ART REVIEWS : Sensuous and Seductive Minimalist Drawings

Richard Serra’s drawings are two-dimensional equivalents of his daunting, steel sculptures: Extremely weighty, grave, authoritative and deliberate, they formally address physical issues of gravity and mass, presence and absence.

Unlike his sculptures, however, Serra’s drawings are comfortably scaled to the size of an individual human body. If not quite intimate, they are still gorgeously seductive, inviting the close-up, face-to-face scrutiny and inch-by-inch exploration we normally associate with easel-paintings, portraits and still lifes.

This description would probably offend Serra, one of the founders of Minimalism whose adamantly reductive work is well known for its inflexible austerity, ungiving impenetrability and stubborn bombast. Nevertheless, emphasizing the sensuous, exquisite and delicate nature of his drawings captures the fugitive beauty of their dense, thickly built-up blacks on creamy or icy white paper.

At Daniel Weinberg Gallery, eight new drawings outline the sensitive side of Serra. Presented without the sheets of glass that usually protect works on paper and obscure our view with intrusive reflections, these pieces are as vulnerable as they are strong. Their immediate, assertive impact gradually gives way to slow perusals of sumptuous modulations, in which slight shifts in the oil allow it to absorb more or less light--to shimmer with a nearly wet, velvety texture.

These aspects of Serra’s supposedly stripped-down, unequivocal artworks are usually overlooked by unthinking critics and lazy feminists eager to dismiss his masterful work as a stereotypical example of dumb, macho power-mongering.

On the contrary, Serra’s ravishing drawings tempt one to call them lovely. They intimate that such emotional overstatement need not be embarrassing, as they reveal that Minimalism is more complicated than its detractors and defenders make it out to be.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0180, through Nov. 27. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

The Sound of Art: Part electronics-whiz and sneaky eavesdropper, Michael Oliveri is also a promising artist whose eight “Soundscapes” at Sherry Frumkin Gallery raise probing questions about the nature and identity of art.

His live, 24-hours-a-day transmissions of amplified sounds suggest that although art might pass through objects, it doesn’t reside in them. For the 31-year-old student of the radical avant-garde, art exists primarily--and most powerfully--as a singular event or inimitable experience.

In Oliveri’s auspicious debut exhibition, each viewer’s (or listener’s) capacity to interpret fragments of information, to project meaningful patterns upon random happenstance, and to make sense of slight, sensory stimulations is as important as anything the artist has done.

Oliveri’s installation consists of a series of enlarged maps of sections of Los Angeles and Santa Monica, to which he has attached a telephone, stereo receiver and speaker. Continuously emitted from each are the sounds picked up by microphones planted at unremarkable, everyday places, such as a bookstore, music center, yoga workshop, schoolyard, pet shop, dance academy and neighborhood home.

Oliveri has rigged up electronic connections--over ordinary phone lines--that constantly transmit to the gallery the audio portion of exactly what takes place at these locations. Walking around his show of invisible sound waves invites one to imagine what’s happening around the Westside.

You find yourself putting your personal spin on the information delivered by his high-tech surveillance devices, allowing your memories and preconceptions to intermingle with the fragmented, ongoing noises of the present. Complete pictures of common scenarios can be created by each visitor, becoming, in the mind’s eye, almost archetypal dramas.

A single piece puts a paradoxical spin on Oliveri’s show. Titled “Silence From MOCA,” this unplugged machine is dedicated to John Cage’s memory and his current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It draws upon Cage’s most famous composition, “4’33” “ in which a piano was not played for that length of time and the audience was invited to listen to existing, ambient sounds, such as their own breathing, the air-conditioning units, passing traffic and blowing breezes.

By denying Oliveri’s request to place a mike at the Cage exhibition, the museum neatly follows his intentions and fulfills Oliveri’s goals, demonstrating that art is everywhere, that finding it is only a matter of looking--or listening--with the right kind of attention.

* Sherry Frumkin Gallery, 1440 Ninth St., Santa Monica, (310) 393-1853, through Nov. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Visual Stimulation: Jason McKechnie pushes decoration so far over the top that it spills into another world altogether. His juicy, swirling, manically overwrought and delightfully energized constellations of silly patterns and bright, synthetic colors take your eyes on mindless rides that leave you gasping for breath and scurrying to catch up with their intoxicating thrills.

Five paintings at Food House run far off the edges of the small shaped canvases on which they began. A typical piece by the 24-year-old, Canadian-born artist is a sprawling, odd-ball configuration of abutted and overlapped segments around which irregular satellites or broken-off cells orbit with carefree abandon.

Psychedelic stripes and mod polka dots cavort in McKechnie’s unapologetically indulgent abstractions. Silhouettes of stylized flowers, designer butterflies and slimy, sci-fi creatures that resemble the mutant offspring of E.T. and Kilroy sometimes punctuate his hyperactive celebrations of impure visual stimulation.

Liberal sprinkles of sequins and glitter, and frosting-like dollops of out-of-the-tube acrylics jazz up his fervid embraces of ornamentation. The colorful fluff that occasionally adorns doughnuts and the anti-slip stickers for bathtubs and showers ensure that his cacophonous conglomerations of cheap junk are stuffed with multiple references.

Despite their adamant artificiality, McKechnie’s paintings remain raw and vigorous. Their refinements are never fussy, nor are their amusements ever precious. Instead, a highly confident energy pulses across their dizzying, generous surfaces, luring us into the fun and letting us get lost in unself-conscious pleasure.

* Food House, 2220 Colorado Blvd., Building. 4, Room 402, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1030, through Nov. 13, Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

Obvious Preachments: “Crossing the L.A. Bridge” is a bland exhibition of specially commissioned installations by Carrie Ungerman and Pat Ward Williams that falters because it is based on the naive idea that looking at contemporary art is intrinsically good for us, especially if its makers intend it to be morally instructive and spiritually uplifting.

Ungerman and Williams spent a year exploring the permanent collections of the Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum--at which the exhibition is held--and the California Afro-American Museum. Under the guidance of the Skirball’s curator, Barbara Gilbert, they created a dialogue about the differences and similarities between the histories and cultures of African-Americans and American Jews.

If their discussions and discoveries were poignant and meaningful at a personal level, these qualities are not very evident in their completed installations.

Ungerman’s contribution, “Remnants of Other Lives,” consists of three parts. The first is a carved wood kigango , an ancestral worship figure from the Mijikanda Peoples of Kenya. The second is a set of hand-sewn ceremonial aprons based on patterns from the Ndebele Peoples of South Africa. Ungerman’s new, enlarged versions have thousands of beads stitched into them, partial inventories from both museums written on them and quotes from her grandparents added. The third component is a large Rolodex, to which viewers are invited to add cards cataloguing their own collections.

From what is exhibited, the connection between Ungerman’s art and her identity as an American Jew is tenuous and incidental. The relationship of both issues to African culture and history is never more than just a vague, undefined parallel.

Williams’ installation, “You’re Nobody, Till You Hate Somebody,” focuses on three mannequins dressed in clothing from both museums. Audio-speakers, replacing their faces, broadcast looped tapes of racist statements the artist culled from interviews she conducted with anonymous people. More explicit racist stereotypes are presented on the surrounding walls in magazines, sheet music, photographs and other documents gathered from the past three centuries.

Purporting to explore residual and subtle forms of racism, Williams’ work serves up obvious, indisputable sentiments. Like Ungerman’s installation, the problem is that connections, other than the most blatant cliches, aren’t made. The bridge, evoked by the exhibition’s title, is more of a traffic circle: It never takes us to the other side, but leaves us where we began.

* Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum, 3077 University Ave., (213) 749-3424, through Dec. 30. Closed Saturdays, Mondays and some Sundays.