ART REVIEWS : Scanlan’s Humble House-and-Garden Works

No artist is more revered for fusing high art and everyday life than Marcel Duchamp. Yet today the iconoclastic Dadaist’s pieces rest comfortably in museums. Stripped of their function, his urinal, bicycle wheel and bottle rack have become untouchable icons of modern art.

Joe Scanlan’s handcrafted works at Christopher Grimes Gallery forgo the shock value of Duchamp’s ready-mades by restoring the idea that art can be useful. Awkwardly out of place in a gallery, his collapsible bookshelves, biodegradable flower pots and customized dropcloths would seem more at home in apartments or home-improvement stores.

The capacity to adapt defines Scanlan’s frugal art. Each tier of his bookshelves stacks up to fit into a nook in his small Chicago apartment. Each tier also nests inside another, making transport cheap and easy.

Two mirrors made of aluminum foil aren’t as reflective as mirrors made of glass, but they get the job done. Unbreakable, they make careful packaging unnecessary and emphasize the mobile, makeshift nature of contemporary urban experience.

What appears to be a pile of dirt on the floor is actually a mixture of coffee grounds, eggshells, cigar butts and sawdust. These useless byproducts of Scanlan’s life imply that he is more interested in the potential of new processes than in the conclusions of old ones. His approach to collecting shares more with recycling than with what usually takes place in the art world, where precious objects are obsessively accumulated and painstakingly preserved.

Scanlan’s humble, house-and-garden art embodies an ethos of American practicality and asks us to alter our understanding of Duchamp. Rather than seeing the father of the ready-made as the progenitor of appropriation, Scanlan proposes that we focus on an overlooked component of his oeuvre .

In Duchamp’s apartment, a single door was hinged at the intersection between adjoining doorways. As a functional object, the door did two jobs at once: It was, simultaneously, open and shut. As a work of art, it was exactly what it was, but never only that.

Scanlan’s crafty, self-effacing works function similarly, becoming nearly invisible as they serve utilitarian purposes. Built on the belief that art works best when it disappears into the rhythms of our daily lives, his do-it-yourself Dada shapes our surroundings while almost escaping our notice.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through April 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Visual Poetry: Larry Johnson specializes in messages with double-meanings. Nine big, computer-generated photographic prints at Margo Leavin Gallery articulate a slick visual poetry. Readers careen between cliches and secrets, sometimes coming up empty-handed and at other times coming across oblique meanings.

Johnson begins by refusing to tell his viewers what to think. Unlike many other artists who use words as the central feature of their work, he doesn’t beat us over the head with unequivocal statements.

“A Stick With Some Writing On It” depicts exactly that, although the writing Johnson employs is intentionally ambiguous, and even contradictory, in conveying his emotions. It’s impossible to disentangle fraudulence from sincerity in this sly image.

“Lillyput” presents this nonsensical word in five designs emblazoned across shapes that resemble a pennant, a button, a certificate, a stamp and a bumper sticker. Recalling the little people in “Gulliver’s Travels,” Johnson’s deliberately misspelled labels suggestively identify a nation, a college team, a candidate, a product or a stamp of approval.

“Noblesse, Oh Please,” printed across a pair of pennants, implies that if you don’t act on your own behalf, someone will treat you as a victim of unwanted charity.

In Johnson’s hands, language is a slippery game of high-stakes seduction. With great economy, his promiscuous pieces put viewer and artist on the same footing, equally implicated in an indeterminate drama of desire, deception and discovery.

Delivery, rhythm and emphasis complicate matters tremendously. Style is as important as content. In the end, Johnson’s colorful pictures are not limited to expressing personal identity, but address the ways all viewers decipher unknown codes and relate to shifty visual stimulation.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-9131, through April 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Sweetly Poignant: Four years ago, FBI agents broke into Jock Sturges’ San Francisco studio and improperly seized his photographic equipment, for which they were later rebuked by a federal grand jury. Today, he’s still making some of the most sweetly poignant pictures of adolescents passing through puberty.

At Jan Kesner Gallery, however, it’s impossible not to imagine that Sturges’ run-in with the federal government hasn’t affected his portraits of nude children, teens and their parents. An unprecedented sense of toughness--which sometimes slips into defiance--encroaches upon the idyllic beach scenes for which the 47-year-old photographer is best known.

Of the 18 gelatin silver prints exhibited, 17 were shot at a resort on France’s Atlantic coast, where families of naturalists regularly take their summer vacations. For the past 12 years, Sturges has returned to Montalivet to photograph his friends and their children as they sleep, read and walk on the beach.

His light-drenched images of lithe young bodies enjoying carefree afternoons have always been remarkable for their candor and innocence. Sturges’ best pictures capture normally awkward adolescents in moments when they’re not playing roles or pretending, but just being themselves.

Although his new works include little children who don’t seem to be striking poses, his subjects appear increasingly guarded and distant as they approach puberty. The suspicion and defensiveness that accompany self-consciousness enter Sturges’ pictures, transforming his explorations of unspoiled innocence into a touching chronicle of its loss.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through April 16. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

Technical Merit: Selma Moskowitz’s eight paintings at Jan Baum Gallery are technically interesting yet visually boring. The veteran L.A. abstractionist has invented a technique that combines the absorptive softness of watercolor with the reflective sheen of metallic pigment. Although marrying fluidity to impenetrability sounds as if it should result in captivating paintings, Moskowitz’s images are too bland to maintain sufficient tension.

Contradictions never disrupt the over-worked surfaces of her acrylics on canvas and linen. Muted to the point of being dull, her recent works look like faded versions of American Colorfield painting or washed-out repetitions of her earlier series.

Moskowitz often applies more than 100 thin washes of acrylic to her paintings on linen, sanding each layer as she proceeds. As each wash evaporates, it shrinks the linen until the painting’s surface is as taut as a snare drum.

Moskowitz also paints on vinylized cotton. Like a raincoat, this material repels paint, forcing the artist to manipulate beads and rivulets that don’t soak into the canvas but rest on its surface.

If the ambiguities and inconsistencies of Moskowitz’s methods made their way into her paintings, they would hold our attention much longer and be more than pleasant decorations.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through April 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.