Art Review : Grooms’ Circus: Anarchic Chaos at Pepperdine

Red Grooms is a well-known New York artist, a fact that often spells sophistication. In his case, however, all you probably really need to know is that as kid in Tennessee, Grooms was mightily impressed when the circus came to town.

Now his circus is in these parts again in a show called “Target: Red Grooms!” Ensconced at Malibu’s Pepperdine University’s small art museum, it was organized by director Nora Halpern. Compared to Grooms’ retrospective at MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary a few years back, this is a bit of a one-ring affair, but a lot of fun, as usual.

Grooms is something of a problem for serious art connoisseurs. They don’t know quite how to classify work so deeply in the American vernacular of carnival posters, burlesque and grungy R. Crumb comics. It might be Pop but misses the requisite irony. It might be Expressionism but lacks mandatory anger. It definitely is “an installation” in the fundamentalist manner of Ed Kienholz. Maybe that’s what makes it artistically respectable.

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Isolating Grooms’ visual anarchy in Pepperdine’s idyllic and slightly antiseptic precincts creates a dramatic contrast that reminds us there is more to art than stylistic categories. Here it’s clear this is an art intended to evoke place and attitude. The place is the seamier side of New York City. You can practically smell gas fumes and grit. The attitude is the sense of humor required to survive Grooms’ main love, chaos. If Damon Runyon were alive today, he’d like Grooms’ guys ‘n’ dolls.

“Discount Store” gives us a life-size Saturday morning in one of those cavernous populist emporiums that sells everything from flower seeds to firearms. The closest thing here to the contemporary art of social criticism is Grooms’ gun counter and he plays it for farce. A Mr. Magoo hunter in requisite red mackinaw aims a shotgun at a crowd he’s mistaken for ducks while the distraught clerk points a rifle at the head of a matron shopping for a handgun.

Grooms sets himself the task of making everything from counters to people out of wood cutouts painted, padded and extended with truly wacky ingenuity. He manages to make right-angle carpenter joins become a cute little blond clerk using her charms to sell a vacuum cleaner to a young dude who really needs a shower.

He fashions a carnival-headed waitress for the doughnut counter. We know she’s psyched herself up to believe this lousy, demanding job is as good as being Miss America.

Among smaller works “Flea Market” reverses scale, making a SoHo square into a miniature masterpiece of high-relief anecdote and deft characterization. You immediately know the pipe-smoking rich guy in golf pants. He thinks his superior taste will find a treasure in the junk for sale. A florid body-builder hawking sentimental mementos is even more trenchant.

Grooms’ only real problem is that the times have outrun him. Today the streets of all great American cities are infected with homeless derelicts and marauding gangs funny to no one. Circumstance has changed an art that was once slightly raunchy into a kind of populist pastorale. Like the Ashcan School of Old, an art that started out tough has become nostalgic.

* Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, through Sept. 25, closed Mondays, (310) 456-4851.