ART REVIEWS : Goofiness That Stands the Test of Time

Scott Grieger’s works from 1968-73 were made 10 years too early to get the attention they deserve. His hilarious photographs, irreverent sculptures and absurd paintings also were made on the wrong side of the country to earn more than disdain and dismissal from New York’s provincial art world. Adding insult to injury, a group of New York-based artists became famous in the ‘80s for making art based on the same ideas Grieger had explored a decade earlier.

A historically important--and scathingly spirited--exhibition at Margo Leavin Gallery offers an eye-popping antidote to this skewed and shortsighted view of recent art history. Organized by critic Dave Hickey for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “Scott Grieger: Impersonations and Combinations 1968-73” playfully demonstrates that art-about-art is best when it’s also about life.

A side-splitting series of black-and-white photographs depict the young Grieger posing as trademark sculptures by acclaimed modern masters. On hands and knees, with a tire around his belly, he mimics Robert Rauschenberg’s famous goat sculpture. Leaning rigidly against the wall, he pretends to be a John McCracken plank. Poised like a mechanical ballerina, he imitates a George Rickey sculpture. Enlarged to monstrous proportions, his feet take on the scale of an outdoor Oldenburg.

The point of Grieger’s jokes is not simply to deflate the reputations of fellow artists. His goal is to show that if looking at art is merely a matter of identifying artists, viewers miss out on the most valuable aspects of the experience.

Other pieces combine signature styles of formalist painters and Minimalist sculptors in odd blends that look like hallucinatory juxtapositions in a modern art history textbook. A Newman “zip” painting warps to resemble a Stella polygon; Larry Poons’ dots appear on Robert Morris’ sagging felt, and a reductive Judd is interrupted by Johns’ fragmented faces.

Grieger mocks the idea of artistic purebreds. His bastardized offspring of high modernism seem to have resulted from inbreeding rather than to have descended through history with proper pedigrees and credentials. Footballs, guitars, windshield wipers, cows, pole-vaulters, butterflies and spider webs also play important roles in his promiscuous mixture of culture’s far-flung spheres.

The main difference between Grieger’s appropriations and those from New York in the ‘80s is that his attacked a substantial opponent in the real world rather than illustrated a stale lesson from art school. Without the unruly edge of Grieger’s appropriations, the New York version functioned as a safe, intellectual exercise, selling like hot cakes and serving up a hollow institutional critique as the new style of institutionally sanctioned art.

Grieger’s goofy hybrids are significant because they don’t put art on a pedestal, but invite us to mix it and match it with anything that suits us. His early works not only remind us that high art has its source in low culture, but that both are enriched when they momentarily sidestep institutional authority and freely intermingle with the desires of their viewers.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Feb. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays. *

Wacky Visual Dance: Roy Dowell’s snappy collages have no qualms about grabbing any available pair of eyeballs and bouncing them around the room like a couple of pinballs in a machine that won’t tilt no matter how hard you nudge, bump, shimmy and shove it.

Upon entering Rosamund Felsen Gallery, your eyes are immediately jump-started (or hijacked) out of their ordinary perceptual habits. Put simply, your optical machinery is unable to filter out extraneous information. The mind can’t focus on the essentials and disregard the incidentals because this difference doesn’t make sense in Dowell’s complexly overloaded art.

His small- to mid-size images, present a jazzy pulse of scintillating visual energy. Out of control, this jolt skips across diverse textures, slides through various styles, ricochets off competing schools of abstraction, and circulates around alternate methods of representation.

An odd pair of painted sculptures translate into three dimensions the optical gymnastics for which Dowell’s collages are well known. The larger work fumbles, merely illustrating ideas he has more successfully worked out by cutting and pasting pieces of paper. The more eccentric, smaller sculpture--which includes a circus poster clothespinned to a metal skirt, a child’s chair and two paint-slathered socker balls--jubilantly catapults abstract visual dynamics into the space the body occupies.

This wacky dance picks up momentum in the collages as your eye careens around sweeping contours and dips into illusionistic depths. As planes disappear behind perfectly placed, overlapping planes, the rollicking rhythm suddenly breaks. You lose your place only to find yourself somewhere else, mesmerized by the pleasures that percolate in Dowell’s restless pictures.

At once relentless and generous, the wild ride of viewing these works is different every time. Powerfully permissive, enthusiastically anarchic and rambunctiously disruptive, his multifaceted abstractions are also disciplined and carefully poised. Politically, they’re radically democratic.

Made from torn fragments of billboards and posters, these punchy images recycle the detritus of advertising in order to form statements that are simultaneously intimate and accessible, highly personal and widely shared. Dowell’s idiosyncratic orchestrations of line, shape and color mix metaphors with a vengeance, putting unpredictability back into the picture.

If his cacophonous collages were pieces of writing, they’d be fragmented non sequiturs. Even so, they’d add up to coherent stories and detailed articulations.

The meticulous deliberation and exquisite facility of Dowell’s painted collages open onto an indeterminate space from which the rules that govern ordinary existence are held momentarily at bay so that something more wonderful might take place.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652- 9172, through Feb. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.