ART REVIEW : ‘Paper View’: Found Objects Seen as a Practical Necessity

“Paper View,” a group exhibition at the Liz Blackman Gallery, a showcase for work by self-taught artists, offers an interesting corrective to those who insist upon the singularity of the institutional avant-garde.

The show features works on found pieces of paper: empty cardboard refrigerator boxes, crumpled grocery lists, unreturned library books. Duchamp’s famous invention of the “found object” is here recast as a practical necessity rather than a schooled provocation.

The mainstream art world has long celebrated the provocative gesture; outsider art, by contrast, is said to prize authenticity. Yet in the 1990s, sincerity has made a splashy return in the pages of the art magazines, so much so that much of the work in “Paper View” would seem right at home in L.A.’s avowedly cutting-edge galleries.

This is especially true of Ree Brown’s tiny portraits of cats and birds. Drawn on scraps of brown paper grocery-bags, these are both charmingly fragile and stolidly matter-of-fact. In odd ways, they are reminiscent of the work of John Currin.

Gary Hissong’s construction-paper cutouts seem to enact two of today’s dominant aesthetic impulses: obsession and decoration. His elaborate objects conjure spider webs, labyrinths and lacy doilies. The patterns themselves are much like inkblots, seeming to conceal images of insects, birds and smoldering sunsets.

Hillary Carlip scavenges discarded grocery lists. From the type of paper used, the handwriting and the items themselves, she imagines the people who went shopping with the lists in hand and portrays those men and women in a series of very funny photographs.

Carlip’s incidental Conceptualism suggests the patent obviousness of what is often considered an obscure type of art-making. Her masquerade resonates with the work of a whole slew of important mainstream artists, from Eleanor Antin to Cindy Sherman to Sophie Calle. The big difference is that Carlip plays voyeurism strictly for laughs--a rather subversive tactic, if you think about it.

* Liz Blackman Gallery, 6909 Melrose Ave., (213) 933-4096, through May 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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An Ironic, Bloody Tableau: In “Night/Crimes,” a new photographic series at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Charles Gaines juxtaposes a portrait of a convicted murderer, an unrelated crime scene in which a body has been discovered and a view of the night sky as it would have been configured at the moment the murder was committed--an expanse of black punctuated by dozens of white-hot points of light.

These pieces are both straightforward and oblique. They counterpose the sublimity of nature and the banality of human nature. By itself, this isn’t very interesting. But Gaines pushes further, taking on the bogus scientific techniques of astrology, criminology and phrenology.

Are there cosmic clues to the future? How can we fathom the unfathomable? Is there a way to ascertain evil in the bland features of the guilty?

The answers are not at all clear. What is clear, and rather glaring in light of today’s demonizing headlines, is the fact that none of the faces in these photographs belongs to an African American male.

Gaines has very carefully plundered his images from police files and back issues of the Los Angeles Times, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s, in order to conjure an era of white-on-white crime. He comments subtly upon questions of race, destiny and our culture’s selective romanticization of violence.

These pieces read somewhat like homages to pulp novels and film noir, those sites within the cultural imagination in which murder’s glamour remains intact. In the pulp universe, murder is quite logical: It can be traced back, invariably, to lust or vengeance.

Yet, by juxtaposing three images that essentially have nothing to do with one another, Gaines creates a blood-soaked tableau whose logic is entirely contrived. Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op once observed that the detective’s role is not to determine the truth, but rather to concoct the most convincing fiction. In “Night/Crimes,” Gaines fulfills this prescription with no small degree of irony.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-0433, through June 11. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

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Surveying Erwitt’s Photos: From the beginning of his career in the late 1940s, photographer Elliott Erwitt has been drawn to incongruities. At Fahey-Klein Gallery, a fine survey of Erwitt’s magazine assignments, advertisements and what Erwitt calls his “personal exposures” is jammed full of visual puns, quirky juxtapositions and small ironies.

The Surrealists seized upon such tactics as a means to transform consciousness. For Erwitt, the goal is far less grand; he wants to entertain.

The best of these images insist upon our obliviousness to our surroundings: a couple who converse animatedly in a hall of screaming mummies in Guanajuato; an older woman in Managua who sits at a melon stall, the fruits installed precisely in front of her breasts; a stern dowager who plays a rhinestone cowboy slot-machine.

The easiest involve animals (dogs, specifically), and are often shot from ankle height: a pair of Great Dane legs, a pair of boots and a Chihuahua in a hand-knit sweater; a dog and its mistress scratching themselves in concert; a woman whose heavy makeup distorts her features as much as a muzzle distorts those of her little dog.

These descriptions veer toward something that has been a bit of a problem for Erwitt: a tendency to be cute. This becomes truly problematic in some of the later work, in which Erwitt creates narrative tableaux: a Mr. Mom scene; a little boy painting a little girl, stretched out on a divan like Goya’s Maja; or a group of smug nudes painting a clothed model. This sort of thing represents advertising culture at its most banal and is a disappointment in light of Erwitt’s obvious talents.

* Fahey-Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250, through April 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Look Very Closely: In “Pastoral Care,” Carmine Iannaccone’s outdoor installation at the Otis College of Art and Design Gravel Pit, the artist has placed several tiny hillocks, covered in luxuriant grass, in the middle of a large expanse of gravel. One could very easily pass the scene without noticing anything that looks like art.

However, if alerted to the fact that one is looking at art, one will indeed find it: an allusion to the serial patterns of Chinese landscape painting; a down-scale Zen rock garden; the lunatic logic of Richard Dreyfuss’ obsessive constructions in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”; a sly parody of the grandiosity of Earth Art.

Yet, constructing multiple meanings on cue is a rather unsatisfying game. It seems less to emphasize the participatory nature of the art experience than the utter randomness of the art object.

“Pastoral Care” is too understated to be effective. It can be intriguing to produce an installation that is barely there. But, if the viewer is not surprised by the fact that everything she doesn’t see is precisely what she is supposed to see, she is likely to be annoyed. And while Iannaccone’s thin installation isn’t quite annoying, neither is it particularly riveting.

* Otis College of Art and Design Gravel Pit, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0564, through May 12. Open daily.