ART REVIEWS : Musings on the Artist’s Commodity Status

In a famous, cleverly staged 1960 photograph, French artist Yves Klein leaped from a second-story window into the void, for the benefit of all those who would question the transcendent nature of art. In 1989’s “From Fall to Fall,” Swiss conceptualist IanAnull juxtaposed Klein’s magical image with a sequence of newspaper photographs that documented an unknown squatter jumping from an apartment building onto an inflatable mattress set up by a rescue team below.

Anull’s point was to argue that art conceived outside a socio-economic context necessarily falls prey to narcissism. If this smacks a bit of self-righteousness, Anull’s work is generally lighter in tone--if no less serious.

This goes for new work at Ruth Bachofner Gallery. In his trademark manner--half-preachy and half-arch--Anull insists that the art world hinges upon the commodity status of the artist.

A perfect example of his sly approach to this Post-Conceptual truism is a backward letter R, painted in glistening silver on aluminum. It’s both the mirror-image of the international symbol for a registered trademark and the Cyrillic signifier for I.

Anull is drawn equally to polemics and absurdity. The leitmotif of the show is a sickeningly strawberry-colored stick of chewing gum that figures in a series of small watercolors. Nicely aged, broken in two and drunkenly swaddled in crumbled foil, one piece of gum parodies the poetic nostalgia attributed to sculptural assemblage. Another becomes the central panel in a miniature stripe-painting.

A solid pink painting (the dimensions of a piece of gum multiplied 10 times) and a solid pink wall painting (the dimensions of a piece multiplied 100 times) apotheosize gum as endlessly fungible material and the monochrome painting as a consumer collectible. Titled “In the Museum, At Home,” this work speaks to the monetary and aesthetic value of the art object in relation to its architectural frame. And it does so without surrendering any of its own entertainment value.

Other pieces are less successful, particularly an assemblage featuring a pair of high-heeled shoes poised on a stack of canvases, sheets of felt and foam rubber. It seems derivative of Sylvie Fleurie’s work, and somewhat self-conscious about it--a misstep for an artist whose strength is that he is never nonplussed.

* Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 2046 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, through Aug. 19. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Poignant: “Starting With Fontana,” a show of Italian paintings and sculptures at Patricia Faure Gallery, is beautiful and poignant, like a slow-motion fall from grace.

Organized by Helene De Franchis, of Verona’s Studio La Citta, the show contains works that date from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, and extending to Alberto Garutti’s recent objects, they incarnate perfection only to mar its surface, shatter its symmetry and mourn its impossibility.

A certain violence is attendant to disillusion, nowhere more clearly than in Fontana’s work. An exquisite, Brancusi-like oval is disfigured by a finger-like gouge, as if the sculpture were made of excrement instead of bronze. And a white canvas is covered with a spherical grid of puncture holes--obsessive rage disguised as Minimalist rigor.

Marco Gastini’s plexiglass panels follow in this tradition. Covered with fine, graphite markings that look like ignominious smudges, they are both delicate and obscene. So, too, are Gastini’s grid paintings of black dots on white, in which a few darker black dots infiltrate the ordered, pictorial space without obeying its logic, as if succumbing to their own desire.

Indeed, the Minimalist aesthetic that seems to want to dominate here is overcome by passion and the forces of unreason. The result is Conceptual art that is stunningly human.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave . , Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Aug. 18. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Triumph of Convenience: Like flow-charts documenting the death of romantic niceties (romance is time, time is money and money doesn’t grow on trees) Graham Gillmore’s word paintings at William Turner Gallery configure the triumph of convenience.

What is necessary, above all, is a quick fix on things, and this work is appropriately frantic. Borrowed from advertisements on the back pages of cheap tabloids hawking inflatable dolls, ceiling-mounted mirrors and all manner of sexual aids and surrogates, Gillmore’s filched texts are etched on lacquered Masonite surfaces, like cigarette burns on Formica.

Crammed into awkward rows and columns, which can be read vertically, horizontally or both, these texts form truncated narratives geared to impatient consumers who can’t be bothered with getting it right. Certain key words and phrases jump out: mirror-like ; and quickly ; safe ; the large ; effortlessly . Each is contained within its own bubble, a quick metaphor for the airless, joyless, radically discontinuous vision of sexuality promulgated throughout the mass-mediated cosmos.

The work, paradoxically, exudes the same neurotic, erotic energy that is its subject. Or maybe it’s not so much paradoxical, just symptomatic.

* William Turner Gallery, 69 Market St., Venice, (310) 392-8399, through Aug . 13. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Odd Couple: At Sharon Truax Fine Art is the work of two very different British artists. David Hosie is the younger of the pair, and well-known in Scotland, where he was awarded the Royal Glasgow Prize in 1993.

His paintings of pensive youths, moony lovers and half-dressed femmes fatales surrounded by rueful admirers, like the Virgin encircled by saints, are distinctly perverse. They borrow from German Expressionism and Surrealism, but where these styles are overheated, Hosie is ice-cold. His paintings are affectless, but not unaffecting. Though inert for the moment, they are poised to implode at the first, unguarded glance.

Harry Holland’s work is more academic and, accordingly, uninspiring. A specialist in the kind of female nude that isn’t spicy enough to be really exploitative, but is bland enough to fulfill any fantasy, Holland isn’t embarrassed to pander.

Photography is a strong reference point. These pictures look quite a bit like studio shots, with an over-reliance on bolts of drapery and would-be subtle lighting. The insistent soft-focus recalls Pictorialist photography, and the artfully arched bodies recall those in pin-up calendars.

Only one image--of a sultry nude who seems to be smothering herself with a white cloth--elicits any interest. But its black humor, being unintentional, isn’t very funny.

* Sharon Truax Fine Art, 1625 Electric Ave . , Venice, (310) 396-3162, through July 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.