SIGHTS : This Artist’s Sense of Humor Keeps His Creations on Move : Some of the offbeat works by Kenneth Schneider at Artists Gallery in Ojai also talk and say some pointed and funny things.

With its erotic art exhibitions, a neon art show last year, and other displays of non-traditional aesthetics, the Artists Gallery in Ojai has established itself as a haven for things off the beaten path. To be sure, the regular visitor can expect to find art yoked to conventional values as well, but we’ve been trained to look for something unexpected.

A current case in point is Kenny Schneider’s usually kinetic, often whimsical and sometimes giddy art, which qualifies in the offbeat category if anything does. That much is made clear upon walking into the gallery, which is crammed with artworks that move, dance, speak, gobble up quarters, and even issue vintage music like a surrogate jukebox.

Just inside the gallery entrance, we find the work called, truthfully, “Me in My House Dancing,” a large-scale kinetic portrait of the artist as a maniacally grinning, flat-planed figure in a tableaux, connected to a motor and dancing madly. The figure’s loose-jointed limbs flail and shiver in unpredictable patterns. Likewise the art itself.

Schneider moved to Ojai from Los Angeles with his daughter and his wife, Nella Barriga-Schneider, who also shows her photographs and some fine paintings in the gallery. “I’m originally from Upstate New York, in a country setting, so this is like coming full circle,” explained the affable artist, prone to sudden laughter.

After studying painting and other art that sits still and behaves itself, Schneider began making experimental films in New York in the ‘60s. “It was a way to keep things moving,” Schneider says of his shift from the static to the kinetic realm.

The film connection is represented throughout the show here, from the zoetropes, which cheekily play off motion experiments, to the elaborate Tinseltown fetishism of the most ambitious work in the gallery, “Auto Biography” (puns rule here).

In this surrealistic city scene, rows of characters, from everyday pedestrians in the human comedy to a fragmented Picasso Cubist figure, stroll by as vintage automobiles drive by in the background. A closer look in these autos reveals a cast of characters behind the wheel, including Albert Einstein, Groucho Marx, Toulouse-Lautrec, and a sci-fi chanteuse from outer space.

All this unfolds to the tunes of a soundtrack of nostalgic ‘20s and ‘30s music and soft-core exotica, filling the gallery with an atmosphere of charmed glee. This is a thinking person’s froth, tapping into an area of lighthearted, pop culture-friendly lunacy that usually leaves you grinning, and only occasionally smirking.

Coming to Los Angeles from the East Coast, Schneider found himself fascinated with the veneer of cinema lore and layers of history--albeit a brief, intense history. “When I first came here, Los Angeles seemed like the world’s biggest company town,” he said. He was discussing one of his charming relief pieces in the show, which depicts the Art Deco-era El Rey theater on Wilshire. That this theater now sits dormant touches on the underside of old Hollywood and cherished notions of an L.A. gone by.

Schneider gave the reporter a non-linear tour through the exhibition, stopping with special interest at the peculiar, reconfigured arcade game marked with the sign “Gene the Artist.” The Gene in question is Eugene Massin, an influential art teacher of Schneider’s, who told the fledgling artist “why don’t you take your humor seriously?”

Marionette-like, “Gene” is a frumpy character in the machine who squirms and serves up “25 cents worth of art,” muttering in sound-byte fashion various axioms and distorted homilies. “Don’t blame God, he’s only human,” the voice, actually Massin’s recorded onto a tape loop, deadpans gruffly. “He who laughs last, lasts . . . female moths are called myths.” And so on.

This is one of Schneider’s series, which he calls “portrait-as-an-arcade-game.” Clearly, he is an artist who places considerable faith in the power of using found objects and likes swiping technologies and ideas from sources outside of established fine art realms.

Less openly gag-driven is “Icarus Rides Again,” an aluminum model for a large kinetic, wind-activated sculpture--commissioned by Santa Barbara’s kinetic art patron saint David Bermant--slated for installation at UC Santa Barbara. Here, a sleek aluminum cowboy braves a bucking bronco’s writhings. Presumably, in its ultimate, large scale, the motions will take on a hyperbolic, Claes Oldenburg-ish dimension.

The folksiest piece in the show is “Silent Movie,” which is not at all silent once you begin manipulating the wooden puppet-like figures, painted in flamboyant abstract-expressionist schemes. Based on Appalachian models, these gently crazy, clattering figures exude a rustic charm that differs from the more extravagant contraptions in the gallery.

“I give myself a problem, then I try to solve it. Halfway through, I wonder ‘why the hell am I doing this?’ ” he said, laughing boisterously. This is the work of an artist fueled by the self-generating force of a zany notion. He follows an idea to its illogical conclusion, often producing machines of delight in the process.

MYSTICAL PLACES REVISITED

Carole Milton’s paintings, at the Buenaventura Gallery through this weekend, reveal an engagingly loose-handed way with a brush, and a sense of color that is idiosyncratic and personal. Mystical references abound, but without any dreaded New Age glaze.

There seems to be, in paintings like “Celestial Being Observing Poor Mortal” and especially “My Over-Burdened Guardian Angel,” a leavening agent of humor and paint-for-its-own-sake. Obviously, she loves paint: It is glopped on with glee and a taste for tactile surfaces. Elsewhere, the paint hums with whorls and dense thickets of gestures, as in “Fallen Angel.”

She aims at atmospheric qualities in her “Dream Meadow” series and “My Mystical Someplace,” the best painting in the show. It’s a someplace depicted with curiosity and flair.

Details

* EXHIBIT: Kenny Schneider and Nella Barriga-Schneider through March 24 at Artists Gallery, 319 E. El Roblar Road in Ojai; 640-1387.

* PAINTINGS: Carole Milton, through March 4 at Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara in Ventura; 648-1235.