ART REVIEWS : Pieter Mol: A Poetic Kind of Conceptualist

If Conceptualism has indeed been the dominant mode of artistic practice since the mid-1970s, then the recipe for its stubborn preeminence is simple: diversification. There’s Duchampian Conceptualism; too-many-objects-in-the-world-already Conceptualism; feminist-theoretical Conceptualism; neo-Conceptualism; and a seemingly endless array of depressingly dilute variants.

Dutch-born Pieter Laurens Mol, a selection of whose works from 1983 to the present is on view at L.A. Louver Gallery, is a Conceptualist of the poetic sort. “Mutiny Lyrics” (1992) makes that characterization peculiarly literal: a large sheet of varnished steel punctuated with horizontal rows of shaving foam--like the white writing associated with madness or exaltation.

Enamored of alchemy, metaphor and meanings that are more often recondite than manifest, Mol is tangled up in the shadow of Joseph Beuys--no surprise for a Conceptualist of poetic temperament. Like Beuys, Mol favors materials with potential for transformation; instead of fat and felt, he uses rust, lead, glass and shaving foam. These materials are juxtaposed with photographs and found and/or manipulated objects to create three-dimensional tableaux that are minimal, but richly visual.

“Thrust Lust Sanctuary” (1991) is in many ways typical. The arrangement includes three broken bottles, suspended upside down from steel plackets; a photographic negative of a wasted landscape (A destroyed factory? The spoils of war?); and several rows of welded steel spikes. This work is dense with symbols of disaster and evidence of violence. Indeed, Mol’s subject matter is the responsibility of the artist in a world marked by fragmentation and loss.

What is missing, however, is any shred of humor. This may be a curatorial misstep rather than a fault of the artist. A recent New York show, for example, included a 1969 photograph of the artist, hair neatly slicked back and body jarringly out of focus, bearing the legend: “Once, I Existed.” In the work presented here, by contrast, the ironies of the artist’s lot are never explored; instead, we are asked to bear witness to his agonies.

In “The Underflow” (1987-92), to cite one example, a washboard is paired with a photograph of Mol, head buried in his hands. The implication is that the artist is drowning under the burden of his calling, symbolized by the washboard’s relentlessly undulating lines. Yet what about the seduction of those lines, their mesmerizing ebb and flow? What needs to be dealt with, it seems, is why the artist chooses his particular vocation. What needs to be asked is where does the deliciousness of the artist’s self-inflicted “burden” lie?

While Beuys was certainly not one to ask these questions directly, nor to deconstruct the notion of artist as mystical shaman, his work is imbued with equal parts melancholy and irony. We may need another show to assess whether or not Mol is able to strike a commensurate balance and thus stand as a worthy successor to Beuys’ very powerful, conceptualist legacy.

* L.A. Louver, 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Nov. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Meet the Art Guys: Jack Massing and Mike Galbreth go by any number of names: the Art Guys From Texas; Art Guise; AAArt Guys. It doesn’t really matter to them how you spell it, as long as it sounds like it’s supposed to.

The Art Guys are well-known in Houston for doing things like spending 24 hours in a booth at Denny’s, sipping Coke in celebration of the winter solstice; having a Labor Day art sale along the side of the interstate highway; or ceremoniously shaving off matching, mutton-chop sideburns.

This is, however, Los Angeles, and art pranks like these--even when they’re flown under the Marcel Duchamp-John Cage-Fluxus banner--are hardly enough to cut the mustard. Wisely, the curator of the Art Guys’ current show at Zero One Gallery, Walter Hopps (of Houston’s Menil Collection and Pasadena’s landmark 1963 Duchamp retrospective), has edited out the high jinks in order to present us with an elegant installation of elegant objects. These objects are lightly scented with essence of “bad boy”; happily, they do not reek of it.

When I say “reek,” I am thinking especially of the art of Pruitt-Early, Cary Leibowitz/Candy Ass and several others whose fame and popularity are--mercifully--on the wane. Like these artists, the Art Guys employ the paraphernalia of the eternally adolescent male--beer bottles, cigarettes, girlie magazines, pencils, marbles, etc. Unlike them, however, the Art Guys do not embroil themselves in formally dull, insincerely retrogressive macho and reverse-macho theatrics. What they do instead is play one stereotype against another--the adolescent’s perpetual boredom against his boundless energy, his single-minded fantasies against his unfocused obsessions--to wonderful, if unexpected, results.

What the Art Guys wind up with are these: large columns and spheres constructed out of beer bottles in revelatory shades of sepia and green; medium-sized stars, sphere tetrahedrons and domes made out of perfectly sharpened pencils; tiny archways, circlets, stacks and pyramids made of prescription pills and capsules of varying colors and shapes. There are also cigarette edifices, marble towers, and studies for googly-eye and match projects. All these are executed according to predetermined systems (Conceptualism once again rears its head); all are marked by extraordinary precision.

Here’s a different kind of precision. Three suitcases with letters cut out of their front panels and lights stashed inside stand in the corner of the room, flashing a syncopated message of ennui: “BLAH BLAH BLAH.” Art does sometimes seem like more of the same. The Art Guys prove themselves to be smart guys by acknowledging this fact and resisting it--all in the same, beer-and-cigarette-stained breath.

* Zero One Gallery, 7025 Melrose Ave., (213) 965-9459, through Dec. 3. Closed Sunday and Monday. Systems Analysis: What can you say about an image of St. Christopher with features that fall somewhere between comic exaggeration and Renaissance idealization, posed against a wall whose texture resembles that of a crumbling fresco, painted on a huge piece of canvas pinned to the wall like a medieval banner?

What if it hangs opposite a picture of a gaggle of naked boys, dancing around a mammoth pumpkin with the neurotic glee of Hieronymous Bosch, as filtered through the ho-hum millenarianism of a “Star Trek” coloring book? And what if it’s next to a massive grid of yellowed pages from a “Richie Rich” comic book, overlaid with scribbles and drawings etched in the thin, blue line of a ball-point pen?

You can say that Jim Barsness is interested in myths, symbols and icons, the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the modern, the private and the public. Barsness’ mixed-media paintings at Caplan Gallery are often spectacular--mostly, but not only, because they refuse to pit one thing against another, to validate St. Christopher over Dr. Spock, gold leaf over ball-point, the idiosyncratic vision over the borrowed image.

Barsness’ subject is the way systems of representation, like systems of belief, are subject to--and subjected to--each others’ rules. By way of demonstration, his works elucidate how those systems overlap, undermine and ultimately buttress one another within the highly volatile space of memory.

This work is best when it is big, layered and incident-filled. It is weakest when it aims at a kind of hieratic unity. “Man With Arch,” for example, looks like a 15th-Century portrait of a saint, placed in the center of an elaborate, three-dimensional frame. While Barsness’ draftsmanship is so fine that it almost carries the day, there is a certain mannered quality that jars. “Man With Arch” feels too much like pastiche. There are, however, few such lapses here. This is an accomplished and quite stunning body of work.

* Caplan Gallery, 2224 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-2170, through Dec. 5. Closed Sunday and Monday. Hurtful Laughter: There is nothing remotely funny about the subject matter: domestic violence, rape, molestation and the less spectacular, but no less insidious, misogyny of everyday life. Yet it is at times quite difficult to hold back laughter in the presence of Sue Williams’ alternately scathing and haunted work at Stuart Regen Gallery.

It’s not the nervous laughter that comes from relief; the dirty jokes Williams shares are already out in the open. Nor is it the laughter of embarrassment; Williams presumes an audience that is more or less beyond shock. What she doesn’t presume, however, is an audience that is beyond shame, that is too inured to the institutionalized sexism that often passes for “communication” to see themselves and those they love (or claim to, with their hands tightened into a fist) in her scabrous, urgent and bitter images. So the laugh that comes is one of recognition. And it hurts on its way up from your throat.

Williams’ drawings and paintings look like malignant cartoons, squished full of irregularly scrawled texts and hastily drawn images--most in black, white and beige, one with nasty accents in red, another in a noxious tone of yellow. “No, No, No--No Means No,” shouts one image, oozing self-esteem as preached by self-help manuals and Oprah Winfrey; meanwhile, the words “HA HA HA” surround it with cool viciousness. “Mom, A Role Model” is the label assigned to an image of a woman on her knees with a toilet strapped to her back, her husband blithely urinating into it. Another image depicts a woman, sprawled on the subway stairs face down, her pants pulled around her ankles; she is “a victim for you--or it’s you.” A man and a woman run toward one another. She says: “I am beautiful and lovable.” He says: “You should meet my mom. She’s a fat pig, too.”

Spelled out in tiny letters above an image of a large pair of flabby thighs is the phrase “This Is (Art) Not Social Commentary.” Williams’ work powerfully insists that this distinction has for too long served the forces of reaction. It has sanitized art such that it has become, in many ways, beside the point. Williams renders the distinction itself beside the point--and in so doing, gouges out a new and dangerous space for a politicized, feminized art.

* Stuart Regen Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Dec. 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.