker and peep hole. With a jig-saw, Hawkinson has removed all of the wood, except for spindly strips that connect the metal components.

What’s left is a skeleton of a door. Its parts remain in their proper places but are unable to function. With a clever twist of logic, the artist presents a key that is a door--one that can’t be closed because, as an object of art, it remains open to interpretation.

Wurm’s odd arrangements of similarly useless articles of utilitarian clothing make a joke of Modernist sculpture. To make his weirdly figurative work, he wraps unused trenchcoats around boxes, stretches new trousers over leg-like cylinders and lays freshly pressed shirts in glass vitrines. With bald humor, he suggests that all sculpture is undeniably anthropomorphic.

In the 1960s, various Minimalists condemned each other’s art by deriding its repressed anthropomorphism. The biggest insult, it seemed, was to say your competitor’s sculpture was no different from the countless bronze monuments of statesmen that perch on pedestals before courthouses in every American city. Wurm’s wry, self-effacing pieces throw references to the body directly in your face, without ever manifesting the human form’s presence.

Spector’s altered postcards and antique glass cabinet, filled with empty glass boxes, create a world of poignancy and its loss. One grid of 45 miniature pictures contains 40 French chateaus. Compressed to the scale of a modest painting, Spector’s fascination with mass reproduction dovetails with his love of an outmoded, aristocratic way of life. These simple, accessible images appeal to our imaginations by denying us access to what might lie behind their fragile facades.

Ungerman’s multicolored, oversize bars of glycerin soap fuse cleanliness with disgust. In her hands, a gentle caress becomes a painful scratch of the skin. One beautifully translucent amber bar is filled with toe- and finger-nail clippings. The sharp thorns from a rose bush stick out of another’s otherwise smooth surface. Needle-like cactus thorns punctuate the top of a third.

Her best piece is a full-length cape made of a finely meshed, see-through net whose collar, cuffs and lapels are decorated with thousands of dead wasps. Unlike her soap, which literally attempts to get under your skin, her exquisitely unnatural garment balances a prick of the flesh with a pique of the mind.

Willing to use any object at their disposal, as well as any conceptual category or pattern of behavior, these artists alter our perceptions by artfully adjusting our surroundings. United by their obsessiveness, they appeal to order only to invite its estrangement. Their work takes place where structures begin to break down, generating responses that might not be random, but are certainly unanticipated.

The viewer’s body is the invisible subject of these nimble manipulations. The most resonant work communicates in an indirectly visceral manner. They neither punch you in the gut nor appeal solely to your mind, but instead run these two modes of apprehension together. As if entering your consciousness after taking a detour through your body, these pieces intimate that reaching a destination is not as important as going off in another direction, without plans or expectations.

The remainder of the exhibition is not as engaging, because the work lacks ambivalence. Barbara McCarren’s installation consists of a fake fireplace, almost 200 newspaper reproductions of actual conflagrations and bad poetry printed on a window shade. Martin Gantman’s flagrantly fake still-lifes of impersonal office furniture are also shrill in their dismissal of art’s capacity to offer anything more than a sterile, frozen view of life. Likewise, his video collaboration with physicist Lothar Schmitz fails to communicate anything more nuanced than the idea that destruction is part of a larger order.

Nicholas Rule’s paintings manage to hold one’s attention a little longer, but not much longer than it takes to read them. Their point is that the present necessarily displaces the past, and will, in turn, be displaced by whatever follows it. Their delicate lines and tenuous drips have greater resonance in memory than when you stand before them. Tracing the lineage of famous racehorses, Rule’s paintings suggest that we’ve arrived at a frightening moment, one that may be the end, if not the continuation of a history given to transformation. His images function like footnotes to the exhibition. They depart from the body of the text only to take you more deeply into it.

* Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave., Irvine, (714) 552-1018, through Nov. 3. Open daily.

Plotless Platinum Dramas: Rei Taka’s platinum prints at Paul Kopeikin Gallery gracefully refer to numerous movements from modern art history. The San Diego-based photographer competently deploys, in refined compositions, elements of collage, still-life, Romanticism, abstraction and a touch of Surrealism. Historical references, however, are not the subject of her works. Taka’s photographs recycle styles and techniques solely for the purpose of design.

Oddly shaped bottles, artfully positioned colanders, glass plates arranged to reflect light and cast shadows, as well as angled tabletops, frame-less mirrors and implied windowpanes are the actors in her self-consciously plotless dramas. At their best, Taka’s images seem to give substance to a weightless world forgotten by time. Their relentlessly artificial nature intensifies the sense that they glimpse a world exclusively made up of moments of perfection.

If this impression gives Taka’s photographs their power, it also leads to their shortcomings. To fill the vacuum created when history and narrative are purged from the picture, her work compensates with an overzealous pursuit of pure design. The photographs depict an impressive array of meticulously engineered lighting effects, sensuous surface textures and richly subtle formal relationships. Nevertheless, they remain bland and uninteresting--not quite formulaic, but hollow and uninspired. These qualities directly result from their refusal to aspire to anything more than visual pleasantness. For example, the objects in Taka’s images are positioned where they are because that’s where they look best. Other considerations simply do not apply.

It would be a mistake to call these works formalist. Formalism maintains that an essential relationship exists between a work’s form and its content. Taka’s photographs replace this difficult dialogue with one-dimensional designs whose pleasant effects are tasteful but empty.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 876-7033, through Sept. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Benign Amusement: “Personal Inventory,” at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, juxtaposes the photo-based works of Ellen T. Birrell and Nick Vaughn. Organized by guest curator Marilu Knode, the pairing makes sense on a number of levels.

Both artists explore the points of intersection--and the gaps between--individuals and social groups. Both intend to disrupt conventional wisdom and normal behavior in order to make a place for eccentricity. And, both use fragments of cultural codes to piece together identities that have not been totally prescribed by society.

If Birrell’s and Vaughn’s goals are ambitious, their work fails to deliver much more than benign amusement. The problem is that their art doesn’t take humor seriously enough. Neither does it trust its own capacity to be powerfully funny.

Birrell has run a number of folkloric adages together and stenciled them in pencil onto the gallery’s four walls. Interspersed among these nonsensical sentences are laminated, black-and-white Polaroids, hung on hooks in sentence-like rows. Birrell’s hybrid bits of folk wisdom, such as “Feet of clay are dirt cheap” and “There is more than one way to skin the lion’s share,” mock the reliability of second-hand experience and send up inherited knowledge. But, her installation puts nothing in their place. Her curiously uninteresting images, appropriated from the mass media, remain mute.

Vaughn has sewn himself a wardrobe of clothes that don’t fit, and he’s had himself photographed looking buffoonish, embarrassed, defiant, resigned, clueless or just silly. Asymmetrical collars, ballooning sleeves, mismatched patterns and warped proportions tell us less about a man’s difficulties of fitting into social roles than about the illusionistic tricks Vaughn uses to make his body look as if it’s made of Silli-Putty.

If, by abandoning the presumption that their art offers some kind of cogent social criticism, both artists could take themselves less seriously, then we might be able to take their work more seriously.

* Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave., Fullerton, (714) 738-6595, through Oct. 25. Closed Mondays.