Remains of the Day : Artist Tom O’Day uses burial and explosives to eradicate works or transform them. Some of the results are on display at CSUN.

Artist Tom O’Day thinks there’s a lot of lousy art around, including some of his own.

He first came to this conclusion when he moved art for Cooke’s Crating, a fine art transportation company.

“I was bombarded with images,” said O’Day, a Spokane, Wash.-based artist who grew up and studied art in Southern California. “I thought, there’s too many people with this stuff and too many pieces without enough criticism.”

Then, when O’Day relocated to Spokane in 1986, the truck driver who moved his things said, “Are you sure you want to take this?,” O’Day recalled with a chuckle. “So I had it done to me.”

Not long after that, he decided to address the art issues that had been on his mind. Chief among these was the dearth of critical thinking being applied to the multitude of contemporary artworks. Again, he did not spare his own efforts. Indeed, when asked by a college art gallery in Spokane to do an exhibit, O’Day instead suggested that he bury some of his artwork near the gallery with the plan to dig it up 20 years later.

“I didn’t want to show the work,” he said. “The idea of burying it allowed the work to still be around and go through a process. The first law of conservation is: ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same.’ ”

That burial would eventually lead O’Day to establish the “Waste to Energy to Waste Project: The World’s First Art Disposal Service.” Any artist wishing to dispose of art can employ his service, which uses a variety of means, including burial and explosives, to eradicate the work or transform it into another art form.

Some of the results of O’Day’s transforming efforts are on view in Cal State Northridge’s Art Annex in the show, “Next Stop.”

These installations include O’Day’s own reconfigured works and the assembled fragments of the work of other artists. These are accompanied by a videotape of O’Day’s disposal performances, and two large map-like paintings. The paintings depict last year’s San Fernando Valley earthquake zone. O’Day missed the quake because he was out of town, but the paintings are his virtual-reality trip to the epicenter.

The videotape on view includes a segment called “Burial,” which captures O’Day’s first act of artistic internment. He dug a 10-foot-long ditch in which he buried 30 of his own pieces, dating from 1979 to 1988. An accordion player added some music to the event, and friends gathered around.

“It looked like an Italian funeral,” recalled O’Day, who received his master’s degree in art from CSUN in 1983. “I had never felt so good about doing an exhibition. I was not worried about what people thought. I knew it was going to be there for 20 years.”

The video continues with “Flambe,” a 1990 performance in which, while a waiter flambed a stew for a formal dinner party, O’Day flambed one of his drawings. Next comes “ik-splod,” 1992, staged at a private airstrip in Ione, Wash. O’Day commissioned an explosives expert to blow up 50 of his pieces, dating from 1979 to 1992.

*

For him, the day after was “like Christmas,” he said. “I had the same sensation from “Burial,” only now I had millions of pieces. They were everywhere. (As a child,) I always liked watching trash men, and I used to shoot up model airplanes with BB guns.”

For his most recent venture last May, a bombing called “Everything Ione,” he invited other artists to participate in his disposal efforts. About a third of the 50 bombed works were by others. “This was a painting by a local artist,” O’Day said, pointing to some charred remains hanging on the Art Annex wall that he calls “EI/45/Ione/65/94.” “It looks a lot better now.”

O’Day’s humorous brochure promotes his services by asking potential artist customers to “Think of all the garbage you’ve seen in galleries this year,” and to consider such questions as: “Are you running out of room in the studio? Depressed because you can’t even give it away?”

Gallery director Louise Lewis said, “I’ve been watching Tom’s career develop since he was a graduate student here. It’s a rather visceral take on art. I like the idea that he recycles. I like the gutsy nature, the rawness of his materials.

“What strikes me in this exhibition is his extraordinary skill as a draftsman and painter. There is a seamless weaving of a variety of (media) and of formal concerns.”

Lewis sees “a strong metaphysical base” to his approach to art ethics, she said, one that “hits a whole range of emotions from the horrifying to the hilarious. The thread that ties them all together is the sense of the absurd.”

In his continuing commentary on art, O’Day plans a sinking for his next effort. If anyone with a swimming pool would be interested in having artwork in it for a year, he’d like to talk to them.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

WHERE AND WHEN:

What: “Next Stop” by Tom O’Day.

Location: CSUN Art Annex 116, near Nordhoff Street and Etiwanda Avenue, Northridge.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Ends Feb. 24.

Call: (818) 885-2226.