ART GALLERIES : ‘The L.A. Gun Show’ Abandons Its Art

“The L.A. Gun Show,” a group exhibition at Julie Rico Gallery of Los Angeles-based artists who explore issues relating to firearms, is a curious and ultimately depressing phenomenon.

It isn’t the carnivalesque atmosphere--the catchy rhythms of Keith Pirlot and Kevin Hurley’s installation, in which the successive sounds of a shotgun blast and moment of impact circulate incessantly on an audio loop; or Joe Wolek’s pastel-colored, handgun-shaped “soaps on a rope,” hanging from the rafters like party streamers.

Nor is it the casual apoliticism of Tom Henry III’s grid of monochrome paintings, wherein the N.R.A. logo is reduced to an incidental motif; or Henry Vincent’s “Gun Fax,” which seems somehow oblivious to its own imagery.

What’s depressing are the show’s broader philosophical implications. On the one hand, it is perfectly logical that artists should be attracted to guns. Guns are dangerous, and the avant-garde has long prided itself on subversive, transgressive attitudes and forms. According to the avant-garde’s recalcitrant mythology, the art object is as threatening as any automatic weapon, if only to the bourgeois consciousness.

Art is, indeed, perilous, shattering, revolutionary or menacing purely on the level of the symbolic. Yet herein lies the rub. That the artists in “The L.A. Gun Show” feel compelled to turn to a subject that is quite literally explosive in order to experience their historic role (and to communicate it to an audience) speaks poorly for their faith in art. At least, it speaks poorly for that of curator Patricia Watts, who may have fashioned a trend where no trend exists.

Art is a process of symbolization. To abandon that, as this show seems to do, is to abandon art altogether.

* Julie Rico Gallery, 2623 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-1177, through May 8. Closed Sun. and Mon.

In Accord With Science: In 1914, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Max Von Laue, who created the field of X-ray structural analysis. Albert Einstein called Von Laue’s discovery of the means to investigate radiation by wavelength determination, as well as to study the structure of the irradiated material, “one of the most beautiful in physics.”

In “Max Von Laue’s Solid State Matter,” Gloria Graham examines the notion of the beautiful, trapped since the 18th Century within the confining realm of aesthetics. In classical thought, beauty was never understood as an aesthetic effect, a residue of the art experience. Beauty connoted perfection, symmetry, definite limitations; these, according to Aristotle, “are the chief properties that the mathematical sciences draw attention to.”

Graham does not wish to exchange one confining realm for another, to award to science that which aesthetics has for so long held hostage. Instead, the purpose of her project at Angles Gallery is to bring about a kind of accord. If the great problem of aesthetics is the nature of the relation between representation and object, appearance and reality, so, is it the long-standing dream of science.

Considering its rather spectacular ambitions, her series of graphite line drawings of the molecular structures of various crystals and minerals--titanium, silicon, corundum, beryl, etc.--is surprisingly understated. The forms are spindly and elegant, masquerading as geometric abstractions. As soon as one glimpses the text that runs down the side of the image, which elucidates each substance’s chemical structure, they suddenly come into view as something far less generic.

The literalness of these images muddles their profound metaphorical quality, in fact, suggesting that all such antinomies are suspect. In Graham’s work even the minimal appears minimal for only a moment. Then it swerves into the territory of dazzling complexity, as if it always belonged there.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through April 30. Closed Sun. and Mon.

Slapstick: Adjective-friendly descriptions of art are often obfuscatory; unadorned descriptions, however, can be equally misleading.

Don Gummer makes large, abstract sculptures of bronze and aluminum. The words alone are rather off-putting: dry, heavy, humorless. But Gummer’s new work at the Fred Hoffman Gallery--all slapstick angles, punctured planes, exaggerated lines and top-heavy proportions--is far from a dour, Modernist exercise. If anything, it jabs affectionately at the Modernist legacy that informs it, while sidestepping the baroque tomfoolery favored by many younger abstract sculptors.

Constructivism is a reference point here, as it long has been for Gummer. So is Pop, in terms of the work’s happily hyperbolic forms. Yet, Futurism weighs in most heavily--not the art historical kind, but the Hollywood-ized interpretation. Think “Blade Runner,” not Boccioni.

Each curve, dip, ripple and strut of metal comprises part of a space-age sign scape. The work seems to fashion a post-apocalyptic architecture in miniature: undulating hangars for off-world vehicles propped up on criss-crossing stilts; staircases leading onto M.C. Escher-esque paradoxes; quake-ready freeways that are already buckled and twisted. Gummer eschews the literal for the fantastic, which is quite a trick for an artist schooled in non-objectivity.

* Fred Hoffman Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 247-1500, through April 30. Closed Sun. and Mon.

Social Satire: A melting-pot scribe, Depression-era sage and sophisticate enamored of the rhythms of folklore, William Gropper was one of this country’s preeminent Social Realist painters. Most active during the 1930s and 1940s, Gropper perfected a wide-ranging repertoire of social types: shifty lawyers and filibustering senators, dawdling Hasidim and yeasty bakers, millionaires in showy coats and the sweat-shop workers who clothed them.

Like most satirists, Gropper’s swipes are painted with a broad brush. Industrialists are fat and leering, the poor are thin and tormented. Steeped in the Marxist dogma so seductive to artists of the period, Gropper was interested in illustrating the class struggle, which allowed for no shades of gray.

Yet unlike much contemporary political work, which all but eschews formal issues to focus on content (as if the two are indeed separable), Gropper remained attuned to questions of style. His work at Heritage Gallery shows how American artists of the first half of the 20th Century (even those for whom a social agenda was paramount) struggled to absorb European Modernist idioms.

His images boast Pablo Picasso’s fractured planes, Marc Chagall’s magic realism and Max Beckmann’s emblematic grotesquerie. If this eclecticism occasionally feels like so much undigested aesthetic matter, Gropper’s graphic sensibility carries the day.

This sensibility is represented in its purest form in the cartoons Gropper produced to accompany Robert Benchley’s column in the New York American throughout the late 1920s and 1930s. These Jazz Age pictograms are the revelation of this fine show; nowhere else does Gropper’s wit run so sure-footed and light.

* Heritage Gallery, 718 N. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 652-7738, through Saturday. Closed Sun. and Mon.