Art Review : Joel Otterson’s Furniture Hurts So Good

Brutality and luxury intermingle in Joel Otterson’s polymorphous pieces of excessively decorative yet fully functional furniture. Mounted on small, heavy-duty wheels, his hyperactive hybrids of recycled pipes, dismembered bathtubs, patchwork cushions, potted plants and goldfish bowls speak--in many voices at once--of an irrepressible desire for physical comfort in a world relentlessly hostile to pleasure, refinement and lavishness.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery’s cavernous main space at the new Bergamot Station complex feels like some futuristic pirate’s hide-out. The treasures here have been pillaged from a wild array of mass-cultural sources.

Delicate dessert dishes emblazoned with rock ‘n’ roll logos recall grandma’s mismatched china and the grandchildren’s favorite bands. Odd candelabrum do double duty as fruit bowls.

A Cher ashtray conflates summer-camp arts-and-crafts with High Style camp. And a fragile glass decanter, with matching goblets cast from plastic bottles of dishwashing liquid, demonstrate Otterson’s ability to make beautiful objects out of common household materials.

His aesthetic of over-the-top accumulation is exceptionally resilient. It embodies a sensibility that is adaptive and practical, capable of making the best out of adverse circumstances. Chippendale sophistication and Road Warrior ruggedness seem to be the unlikely bedfellows from whose union Otterson’s art springs.

The animated glee of his multilayered pieces includes a healthy dose of reality. Far from being an escapist fantasy of outlandish piracy, his voracious installation is a moving meditation on art’s place in contemporary life.

A 1961 jukebox, flanked by two life-size human skeletons made of ruby red, hot-sculpted glass, serves as funerary urn for the ashes of Richard Alan Shiffler, a musician who recently died of AIDS-related complications on his 33rd birthday. Otterson’s poignant memorial fuses fragments of popular culture and pieces of plumbing to form a personal shrine that provides different levels of comfort, depending upon what each viewer brings to it.

All of these flamboyant sculptures take their place in an ongoing cycle of life and death. They make a necessity of decoration, stealing fugitive pleasures from an impersonal world and striving to infuse some joy amid much sorrow.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station B - 1, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Nov. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Endurance Test: Visiting Mike Kelley’s exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery feels like being trapped in a building whose burglar alarm has been accidentally triggered. Lights flash and ear-splitting sounds assault you as you wander around the makeshift sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs, wondering if you should wait for someone to silence the annoying noises or if you should just give up on the art and leave.

With a nasty, aggressive twist, Kelley transforms the difficulty usually associated with Modern art--particularly abstraction--into a painful endurance test. Masochism, his work effectively screams, lies at the root of the way Americans currently think of art.

The idea that looking at art is good for us gets skewered in his pugnacious installation. Spending time with Kelley’s enlarged photographs of lint, sculptures made of chicken-wire and tinfoil, and egg-shaped paintings based on a fusion of 1950s horror movies and biomorphic abstraction does not result in any sort of moral improvement. On the contrary, all you’re left with is a headache.

For such bodily ailments, Kelley’s drawings in the back gallery sarcastically recommend Immodium A-D, Pepto-Bismol or acupuncture.

The remainder of the exhibition resembles ill-fated, back-yard experiments by a crackpot scientist or handyman. Leapfrogging back to the wacky birdhouses he made in the 1970s, Kelley’s new works focus on eggs and incubator-like containers, suggesting that art’s job is not to offer moral improvements but to hatch ideas, creating new, mutant forms, however distasteful they might be.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652-9172, through Oct. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. *

Pricey Gamble: Hiro Yamagata is a graphic artist whose mass-produced screenprints have assured his commercial success but have earned him little critical recognition. “Earthly Paradise,” a well-financed exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park, is meant to alert viewers to Yamagata’s significance as a serious contemporary artist.

The plan backfires. Badly.

Yamagata’s schematic, tacky paintings of tropical plants, gorgeous flowers and snazzy toucans, adorning seven perfectly restored, 1951-52 Mercedes Benz Cabriolets, get things drastically backward.

These brightly colored pictures on fenders, doors, hoods and trunks might be fine as murals along the freeway or as innocuous designs for beachwear. As embellishments of the cars, however, they look terrible.

Yamagata’s paintings detract from the beauty of the rare, hand-assembled convertibles. Worse, the attempt to secure Yamagata’s significance as an artist is based on a cynical belief that contemporary art is meaningful because it’s expensive.

Art is pricey not because its materials cost a lot--as Yamagata’s certainly do--but because it coveys ideas and elicits experiences a culture deems to be valuable. Yamagata’s effort fails because it puts too much emphasis on money, forgetting that while high prices are often the result of art, they are not its cause.

* Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 485-4581, through Oct. 23. Closed Mondays.

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A Focused Edge: Linda Burnham’s paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery are sharper, less cluttered and more resolved than any of her previous images, in which stylized designs and calligraphic flourishes energetically overlap with silhouettes of frogs, bugs and bears, as well as a wide variety of patterns, textures and techniques.

The crisp clarity of her new paintings is due, in part, to their being collaborations--of a sort. Burnham made this body of work on unfinished canvases left behind by her husband, artist Robert Overby, at his death last year.

Ghostly outlines of lips, eyes and fingers remain from his wispy, linear sketches. These soft details appear to hover beneath the surface of Burnham’s more thickly built-up layers of oil, alkyd, acrylic and resin. The contrast between her tactile accumulations of gooey paint and his shadowy, seemingly intangible after-images yields a delicate tension that gives these paintings their off-balance edge.

Unlike Burnham’s earlier works, which seem tentative and excessively indebted to the styles of other artists, her most recent paintings are bold and focused. They signal her maturity as a painter.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Oct. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.