A SALUTE TO A.R.T. PRESS : 15 Associated With the L.A. Art-Book Publisher Have Their Say--Visually or Verbally

Shoppers who notice the display of bright red bowling balls and red shirts in the window of the Works Gallery Annex at Crystal Court sometimes look confused. Is this a sporting goods store, or what?

In fact, the bowling gear--the work of Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley--who has subverted “high art” pieties with some of the most unlikely objects and images from real life--is part of the gallery’s salute to A.R.T. Press, a division of the Los Angeles nonprofit group Art Resources Transfer Inc.

The 15 artists represented in the show (through May 23) are all associated with the press, which publishes an unusual series of artist monographs. Some of the artists are subjects of the books, others were interviewers, and a few have served in both capacities. (For example, Sarah Charlesworth interviewed Laurie Simmons, who in turn interviewed Jimmy DeSana.) Still others have been profiled in the semiannual arts and culture journal Now Time, also published by the press.

Although the art on view is not uniformly strong, it serves as a good introduction to one of the more inspired ideas in art publishing.

The monographs in this series--a set of slim copiously illustrated and snappily designed paperbacks--are not vapid “coffee table” books or essays written in unintelligible art jargon. Instead, each artist is interviewed in a probing and personal way by a simpatico fellow artist--often, a longtime friend--and the edited conversations appear in an easy-to-follow Q-and-A format (sort of like an Interview magazine piece but minus the fawning attitude).

Each artist was chosen for the project because of incisive interpretations of contemporary art issues, his or her articulateness and willingness to spend a great deal of time working on the content and appearance of the book.

The press, founded in 1987 by publisher and editor William S. Bartman, an art collector whose previous careers were in theater and film, issues three monographs a year. (Sample copies of these publications and the journal are on display at the gallery.)

In addition to Kelley, artists in show include Judy Fiskin, Vija Celmins, Kim Abeles, Pat Sparkuhl, Michael McMillen and Allan McCollum.

* DeSana, a somewhat obscure artist (despite his photographs of such New Wave rock figures as David Byrne and Debbie Harry), died of AIDS-related causes in 1990 while his A.R.T. Press monograph was still in production.

In his early color work, printed in the jarring hues he associates with bad TV reception, bodies are engaged in all manner of strange activities in banal suburban settings. Later images often feature curious hybrids of bodies and objects.

In 1972, the year he graduated from college, DeSana printed a lithographic portfolio, “101 Nudes.” The grainy black-and-white images--a sampling is on view--showed friends and neighbors posing dreamily or defiantly in various states of undress: wrapped in a filmy curtain, lying on the front stoop, lifting a fur coat above a bony derriere, playing with a dog.

In his interview, DeSana says the inspiration for the black-and-white nudes came from “traditional pornography” he had seen at friends’ houses as a kid.

A blurry-looking woman in an untitled 1989 color photograph by DeSana lies under the bedcovers with her breasts exposed. Brightly colored streaks of colored light leap off her head and her feet, as if evoking a highly charged mental state. “Kneeling Magical Figure,” a collaged color photograph from 1990, is an amalgam of a crouching man and a childlike, open-mouthed mask.

“If I could do a show that confused people so much, that was so ambiguous that they didn’t know what to think, but they felt sort of sickened by it and also entertained,” DeSana told Simmons, “then for me that would capture the moment that we’re going through right now.”

* Judy Fiskin’s photographs are tiny black-and-white images printed with huge borders of white space around them. Her images in the exhibition, all from 1980, are of vintage architecture and amusement park rides in Long Beach.

In college and graduate school, as Fiskin told her interviewer--fellow photographer John Divola--she became used to looking at art reproduced in slides or in small photographs in books.

Making her own photographs so small “somehow re-creates the experience of looking through a viewfinder,” she said. “It’s like receiving an image directly into your brain. . . . The small scale organizes the image visually in a really graphic way. It gives it an immediate impact.”

Beginning with a series of photographs of Southern California stucco bungalows, Fiskin has also made numerous images of military architecture, 18th-Century furniture in museum displays and flower arrangements made for amateur competitions.

Underlying all these projects is her “feeling of the arbitrariness of the world,” she said, which is especially obvious “in popular architecture and popular art . . . because the choices are, from our point of view, so often wrong.”

Becoming aware of the relativity of aesthetic judgments--that they depend upon the consensus of certain people at a particular time in history--means “having our ease in the world pulled out from under you,” Fiskin says. But “the positive side of that is that it (allows you to) see the world with fresh eyes.”

* Celmins’ mezzotint (“Saturn”) and three etchings in the Works exhibition all incorporate astronomical imagery. In her interview with photographer Chuck Close, the Latvian-born artist--whose meticulous drawings and prints are based on photographs--explains that she does not choose most of her subject matter for its symbolic value.

She is interested in such formal issues as filling a surface with marks “until it is really full” and matching the exact range of grays in a photograph reprinted in a magazine. Beyond that, she says, “essentially, it’s very conceptual work--it’s about looking.”

Celmins doesn’t share the Romantic attitude of human insignificance and awe when confronting nature. Rather, her drawings of galaxies “came out of loving the blackness of the pencil.” They are explorations of an image, made through the activity of drawing it.

* Kelley tells his interviewer, artist John Miller, that when he was growing up, the “first things I saw and thought of as art” were such “subcultural stuff” as psychedelic posters, left-wing graphics, underground comics and the perky banners made by Sister Mary Corita.

His own work reflects his fascination with everyday corners of life that the art crowd generally dismisses out of hand. What does craft work really communicate? How does junk become junk? Kelley is also interested in the ways we really respond to phenomena--not the polite public responses we make, but the feelings that we won’t quite let ourselves think because they’re embarrassing or socially taboo.

Kelly’s untitled edition of bowling paraphernalia dates from the year after his interview was published, so they are not discussed in the interview. Perhaps they are about the human urge to “belong”--whether to a bowling team or to the set of people who have collected these pieces as works of art.

What, if anything, does a pro bowler’s printed signature on a ball mean to a bowler? Does it mean any more or less than an artist’s printed signature?

“The viewer is responsible for any moral point of view,” Kelley tells Miller at one point, “and responsible for (realizing) they’re the ones who are taking a stand in relation to (the art)--it’s not me preaching to them.”