Art Reviews : ‘Sincerity’ Focuses on Beauty, but Not Without Irony

Among the myriad offerings of “LAX/94,” the biennial survey of Los Angeles-based art currently at a variety of area venues, is a large, group show at Otis Art Gallery called “Sincerity and Other Peccadillos.” The title is provocative, if misleading. Lumping sincerity in with unspecified peccadilloes is meant to imply that in the context of 1990s art, sincerity is a slight offense, somehow off-color and therefore quite daring.

In fact, sincerity is increasingly to the ‘90s what irony was to the ‘80s: ubiquitous, and all but obligatory.

These days, sincerity appears in art in various guises. Among them is the much-heralded “return” of beauty (which begs the question of when beauty was ever truly out of style), and the plethora of installations and objects gathered under the rubric of “identity politics”--the half-accusatory, half-celebratory embrace of autobiography as art.

Sincerity, of course, goes hand-in-hand with authenticity. Too often, though, they kiss criticality goodby--and with it the possibility for a truly political art.

Curator Anne Ayres notes that the artists she has selected are “in retreat . . . from complex media-based critique”--another way of saying that they have no use for the theoretically informed challenges mounted in the last two decades by feminists and others to a hegemonic, patriarchal and racist establishment.

Meant to augur a breath of fresh air, the retreat is in fact nonsensical in this context. Most of the artists display a knowing wit, a smart-alecky charm and a penchant for irony unvanquished by the years or by the art world’s incessant trend-mongering.

Among the ironists are Martin Kersels, who projects on a plastic lid a Super 8 film of himself swinging back and forth, again and again, to the music of Cheap Trick--a witty allegory about the tiresome nature of the liberated artist; Robert Gunderman, whose painting “Probably My Happiest Day Ever: Square Sun” is a classic of faux-patheticism; and Tyler Stallings, whose mixed-media ode to fashion in technology, “Most Beautiful Cyborgs,” features home-sewn astronaut suits customized to match responses to an absurd questionnaire.

A very tenuous connection exists among these three artists. But however appealing, the show’s other works refuse to hang together.

The dense, lapidary paintings of Monica Majoli and the fabulously over-the-top rubber concoctions of Jacci Den Hartog continue to stand out in any context in which they are placed. But they work in spite of their context, which is unusually and unproductively contrary.

* Otis Art Gallery, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0555, through Jan. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Doodling Everything: Russell Crotty is the Ur -doodler of our time, someone who can turn a mindless preoccupation, performed in a semiconscious haze, into something akin to a religion. His obsessiveness is a fine and awesome thing to behold.

For several years, Crotty has been producing grids of up to thousands of tiny images, each one scrawled in ball-point pen. These are intensely focused and slapdash at the same time.

Best known are his multitudinous surfers, triumphantly riding waves or ignominiously wiping out, each tiny image a spiraling line jammed into a horizontal pile, or a zigging mark zagging right out of its allotted spot, like a libidinous jolt of inky energy.

Crotty’s new work, which inaugurates the Dan Bernier Gallery, turns from the ocean to the stars, toward Mars, Jupiter and Venus. Crotty’s astronomical observations have produced the artist’s usual, ample yield.

These include rhythmic grids and stacks of ink and tinted gesso drawings of the planets, seen in different lights, from different angles and at different focal lengths. Each image is both a relic of what is seen and an emblem of what can never be known, for a technologically assisted view is inconclusive at best.

Crotty’s work aligns with a particular strain of 1970s Conceptualism, which purportedly recorded everything about everything. In this vein are Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” and Douglas Huebler’s plan to photograph everyone alive.

These artists were making a point about the fallacy of objectivity and totalizing systems. Crotty is onto something quite different.

He is mesmerized not by ideas, but by things. This lends his work a certain naivete completely at odds with Ruscha’s and Huebler’s cynicism, as well as a formula for a self-sustaining system that just could prove them wrong.

* Dan Bernier Gallery, 3026 1/2 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4482, through Dec. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Stretching It: “Minus Equals Plus,” Patrizia Giambi’s installation at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, is laconic, elegant and probably about something. What that is, however, remains disappointingly muddled.

Each piece in the show is composed of a single long, thick rubber band, stretched between a pair of steel clamps affixed to the gallery wall or floor. Sometimes the rubber band is aligned along the horizontal axis, sometimes the vertical. Each band is a different, primary color and stamped repeatedly with one word: space , time , male , female , law or beauty .

The work plays out a familiar Minimalist idiom: These are simple, geometric structures presented in serial form. The words themselves form additional serial subsets, and Giambi selects them very deliberately.

Each relates to a category of measure, a code of conduct, a mode of classification or a system of logic. As Minimalism itself enshrines a rigorous and exclusionary logic, Giambi seems poised to offer some kind of critique.

Yet none is forthcoming. Giambi could have stretched the rubber bands to an unendurable point of tautness, as if to suggest that a breaking point was inevitable. But the rubber bands are slack--much like the work.

One piece in the show is different from the others. It consists of nine bands hanging from metal hooks, each band marked to resemble a tape measure, extended to 41 inches. The piece pivots on the understanding that though ostensibly identical, each band could be stretched to a different length while continuing to assert its identity with the others.

Here, Giambi manages to suggest the arbitrary, eminently unstable nature of truth. Her take on elasticity recalls a well-known work by Robert Morris, but this doesn’t detract from its strength. It merely offers a well-tested precedent for Giambi’s inquiry into Minimalism.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Dec. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

All in the Vision: Michael Norton’s small landscape paintings are executed in egg tempera on wood panel. This venerated technique, most familiar from Early Renaissance painting, is uncommon today. It might be construed as an antique affectation, except that pretentiousness makes no sense when one is speaking of affectless painting.

The colors of Norton’s five paintings at ACME Gallery are muted (golds, umbers, mauves and blues), and their surfaces are flat. Swirling strokes, short and choppy marks, and the feathery edges of the brush are visible; but stripped of all texture. There are only cool notations or impassive descriptions of forests, skies and mountains: a horizon line, a hint of darkness suggesting a clump of trees, a burst of light denoting dawn.

Nothing is specified. This makes the images seductively blank. Like any vacuum, they draw everything around them inside.

In the space of an instant, they become bloated with meanings and metaphors. They are dreams, which seem to fade upon consciousness, or Proustian memories that come suddenly, startlingly into focus.

They are not landscapes at all, but allegories of vision and, like all systems of knowledge, only deceptively trustworthy. Yet mostly, these very beautiful paintings are icons of the recalcitrant romantic sensibility of the viewer. The artist may or may not be similarly besotted.

* ACME Gallery, 1800B Berkeley St., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5818, through Dec. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.