ART REVIEWS : Self-Help Culture Skewered at Food House

Sam Durant’s installation at Food House is incisive and ambiguous, stripped to the bone and loaded.

Durant conjures the image of an alienated individual, earnestly struggling for self-improvement. At the same time, his homemade bookshelves, second-hand self-help books and morale-boosting posters ridicule the idea that life-defining habits can be changed as easily as a paperback can be read.

Five blurry photographs of posters usually found in the lunchroom of a small business or the waiting room of a social worker bear messages, such as “Believing in yourself is the first step to success” and “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Squinting to see the words clearly, you get dizzy reading these rules-to-live-by.

Although it’s impossible to disagree with these bits of popular wisdom, they still sound like half-truths. Durant forces a viewer to experience what it’s like to get blurry eyed and disoriented from reading too much, from tirelessly searching for answers but never finding them in words.

His bookshelves, partly filled with paperbacks, also emphasize the difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Desperation and futility are evoked by entire sections devoted to get-rich-quick schemes, love relationships or self-respect--sometimes with as many as eight dog-eared copies of the same volume.

Durant’s homemade library suggests that simple, step-by-step lessons found in books may look good on paper but are ineffective in life. His art is powerful because it wholeheartedly embraces the desire to change, yet it recognizes the difficulty of real transformation.

The critique of self-help sub-cultures includes the art world, offering a scathing assault on the current demand that art be therapeutic. For Durant, the idea that art makes us better is ridiculous--part of the problem, not the solution.

Durant’s art neither provides lasting respite from life nor improves its viewers. It simply identifies complex problems and draws us into discussions by inviting us to see things differently.

* Food House, 2220 Colorado Blvd., Building 4, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1030, through Saturday Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. * Works on Racism: Glenn Ligon’s politically motivated prints inject new meanings into old adages and racist stereotypes. At Ruth Bloom Gallery, the young, New York-based, African American artist’s two series from 1993 are considerably more interesting than a flat-footed set of etchings from 1992. His recent work adds layers of significance to popular opinions, allowing humane values to echo off destructive prejudices with neither element dominating the other.

The racist idea that all blacks look alike haunts “Runaways,” a portfolio of 10 lithographs in which 10 different descriptions of the artist are juxtaposed with small depictions of slave life in America, in the style of 19th-Century woodcuts. (The portfolio was also shown earlier this season at Kim Light Gallery.)

With remarkable nuances, the descriptions paint a collective portrait of Ligon that tells us as much about his appearance as it does about those who wrote them. The details range from the obvious, such as height, weight and hairstyle, to the more intimate, such as habits of speech and personal idiosyncrasies.

Ligon casts himself as a runaway slave to mock art collectors who believe they own a piece of the artist when they buy his work. In a market dominated by rich whites, in which the work of oppressed others is currently hot property, Ligon’s “Runaways” symbolize his unwillingness to fit into restrictive categories. For him, that would be tantamount to being a good slave.

A series of nine etchings titled “Narratives” fleshes out Ligon’s refusal to serve as a token demonstration of racial openness. Playing off the phrase, “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” his prints mimic the 19th-Century frontispieces of true-life stories.

Viewers are given only hints of the autobiographies within. We’re left on the outside, only able to imagine what the artist’s life might be like. From this position, no one is able to appropriate Ligon’s experiences.

Both series slyly undermine the idea that art captures the artist’s self. Ligon contends that human identity is an on-going negotiation that begins between two people and always involves innumerable others. Only violence reduces this complex process to a simple opposition between black and white.

* Ruth Bloom Gallery, 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through May 22. Closed Mondays. * Images in Flux: Vernon Fisher’s three-dimensional images interspersed with words combine elements of painting, sculpture and drawing with such apparent ease that it’s impossible to determine which of these categories they belong to. Six new, remarkably elegant pieces at Mark Moore Gallery might best be described as mini-installations.

In a sense, visually entering one of the Texas-based artist’s mixed-media hybrids is like entering a dense cluster of micro-environments. Scanning a typical piece demands moving among tangible objects, illusionistic images, diagrammatic grids, digitized representations and written words.

But describing Fisher’s art in this way makes it sound divisive and clunky, as if it were an awkward hodgepodge of strategies arbitrarily stuck together.

A better approach is to think of his works as events, as ongoing occurrences that began before you arrived at the gallery and will continue long after you leave. It’s difficult to suppress the suspicion that the components of his pieces are rearranging themselves when you’re not looking.

Painted on blackboards and repeated in many works, Fisher’s images seem to be in constant flux. Crisp black-and-white drawings float out of cloudy, smudged erasures. Even sharper color pictures momentarily grab your attention and lure your eye deep into illusionistic space.

Despite their dynamism, Fisher’s works are never restless or pushy. As a whole, his show has the feel of an inquisitive mind contemplating its operations simply because it has the spare time to do so. Far from being solipsistic, his art welcomes viewers along for the ride as memories drift in and out of focus and consciousness gets lost only to find itself somewhere else.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032-A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through May 14. Closed Mondays. * Surface Appeal: George Stoll’s wax casts of Tupperware cups, bowls, pitchers and variously shaped kitchen containers come in more colors than the originals. His handcrafted vessels are also prettier than their plastic counterparts.

Unfortunately, these characteristics are the only advantages Stoll’s imitations have over the real thing. Too fragile to use, his sculptures are meant to be judged formally, by their shapes, textures and colors.

As three-dimensional compositions, his works at A/B Gallery are blandly decorative. More than 100 pieces casually stacked on shelves or clustered on pedestals are superficially attractive but conceptually empty. Their initial visual appeal quickly wears thin; no interesting ideas or critical concepts emerge to save them from being forgettable.

The problem is that they try to combine Pop’s ironic attack on high art with formalism’s insistence on art’s autonomy or purity. This work falls short because it doesn’t take either style very seriously, instead treating them as flexible packaging materials free of content and rigor.

* A/B Gallery, 120 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 659-7835, through Saturday.