ART REVIEWS : Russians Give Americans What They Want

Everyone knows that art can never be all things to all people. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, a pair of Russian emigre artists who have worked together for more than 20 years, deliver the next best thing: art that contains the highest number of popular elements for the majority of people, as determined by a poll of a cross-section of U.S. citizens.

At the Huntington Beach Art Center, “People’s Choice: The Polling of America” presents a devious display of bar graphs, pie charts and bound volumes filled with surprisingly concise data about American taste. An abundance of information--broken down into such categories as style, color, subject and size and summarized in terms of ethnicity, gender, class, region and education--is available for interpretation and analysis.

As you move through the censuslike show, a general picture of what Americans want from art begins to come clear in your mind’s eye. Traditional subjects are preferred to modern ones; blue is by far the most popular color; blended colors are chosen over unmixed juxtapositions; wild animals are valued above domestic ones; and pictures the size of TV screens are more desirable than those the size of paperbacks, refrigerators or walls.

After you’ve grown accustomed to scanning the large abstract graphs and charts, the two paintings on the gallery’s back wall come as something of a shock. Only upon reading their wall labels do you realize that one of these modestly scaled oils-on-canvas represents just what most Americans want to see in art and that the other is made up of the least popular ingredients.

“America’s Most Wanted” depicts an autumn landscape with a large lake on whose shore stand three tourists, George Washington, a pair of deer and a partially submerged hippopotamus, each savoring nature’s splendor and oblivious to the other figures. By contrast, “America’s Most Unwanted” is a puny, angular abstraction in bright yellows and discordant oranges.

Both paintings have an air of failure about them, despite fulfilling all the established requirements. Their jobs, after all, are impossible. No work of art, no matter how well-researched, can embody general qualities.

Komar and Melamid use their sly, humorous project to demonstrate that art works only in terms of specifics, according to individual responses and by means of concrete particulars. Answering generic demands, like the overall taste of American citizens, results in pictures that are a far cry from anything any single citizen would hang on his walls.

* Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St., Huntington Beach, (714) 374-1650, through Nov. 12. Closed Mondays.

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Poetic Whiplash: One of the four 7-by-5-foot drawings in Raymond Pettibon’s dense installation of 48 mostly page-size works on paper at Regen Projects begins with these words: “I gazed on you with eyes too weak to resist the dazzle of your splendor.” This lofty sentence, hastily inscribed above a drawing of a man in uniform, seems to describe the lone figure’s deeply intimate reverie--possibly his fond recollection of a long-gone love or his momentary powerlessness before a sublime object of art.

In slightly smaller letters on the work’s lower right side, Pettibon has penned, “A called third strike.” To viewers, it’s suddenly clear that the you in the first sentence is not an irresistible romance or a beautiful work of art, but an ordinary baseball that has just whizzed past the batter as he stood there, costing him his chance to get a hit.

To read the rest of the abbreviated poetry with which Pettibon has captioned almost all of his poignant pictures is to subject yourself to a series of similar whiplash movements, from highfalutin’ grandeur to everyday happenstance.

Unlike much art inspired by comic books, Pettibon’s swiftly rendered images never drag refined ideas down to earth merely to emphasize the banality and emptiness that pervade modern life. On the contrary, this crowded, salon-style installation of new works, punctuated by about a third dating from the last 10 years, relishes the fact that at any given moment a seemingly insignificant detail can feel like the center of the universe.

Pettibon’s highly intelligent, low-brow drawings offer a nuanced, often moving meditation on aimlessness, indecision and missed opportunities. Their profound melancholy never slips into despair, because it is always tempered by art’s real power: not to transcend mundane experience, but to momentarily redeem it from meaninglessness.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276- 5424, through Oct. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.