ART REVIEWS : ‘Kipper Kids’ Find Joy in Buffoonery

The Kipper Kids are a couple of 40-year-old juvenile delinquents who have staged food fights, scatological skits and bawdy song-and-dance routines for the past 20 years.

For almost as long, the London-born L.A.-based duo has made deliberately buffoonish videos. Although influential, even legendary, to two generations of performance artists, their madcap antics and ribald humor are largely unknown to a wider art audience.

At Regen Projects, “The Kipper Kids: A Look Back” offers a quick but overdue introduction to their uproarious do-it-yourself brand of vaudeville. A new video, five souvenir prints, two ketchup-crusted Boy Scout outfits and a painting made from glitter-covered, flour-coated jockstraps do an admirable job of translating the Kippers’ raw live-action energy to an art gallery.

A grid of black-and-white photographs from a 1972 Berlin performance recalls the extraordinarily morbid work of the Viennese Actionists, whose blood-soaked, entrails-strewn theater pieces share some of the libidinous anarchy that propels the Kipper Kids.

In contrast to the explosive violence, religious fervor and dark psychological undercurrents of the Viennese, the Kippers live in a cartoon world. These captivating stage personas have the presence of Saturday animations made 3-D and fleshy, especially in recent performances, in which their flabby paunches sag comically.

The hyperactive video suggests that the Kipper Kids’ vision is more influenced by American TV than by Freudian psychoanalysis. Close-ups of their eyeballs spinning like the images in slot machines convey the giddy feeling that their bodies aren’t driven by unconscious desires or traumatized by past events, but are animated by the superficial impulses of the entertainment industry.

When one of the twins puts on boxing gloves and punches himself silly while the other referees the solipsistic boxing match, both lose the sense of invulnerability that always rescues Laurel and Hardy from real harm. Slapstick exaggeration, in the hands of the Kipper Kids, turns dumb amusement inside-out, leaving the viewer free to laugh at life’s absurdity, but never from a safe distance.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, Los Angeles, (310) 276-5424, through Feb. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays. *

Self-Containment: Meg Cranston’s sculptures and silk screens at 1301 address the relationship between form and content. More concretely, her claustrophobic installation dissects the links between private sentiments and their public expression.

Nearly all of Cranston’s pieces take the shape of containers--of sealed barriers between invisible, implied insides and accessible, easy-to-see outsides. “Self Consciousness” consists of four eight-foot-square walls that run from the floor to the ceiling. A TV can be heard inside the impenetrable wooden cube, which occupies almost the entire room.

Cranston’s deadpan revision of Minimalism is a metaphor for the self. Like the TV inside the cube, consciousness itself cannot be seen, though indirect evidence of its presence is open to scrutiny. The contents of the box--dumb utterances on daytime TV--are less important than the promise that something be communicated.

“Mind Body Problem” is equally skeptical about the transmission of abstract ideas into physical reality. A model dolly supporting a small cardboard box suggests that the human body is an unwieldy, ineffective, even cruddy wrapper in which consciousness is condemned to reside and travel.

Individual portraits of Cranston’s family, as isolated military tanks, outline an intensified division between inner selves and outer appearances. These silk screens put siblings and parents inside armor shells, as if each of the artist’s immediate relatives were a tank commander, where they wait to blast away at one another, should anyone get too close for comfort.

Phonograph records stitched, coffin-like, into black velvet sleeves, blankets covering arched doorways and newspapers taped over windows bolster Cranston’s contention that the self is intrinsically alienated from the world, forced to hide out if it is to maintain its constantly threatened integrity.

Her most impersonal work, “American History: Condensed Version,” consists of hundreds of postcards neatly stapled to the walls. It claims that the discrepancy between the truth and its representation is not a simple fact of life but a strategy used by the powerful to manipulate history for their own selfish ends.

Unfortunately, Cranston’s most straightforwardly political piece is also her least interesting. Its direct message suggests that the presence of inarticulate contradictions, even embarrassing neuroses, gives art an edgy resonance that rational arguments and clear statements necessarily lack.

* 1301, 1301 Franklin St., Apt. 1, Santa Monica, (310) 828-9133, through March 26. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.

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Zen-Like Self: Vija Celmins’ crystalline images reverberate in your memory long after their exquisite details have disappeared from sight. A brilliantly focused exhibition at Cirrus Gallery of nearly every print she’s made over the past 24 years (altogether there are only 18) delivers almost as much of the ravishing silence of her paintings and drawings, especially since her retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art closed Sunday.

Celmins’ mind-boggling mastery of lithography, etching and wood-and linoleum-cuts endows her mechanically reproduced works with the same haunting force as her handmade pictures. None of her art relies on pitting human touch against the impersonal imprint of the machine. In fact, a great deal of her work’s enduring fascination resides in its capacity to fuse the mechanistic with the personal.

Although Celmins’ realistic images of the ocean’s surface, the desert floor, the night sky and several World War II bomber planes initially appear to embody the perfection of photographs, they slowly disclose a warmth, light and softness that suggest their surfaces are suffused with the delicate touch of the artist’s hand.

Yet these crisp pictures are hardly sentimental. They never have the feel of being caressed into existence or lovingly drawn out of nothingness.

The astonishing, obviously painstaking effort Celmins has made to completely purge subjectivity from her work gives it a profound sense of Zen-like emptiness, in which the self disappears into its surroundings in hypnotic moments of intense concentration.

* Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St., (213) 680-3473, through March 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Raw Power: Mark Milloff makes impressive relief sculptures out of nothing but oil paint and canvas. At Fred Hoffman Fine Art, his thick, dense and visceral layers of congealed brush strokes piled upon partially buried strata of underpainting proudly (and problematically) identify themselves as the offspring of American formalist painting.

At the end of the 1960s, this attenuated strand of Modernist abstraction reached its desperate apogee in squeegeed fields of untouchable colors and bland expanses of flat canvas into whose weave had been soaked and stained some of the softest pastels and most tasteful tones ever to make their way into painting.

In the 1970s, a few of the proponents of this type of painting abandoned pure opticality with a vengeance. They began to pile up tactile wads of oil, viscous smears of paint and clotted globs of nauseating color, as if seeking penance from abstraction’s previously disembodied state.

Milloff’s recent paintings return to a dialogue that went dead long ago. They seem to be at once unwary throwbacks to an exhausted phase of art history and crudely engaging explorations of paint’s animal presence--as if, by sheer willpower, a painter might muscle his way through paint to primordial slime, where history could be rewritten from the beginning.

Milloff’s raw paintings manifest this fantasy. Depending upon one’s perspective, they belong in a dream or a nightmare.

* Fred Hoffman Fine Art, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 247-1500, through March. Closed Sundays and Mondays.