ART REVIEWS : Chickens, Pollo-Doh in Oliveri’s Tenderhearted Anarchy

It isn’t often that a visitor is greeted at the gallery door by two dozen squawking chickens--much less chickens whose feathers have been colored lavender, baby pink, soft green and lemon sherbet. Welcome to Michael Oliveri’s be-fowled sensorium at Crossing Gallery, full of edible pastels, rustling sawdust and pungent odors wafting indelicately through the air.

Less interested in making a spectacle of the chickens than of himself, Oliveri uses them as instruments of an elaborately infantile spoof. Under his wild-eyed supervision, they go on a metaphorical journey from happy-go-lucky barnyard beasts into the absurd stuff of art, and live to tell the tale.

This mildly but determinedly psychotic installation/performance adheres to a strict scenario. Oliveri begins with packaged poultry purchased at the supermarket. He loads them into the “chicken cannon ejector,” a gleaming apparatus located on the gallery’s ground floor. The dead birds are then shot up to the laboratory-cum-factory on the second floor, where they are separated and loaded into the “ACME Pollo-Doh Converter,” which pulverizes them into sculpting material: Pollo-Doh.

The Pollo-Doh is stored in tanks and dispensed (quite like frozen yogurt) into cans, by day-laborers wearing official Pollo-Doh jumpsuits. After being sealed, the cans are sent back down a chute to the first floor, where they are displayed in the gallery window as pasteurized and homogenized art for the masses, at $60 a pop.

If Pollo-Doh is glop processed from chickens (and of course it really isn’t; the hens are dumped upstairs, and replaced by a dry-wall compound), this project similarly grinds things up and reconceives them: Jeffrey Vallance’s “Blinky the Friendly Hen,” Piero Manzoni’s signed and numbered cans of artist’s excrement, Paul McCarthy by way of Jason Rhoades.

Like McCarthy, Oliveri seems to have a mean streak. But in the end, Oliveri’s nastiness is all show: The chickens have been saved from the slaughterhouse, are colored with nontoxic food dye and are well cared for. This is tenderhearted anarchy, a relief, a contradiction in terms and provocative enough to pique an interest in this artist’s still-nascent ideas.

* Crossing Gallery, 1104 S. La Cienega, (310) 358-9359, through Dec. 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Fostering Dialogue: An exhibition relating to a major public art program, “Cultural Explainers: Portals, Bridges and Gateways,” is now on view at the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). The exhibition consists of architectural models, photographs and texts that elucidate the physical structures and the working philosophy of an ambitious work-in-progress, organized by SPARC and ADOBE L.A., a group of Latino artists, designers and architects.

“Cultural Explainers” was conceived in the aftermath of the 1992 riots, as a way to foster dialogue among L.A.’s disparate ethnic communities, specifically those hardest hit by the events: Korean Americans, African Americans and Latino Americans. Through workshops, the members of these communities have interacted with artists named by SPARC to collaborate on three large-scale public monuments.

The monuments will be exchanged among the communities they are designed to represent, before being installed in permanent sites (yet to be determined) in Koreatown, Pico-Union and South-Central Los Angeles.

The “Cultural Explainers” monuments take very specific forms. The Koreatown structure, which is to be built first, will mimic a traditional pyong poong , or folding screen. The Pico-Union monument is inspired by the Pre-Columbian Mayan arches found in Southern Mexico and Central America. The South-Central L.A. monument will consist of 12 poles akin to the ancestral poles in Yoruba culture. All three will incorporate reliefs, panels or tiles bearing images relating to the history of the community in question.

Multiculturalism, as conceived here, is a highly romantic proposition, with its embrace of Otherness and emphasis on elective affinities. To refer to these monuments as portals, bridges and gateways is to promulgate yet another romantic metaphor--this time, for cross-cultural understanding.

For all the valuable collaborative processes undergone, this project begs the question of its own Utopianism. What kind of art object can explain one culture to another? Such an object, no matter how necessary, is likely an idealist fiction.

* Social and Public Art Resource Center, 685 Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-9560, through Dec. 22. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

*

Over-the-Top: The title of Terri Friedman’s new show at Sue Spaid Fine Art is like a tabloid headline from which you try to avert your eyes, but find--horrified--that you cannot.

“Sunny von Bulow is Still Alive!” Friedman fervently proclaims. At once Von Bulow’s champion and a dazzlingly creative parasite, sucking what life remains out of this 14-year coma victim, Friedman displays a flair for exploitation matched only by a knack for finely festooned fussiness. Everything here is way, way over-the-top.

If Rubens chronicled the triumph of Maria de’ Medici in his famous cycle of paintings, Friedman chronicles the tragi-comedy of this moribund heiress in a series of fantastic assemblages. These are gorgeous to the point of gagging, full of glitter, beads, gold leaf, mirrors and cut glass, with pink fluorescent light to perk up the gallery’s ghastly pallor.

Gagging isn’t a problem, of course: These pieces come fully equipped, much like the room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in which Von Bulow has long been ensconced. Life-sustaining substances are everywhere.

These include air blown from a black-and-white striped fan into a series of black-and-white striped shopping bags, affixed to the fan by a network of artfully twisted black-and-white striped wire (an homage to the salubrious effects of shopping at Henri Bendel’s); and sparkling water, an essential fluid for those enamored of glitz, which flows through plastic tubes snaking across the floor into an oversized hospital beaker, bubbling with yet more of the glittering stuff.

In a statement that accompanies the show, Friedman describes Von Bulow as a “decorated living corpse,” freshly dressed and made-up each morning. Friedman’s fascination with the Von Bulow story is easily explained: It allows her an out for work that otherwise might be praised as meticulously crafted and exquisite, but rather vacant.

The gambit works, if you are willing to discount the tastelessness of it all. Certainly someone who could create “Sunny Sideways With Oxygen,” which features an electrically induced sunrise, repeated rhythmically until the plug is pulled, is loath to consider anything so boring as good taste. Her shamelessness is embarrassingly seductive.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through Dec. 24. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

*

A Glance Back: “CoBrA Revisited,” at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, features paintings, drawings and prints produced over a 40-year span by artists once associated with this post-war European movement.

Founded in 1948 as one of the many splinter groups of the international Surrealist movement, CoBrA (whose name is derived from Co penhagen, Br ussels and A msterdam) lasted a scant three years, before evolving into the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, which itself eventually transmuted into the better-known (if equally doomed) Situationist International.

Fascinating historically--especially when counter-posed to the monolithic “triumph of American painting,” which occurred at the same moment--this parade of overlapping, decomposing, European avant-gardes boasts very interesting work. The most important member of CoBrA, Asger Jorn, is an obscure figure in this country. His paintings conjure those of Jackson Pollock in terms of their masses of color and nervous doodling; his tendency toward a perverse ornamentalism, however, is unique.

Like Jorn, Corneille is rarely exhibited here, though he is currently enjoying a renaissance in Europe. His obsessively patterned surfaces and faux naivete suggest Dubuffet crossed with Peter Max.

Far more familiar are Karel Appel and Pierre Alechinsky. The former’s exuberant canvases are remarkably consistent, whether paint is pulled over the surface, as thick and delicious as taffy, or whether the surface is composed of a patchwork of brightly colored pieces of felt. Alechinsky is amply represented, and offers the stand-out works: a series of antique stock certificates overlaid with calligraphic flourishes, which reconcile Conceptual art with unrepentant decoration and feel wonderfully, surprisingly new.

* Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-5222, through Jan. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.