Santa Monica’s Exquisite Deceptions : ‘Altered Egos’ and ‘Return of the “Cadavre Exquis” ’ present works with their hearts in Surrealist-era Paris.

The essence of two spirited new exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, “Altered Egos” and “The Return of the ‘Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse),’ ” is pretty well encapsulated in an installation by L.A.-based artist Charles La Belle. Working under the pseudonym of Charles Bon, he calls the piece “Seven Paris Monuments--Santa Monica Correspondent.”

La Belle’s project, which is part of “Altered Egos,” signals exhibitions where appearances are decidedly deceptive. Both shows have their hearts in Surrealist-era Paris of the 1920s, when the favorite form of cultural sabotage was derailing the train of rational thought.

La Belle’s piece consists in part of computer-generated photographs. They show such famous Parisian landmarks as the Arch of Triumph and the Eiffel Tower weirdly materialized on beaches, malls and boardwalks in Santa Monica. We recognize these assertions of colossal ego more readily than our own laid-back landscape, although they are equally artificial.

“Altered Egos” involves nine artists, solo or in teams. All pretend to be other people. They play roles ranging from lesbian serial murderer to ambitious unknown artist. Hunter Reynolds, for example, has himself photographed portraying a woman named Patina DuPrey. Theresa Pendlebury uses numerous alter egos to create paintings based on literary descriptions of visual art.

Organized by the Santa Monica Museum and beautifully framed by curator Karen Moss, the exhibition’s ruling spirit is that of Marcel Duchamp in drag as his feminine mirror image Rrose Selavy.

The well-known Russian emigre team of Komar and Melamid fares beautifully in their visual biography of Nikolai Buchumov, a fictional, academic, Social Realist painter of the Revolutionary period.

Invented by the pair in 1973, Buchumov lost an eye and retired to his native province to paint the same landscape over and over for the rest of his life. A prominent promontory appears in the left corner of each of the small multiple canvases on view. Actually, it’s the artist’s nose. You see a lot of your nose when you only have one eye.

Brian Tucker presents a mini-exhibition complete with an audio guide. The installation documents the life of Richard Sharpe Shaver, an invented visionary who believed the center of the Earth is inhabited by sadistic mutants called “Dero.” Their machinations cause all the trouble on the planet.

Shaver came to prominence in the 1940s when he was discovered by Ray Palmer, editor of the pulp sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories. Palmer translated Shaver’s theories into a series of yarns for the magazine. Tucker’s re-creation is so deft that you leave thinking, “Maybe there are evil mutants down there; why not?” The piece is a charmer.

Only one artist on view masks his real identity completely. Annabel Livermore is actually a male sculptor from Texas. The rest all fess up to being Pendlebury, Kevin Sullivan, Jan Tumlir, Millie Wilson and Vernon Fisher.

At bottom, they all make the same point. The persona we present to the world is but a carapace. Behind it, stored in the subconscious are aspects of ourselves that remain troubling monsters unless we come to terms with them.

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Among Parisian surrealists a favorite parlor game was “The Cadavre Exquis.” A piece of paper was folded horizontally, once for each player. In turn everybody put a phrase or a fraction of a drawing in his space without looking at the rest. The point was to use randomness to create art. One felicitous coincidence produced the spontaneous poem, “The exquisite-corpse-shall-drink-the-young-wine.” That’s how the game got its name.

Now the museum hosts “The Return of the ‘Cadavre Exquis,’ ” a traveling show of nearly 100 collaborative drawings organized by the Drawing Center, New York.

The list of participants includes the likes of John Baldessari, Ellsworth Kelly, William Wegman, Mark Tansey and Roy Lichtenstein as well as a gaggle of emerging people. At three or four authors per sheet, it’s a large cast.

The exhibition is a pleasant curiosity. Evidence suggests that a lot of fudging goes on in the game. Many sheets are just too integrated to leave the idea of total randomness believable. It also proves that the odds on creating a masterpiece this way are about as long as those on a typewriting chimp pecking out a great novel. What we get mainly is a series of visual non sequiturs.

The collective confirms the universal suspicion that humans are preoccupied with sex. The exhibition frontispiece should probably be an image in which the head of Surrealist guru Andre Breton hovers above a large vagina that extrudes snakes with male heads and has the legs of an easel. This chimera was cobbled together by Steve Wolfe, Ashley Bickerton and Jan Hashey.

Slight shortcomings notwithstanding, the pair of shows would not be out of place at the Museum of Contemporary Art or the L.A. County Museum. Both come with good catalogues and make the little museum look smart and urbane.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St.; through Sept. 4, closed Monday and Tuesday, (310) 399-0433.