ART REVIEWS : An Enthusiastic Embrace of Powerful Ambiguity

Martin Kersels’ first solo show ranks among the best debuts of the last few years. Funny and engaging, but also creepy and slightly frightening, its power resides in its enthusiastic embrace of ambiguity.

Walking into A/B Gallery feels like climbing through the backside of a gigantic cuckoo-clock. Weights dangle from pulleys and ropes. Mechanisms jump, jitter, stutter and sway, repeatedly measuring off uneven segments of time. Gears rotate relentlessly, stopping and starting on irregular schedules.

The incessant hum fills the crowded gallery. Once in a while, through the clamorous scraping, clanking and banging of Kersels’ awkward installation, a melodic pulse of music makes its way into your ears.

Rather than providing respite from the cacophonous exhibition, the faint music intensifies the intrigue. You find yourself paying attention to slowly unfolding patterns of sound and movement, increasingly unsure of what’s central or peripheral to Kersels’ intentions.

Several models of artmaking compete for your attention, often stretching its span beyond ordinary limits. “Monkey Pod” and “Speaker Slam” propose that art is either a household appliance with a life of its own, or a Sisyphean task that is as frustrating to witness as it is to undertake.

The notion that art is an invisible essence takes hilarious shape in a piece that uses the vibrations of a flame to do the work of a stereo speaker. In “Twist,” a prosthetic leg that spastically dances at the end of a rubber-band rope, the idea that an artist controls his work in the same way that a puppeteer controls his marionette is asserted and undermined.

Kersels’ best piece is the least aggressive. “Precious Dancer” is a 23-minute Super-8 movie of the artist dancing by himself to pop, soul and Moroccan music. Projected onto a few inches of the gallery wall, the tiny home movie is surprisingly free of the self-involvement (and self-obsession) that is so much a part of contemporary art. The piece ingeniously side-steps the demand that art be ruthlessly self-conscious--a demand that has driven advanced art for more than a century.

Captivation and joy replace intellectual one-upmanship. As you squat and watch Kersels dance with his eyes closed, you’re less concerned with what might be going on in his mind and more caught up in the endearingly sweet movements of his body. The simple fact that he might be taking pleasure in his art is enough to get us to take pleasure in our viewing, which these days is to risk being foolish.

This openness can be traced to the fact that Kersels isn’t afraid to make a fool of himself in public. His three-dimensional gizmos that move and make noise are a mature meditation on art’s capacity to communicate. Although too early to tell, it’s not too late to hope that Kersels’ work is part of a larger artistic sea-change--a long overdue shift away from self-assured, narrow-minded message mongering, and toward a riskier, more open-ended approach to the ways meaning actually travels between artists and viewers.

A/B Gallery, 120 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 659-7835, through Jan. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

‘Everyday’ Art: “Everyday Life” is a wildly uneven, 15-artist exhibition based on the idea that some of the most interesting work being made today comes from ordinary, day-in and day-out experience. The upshot of the show, curated by ex-New York art-dealer Simon Watson, is that good ol’ everyday living no longer exists.

The postmodern society represented by the sculptures, prints, drawings, videos and found objects at Kim Light Gallery is, on the contrary, extra -ordinary. It consists, almost exclusively, of unmitigated wars among classes, insidious conspiracies among races and vicious manipulations between the sexes. Grotesque stereotypes, senseless violence and rampant stupidity define life in this blunt and ugly picture of existence.

The ultimate loser in Watson’s over-dramatized battle between omnipotent oppressors and resentful victims is art. Under his sponsorship, the distance essential to traditional aesthetics--and to any sort of critical contemplation--is ruled out from the beginning.

The show baldly claims that life’s gotten so bad that suppleness of thinking amounts to little more than selling out to the status quo. As viewers, we’re left with inflexible illustrations of ideas that lack nuance, insight or room for interpretation. These strong-arm tactics amount to aesthetic terrorism.

The worst offender is Watson’s own attempt to make art. His collaboration with Kelly Sena consists of guns placed on pedestals in the center of the gallery. Although he intends to remind us that art is connected to the rest of life, the display merely demonstrates that when art tries to compete with muggings or murders, it loses. Given the assumptions that motivate the show, art will always stand in a subsidiary position to reality.

Setting these problems aside and considering “Everyday Life” solely in terms of art doesn’t clear up the confusion. Watson juxtaposes a few collages Martha Rosler made between 1967-72 with a lot of new work by young artists. Though thematically related, it’s not clear if the connection is one of influence or simple coincidence. Generational links are neither made nor rejected.

Questionable relations between well-known L.A.-based artists and little-known New Yorkers make the exhibition look less like a serious curatorial effort and more like an exercise in art-world politicking. Broadly speaking, “Everyday Life” acts as if the history of modern art counted only for its shock value.

The show draws the crudest lessons from Manet’s whores, Duchamp’s urinal and Warhol’s soup cans. Its only reference to contemporary painting is Cheryl Donegan’s video mocking Pollock’s technique, as if the most interesting thing to say about his drips is that they symbolize male potency.

Paul McCarthy’s demented videos, Glenn Ligon’s wickedly disturbing prints and Chris Finley’s neat piles of Tupperware and pencil stubs stand out as powerful exceptions in an otherwise grim exhibition. These works succeed because they allow art to stand somewhat apart from life, where it has a fighting chance to open onto alternative visions and to elicit unpredictable responses.

Kim Light Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-9816, through Jan. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Restless Connections: At 52, Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential artists in the United States. An assortment of his diverse works from the late 1960s to the present at Shoshana Wayne Gallery provides a quick glimpse of his media-spanning oeuvre.

Including a pair of wax heads, a dozen studies for past constructions, three neon signs and a room that floats in the air, the exhibition sketches connections among language, bodies and architecture. The tendency to turn things inside-out, upside-down and backward animates all of Nauman’s restless art.

“Floating Room” anchors the show. Standing alone inside a brightly lit, empty white cube suspended from the ceiling in a dark gallery creates the impression that the floor is slipping out from under your feet. The gap between the room’s walls and the gallery floor triggers memories of the terror that gripped you as a kid, when you were certain that monsters lurked beneath your bed.

Likewise, Nauman’s colorful, flashing neon signs, such as “Run From Fear/Fun From Rear” and “None Sing/Neon Sign,” function like twisted nursery rhymes. They exploit rhythms and nonsense to grip us with sentiments that are illogical yet oddly undeniable. Five screenprints of the artist’s mouth being aggressively poked, pinched, pulled and probed by his fingers also point to the irrational underbelly of language.

Nauman’s exploration of the architecture of our minds and memories gives compelling physical form to inarticulate notions. His best work gestures toward the threatening, often unspeakable images we see in our mind’s eye.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 Fifth St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733, through Jan. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.