ART REVIEWS : Yonemotos Look at Purity and Find a New Meaning

The myth of purity as it relates to art and race is interlaced, then unraveled in “Disintegration,” Bruce and Norman Yonemotos’ latest installation at Kim Light Gallery.

In one room, the Yonemotos create a series of colorless grids. Fashioned out of projected, 35-millimeter slides or beaded glass projection screens, these conjure Piero Manzoni’s gridded and stretched “achromes.”

Manzoni’s canvas constructions grew out of a desire for visual and conceptual purity; once frustrated, this desire provoked a celebrated scatological masterwork. The Yonemotos deal with the question differently, though no less bitingly. Here, purity is recognized as a construct from the outset, and interrogated accordingly.

The exhibition opens with a dark room in which a TV plays a series of vintage commercials; while opposite, surplus Hollywood World War II footage is projected and fragmented across an overlapping group of screens.

In the context of stock footage of Japanese soldiers floating in lifeboats, a commercial for Pepsodent toothpaste, with the dreaded word Yellow emblazoned across the screen, takes on new meaning. The insidious mechanisms by which the media promulgate an ethnocentric ideal are made emblematic.

Elsewhere, the projection screens are folded into origami-like shapes. Placed on oversized trays, these conjure the other way mass media serve up disparate cultures--as readily as lukewarm TV dinners, all differences ground down into bland, consumerist pabulum, as pure as Ivory Snow.

By contrast, the Yonemotos strive to recuperate marginalized identities and celebrate hybrid forms. Continuing to explore the possibilities of combining video with sculpture and installation (itself an homage to mixed media), they accept nothing as given, everything as game.

Images are borrowed, recontextualized, manipulated into sculptural material, or allowed to disintegrate, with little regret. It isn’t a matter of nihilism, but of locating subject matter in the interstices between things, or in what’s long been left over and/or left out.

* Kim Light Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-9921, through Oct. 16. Closed Sun. and Mon.

Not Boxed In: Cameron Shaw continues to explore the box as a metaphor for history. Mounted on the wall or placed on the floor, filled with relics or lined with documents, Shaw’s boxes are sites in which the past is shaped, contained and preserved, or distorted, concealed and forgotten. To his credit, we are seldom pushed to believe that these alternatives don’t add up to the same thing.

In his boxes at Mark Moore Gallery, Shaw aims for wartime drama: historic headlines partially revealed, rusted metal containers saved from enemy fire, expanses of tweed signifying the man of affairs’ calm assurance that rationality will prevail.

Occasionally, however, Shaw strays toward melodrama. A cardboard box placed on the floor goes all but unnoticed, until one glances inside and sees a neatly folded white sheet, a pair of polished black oxfords and, beneath them, a piece of newsprint dating from the 1940s, warning of relentless German advances. This funeral ode to reasoned accommodation is bluntly overstated.

Shaw rights himself in two other pieces that cleverly mock another exercise in reasoned accommodation: art criticism.

A box is covered with gallery and museum reviews taken from various New York newspapers circa 1946. Interspersed among the barely legible texts are photographs of the critics’ picks, a long-forgotten array of figural paintings and sculptures. Placed on top of the box is Shaw’s retort: a steadfastly abstract sculptural object, an emblem of art’s future.

Shaw, however, doesn’t indict the blindsided critic just to let himself off the hook. His “sculpture” is no masterpiece, his “real” work hardly abstract. So what is art’s future? Who determined its past?

Answers aren’t the point. The questions are enough to provoke reflection upon the processes and products of history: half-baked, arbitrary or--maybe, if we’re lucky--otherwise.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Oct. 9. Closed Sun. and Mon.