ART REVIEWS : ‘How to Remember a Better Tomorrow’ Too Scattershot

Allen Ruppersberg’s brand of conceptualism has always been idiosyncratic. With his contemporary, Jonathan Borofsky, he shares a mania both for relentlessly cumulative detail and off-key humor. Yet, whereas Borofsky swings between squinty obsessiveness and pupil-popping gigantism, Ruppersberg keeps the reins pulled in tighter, his focus consistently narrower. His art is less concerned with the mechanics of the ego than with the media’s complicity in staking out and controlling the ego’s territory.

In his current installation at Linda Cathcart Gallery, “How to Remember a Better Tomorrow,” Ruppersberg does a perfectly serviceable job. His presentation is characteristically eclectic: framed stills from vintage educational films, movie paraphernalia including velvet ropes, intermission signs, cardboard dummies hawking coming attractions, silver film canisters, piles of boxes filled with novelty calendars bearing titles such as “Grandmother’s Cottage” and “A Day to Remember” and blown-up calendar pages leaning against the wall like pictures of time standing temporarily still.

In place, then, are all of Ruppersberg’s pet themes: the insidiousness of cinematic time and space, the hollowness of the American dream, the eclipse of memory by propaganda. And yet, this installation is a disappointment--too pat and too scattered in the same moment.

In the center of the room is a plexiglass case that contains a scale model of a white house with pink shutters, surrounded by trees, rolling meadows and the highway below. Almost lost in the clutter, this single object winds up swallowing and incorporating all the other objects around it. It represents all sanitized fantasies, dreams and containment--the ideal and its spooky degeneration. It offers a model of the kind of economy that is, on the whole, sacrificed here. Elsewhere, however, it has characterized Ruppersberg’s best work.

* Allen Ruppersberg, Linda Cathcart, 1643 12th St., Santa Monica, (310) 392-8578. Open Saturday, Sunday and by appointment, through Sunday.

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Non-Traditional Tradition: Within the history of Western art, clay has not been a material associated with monumental figurative sculpture. Although Michelangelo produced full-sized clay models for some of the figures in the Medici Chapel in Florence, these were taken as sketches, not as finished works. In Mexico, however, there is a venerated history of ceramic arts that dates to the pre-Conquest period. In new work at the Iturralde Gallery, Mexican artist Javier Marin exploits this indigenous tradition in order to disrupt a certain sacrosanct vision of Classical art.

Marin’s nudes ape the dense musculature, careful proportions and heroic scale characteristic of the Classical nude. Yet, instead of the chilly beauty of marble or the daunting richness of bronze, Marin substitutes a warm terra-cotta, at once sacrificing impassivity for intimacy. What’s more, Marin views the body not as a Platonic ideal, an embodiment of the soul, but as a surface that cries out for decoration. Thus, his figures are covered with rivulets of multicolored pigment--often pastel greens, pinks and yellows--and are etched with various lines, squiggles, arrows, and geometric marks.

If Marin can be said to do violence to a certain tradition, his work everywhere corroborates it. Limbs are spectacularly absent in virtually all the sculptures--not due to loss over time, as with their Classical referents, but merely, mercilessly, for effect. In some of the pieces, the lines scratched onto the surfaces seem less like decorative flourishes than the result of scarification rituals. And, finally, there are the metal staples that hold the clay “bodies” together. Fabricated in horizontal segments that are retrofitted, the sculptures eschew the notion of integrity altogether--corporeal, aesthetic or otherwise.

Initially, these works seem somewhat exaggerated, even tasteless. This is because they assault a standard of beauty that is, even today, recalcitrant. That they become less exaggerated, less tasteless and more appealing over time suggests not that the standard is shifting but that there are ways to work around it and to call upon figurative sculpture to do different things.

* Javier Marin, Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-4267. Closed Sunday and Monday, through Jan. 15.

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Webs of Subterfuge: James Richards’ new paintings are elaborate subterfuges. They work to deflect the gaze with tangled and knotted webs of string stretched over their frames--and then, with blots, globs and streaks of paint laid over the webs. But why bother?

Here, there is no picture to protect from prying eyes--no canvas, board or surface. The rectangular frames circumscribe nothing, in fact, but the pristine white wall beyond. The frames do not define the pictorial space. Instead, everything takes place around their borders, not within them.

These are very coy paintings. They announce themselves, with no small degree of flamboyance, as veiled objects. And so the viewer is drawn, naturally, to the gaps in the veiling: the tiny spots between the dense nets of string, the larger areas between the irregular screens of paint.

But all that can be glimpsed beyond are the shadows of the string, tinged with the soft colors of the reflected paint; and in some of the works, vertical strips of plexiglass attached to the back of the frames--another element of the trickery, both optical and philosophical.

So we see what’s in front, and we see, finally, what is behind. But the eye has penetrated nothing. The sense of mastery we experience in the presence of these works is illusory. But not so the sense of pleasure they induce--especially when you consider that they are not paintings at all, but sculptural trompes-l’oeil .

* James Richards, Food House, 2220 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1030. Closed Sun. and Mon., through Saturday.

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Psychological Space: Julia Couzens’ art--no matter what else it depicts--articulates psychological space. On view at Christopher Grimes are two large and intensely refined charcoal drawings, along with several smaller, rather impressionistic watercolors. These depict eyes--clustered around the edges of the frame, crammed into the center, floating in halo-like circles, madly reduplicating, or isolated like distant planets. Yet they evoke something altogether different--claustrophobia, joy, loneliness and/or liberation.

Couzens’ points of reference here are both literary and artistic. First, there is a Symbolist like Odilon Redon and his images of eyes as pure intelligence, struggling to free themselves of matter by floating heavenward, or a Surrealist like Georges Bataille, whose spectacularly perverse Story of the Eye plays associative games similar to Couzens’--eyes as eggs or testicles, tears as yolks or semen.

Yet Couzens is not constrained by such influences. She is interested neither in illustration nor in meta-critical commentary. The sense of mystery here comes from a continual oscillation between her own obsessions and the work’s stubborn equivocations. As representations, the images are dense with meaning. As they tend toward abstraction, all that remains is Couzens’ remarkable technique. That, in any case, is more than enough to sustain any viewer’s interest.

* Julia Couzens, Christopher Grimes, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373. Closed Sunday and Monday, through Jan. 8.