ART REVIEWS : Taking On Beuys, Bunyan and Keaton

With an admirably mad intensity, Julien Bismuth’s art takes on Joseph Beuys, Buster Keaton and Paul Bunyan, and like the mythical backwoodsman, lives to tell tall tales about it.

Here is Disney’s Frontierland, only it’s just been dynamited. Beaver skins (presumably fake), twigs, tree stumps, rotting wooden planks and makeshift cardboard structures are everywhere at A/B Gallery. They are covered with snapshots and annotated with texts in which Bismuth frantically documents his wilderness adventures: aesthetic, lunatic and otherwise.

These include building a cabin, using it as a flotation device, drawing only what one sees and running in place to get the Earth to spin backward so as to go back to a time when there was still open land.

There’s no going back, however; and nothing, art included, is quite what it used to be.

Beuys based his Actions upon a pivotal experience during World War II when his plane was shot down in the Crimea. Bunyan likewise transformed survival into art. Legend says he was so cunning that, coming across the carcass of a bull moose that had died of old age, he could track back to the place it was born.

Bismuth, however, is a latecomer to the romantic entangling of culture and nature, art and life. His acts of courage and wit inevitably go the way of slapstick. This is where Keaton comes in.

Bismuth, looking very young, especially in his rather absurd fur suit and hat, gets everything wrong: His cabin collapses on him; his raft sinks into the dark recesses of the ocean. Yet all this is accomplished with amazing aplomb. Like Keaton, Bismuth is a silent comic prone to visual excess, whose art spoofs mastery while displaying a lingering infatuation with it.

Also at A/B Gallery, Mike Bouchet has done up his space to resemble the neighboring high-ticket home-furnishings shops along Robertson Boulevard. For his first solo show, beautiful objects in different colors to suit all tastes are neatly arranged in display cases and on wooden shelves and tables.

These objects conjure any number of extravagant household items: handblown glass plates, retro ice-cube trays, ceramic basins. Yet they serve no function whatsoever--except perhaps to indicate the wealth and savoir-faire of their buyers. This makes perfect sense: We are, after all, in an art gallery, where useless objects have always been at home.

This kind of critique is not new. It has been around since Claes Oldenburg’s 1961 “Store,” in which the artist sold painted plaster replicas of ordinary items. In the Post-conceptual 1980s, it became standard fare.

Bouchet ups the ante, however, by literally injecting himself into the proceedings. His objects, made of vacu-form plastic, are cast from his own body parts: nose, stomach, buttocks, testicles. What’s on sale in the gallery is the essence of the artist, the repository of his genius, highly valuable goods.

If Bouchet dramatizes the way the art market has transformed the artist into a marketable commodity, he stops short of the self-righteousness such a dramatization might imply. For here, every body part is multiple and endlessly replicable. Cheerfully Bouchet acknowledges that there is neither anything unique nor anything new under the sun.

* A/B Gallery, 120 N . Robertson Blvd., (310) 659-7835, through Dec . 2. Closed Sunday-Tuesday .

A Straight-Faced Manner: Let there be no mistake about the New Italian Neo-Mannerists (not that there could be). A mere glimpse at their garish colors, invariably nude allegorical figures and bravura brushwork, which little animates the lifeless surfaces of their bizarre, trans-temporal tableaux, tells you that Renato Nosek, Antonella Cappuccio, Bruno d’Arcevia and Vittoria Scialoja do not make great paintings.

On the contrary. At the Koplin Gallery these artists incarnate a nostalgia for great painting so palpable it commands a certain thunderstruck awe.

Nosek’s Flemish-themed pastiches of Rembrandt’s golden light and Hals’ composition, Cappuccio’s melange of Pre-Raphaelite lucidity and tarted-up Symbolism, D’Arcevia’s surreal neo-Georgian reveries, Scialoja’s spectacular flexing of her High Renaissance muscles--to encounter these paintings en masse is to enter an imaginary realm in which the avant-garde either never happened or is so far behind us that it is forever lost to memory.

Memory is instead consecrated to a vision, however fantastic, of “true art.” The desire to preserve “true art,” however, always goes the way of academicism, which itself inevitably devolves into kitsch, camp and mawkishness. Sometimes all this is delightful; sometimes not. In the presence of this work, mostly not.

One yearns for the tastefulness of Modernism. This is another irony, as Modernism predicated itself upon the rejection of taste as preeminent criterion of aesthetic judgment.

What makes this work tiresome is not its rejection of the Modern, or its tastelessness or even its failure to recapture the power of its lost ideal. It is the utter lack of humor it displays about its quixotic mission.

Aside from d’Arcevia’s “Hero at the Falls,” in which Hector and Andromache bid their final adieux before a backdrop of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterwork Fallingwater, this art is alarmingly straight-faced. It is also alarmingly hollow, for one can’t fill a vacuum with nostalgia alone. What you are left with is still a vacuum, something that little sustains the eye or the mind.

* Koplin Gallery, 1438 9th St., Santa Monica, (310) 319-9956, through Dec . 31. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Elements of ‘Structure’: In her show at Margo Leavin Gallery, Maria Nordman puts unlikely things on display: planks of wood, piles of nails, aluminum hardware, several rudimentary pieces of furniture. These, scattered across the gallery space, are the actual materials Nordman will use in her “Structure for an Open Place,” a public project to be erected on a median along Santa Monica Boulevard on Jan. 8, and that will remain for three days.

Nordman has been creating such “open works” in various places around the world for the past 25 years. Defined less by their physical presence than by the kinds of encounters they generate, these works exemplify Nordman’s longstanding utopian ethos. A series of drawings in the current show clarify this philosophical, as well as aesthetic, position.

The drawings, shown in pairs, are mounted on sliding frames placed inside wooden boxes. They juxtapose texts (theoretical and lyrical), architectural plans, powdery white gypsum sandwiched between glass, Rorschach blots, and solid fields of color. Their structure is such that the various forms, images and substances are seen only through other forms, images and substances. As with the building materials, which function here purely as possibility, everything is contigent.

If Nordman prefers to leave things unfixed, to privilege the temporary over the permanent, it is to expand the viewer’s role and to break down the dichotomy between artist and viewer. Inscribed inside one of her smaller boxed drawings is the statement: “A city attains/retains its name when each inhabitant without exception is considered its poet-orator.” She resists the habitual narrowness of art’s scope and address by pushing it into the public space, where it can more easily reach the city’s other poet-orators.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 817 N. Hilldale Ave., (310) 273-0603, through Dec . 18. Closed Sunday and Monday.