ART REVIEWS : A Wry Survey of What Artists Collect

While reams have been written about what motivates artists to create (love, genius, ambition, insecurity or any number of other gifts or pathologies), very little has been said of the collector’s drive to accumulate. “Neotoma,” curated by artist Renee Petropolous at the Otis College of Art and Design Gallery, entangles both questions by taking a very wry look at artists whose mania is collecting.

According to Webster’s Third New International, Neotoma is the name of “a genus of rodents (family cricetidae) comprising the wood rats or pack rats of western North America.” Certainly its rarity and melodiousness make the word itself worth collecting, and Petropolous pulls it out as a metaphor for an interesting group of artists enamored of video clips from public access cable shows (including New Age aerobics and Christian puppetry); aluminum Christmas trees (among them the venerable Sparkler Pom-Pom model); Mikasa tableware, in shades of olive and rust; and various salvaged goods and flea-market finds, all perfectly suited to fulfill the non-needs generated by the nostalgia industry.

The show is beautifully installed, with Pae White’s Vera scarves floating overhead, Uta Barth’s rubber duckies (some of which are neither rubber nor duckies) flanking one wall like a plucked regiment and David Muller’s white silk bubble-lamps lending a sophisticated note.

It is also full of surprises. One might have predicted that Mike Kelley would collect felt school banners, or that Jeffrey Vallance would go for kitschy religious magnets, but who would have thought that Daniel J. Martinez would hoard slivers of soap, their minimal beauty totally at odds with his usual penchant for multilayered multimedia?

“Neotoma” raises a number of provocative questions, including the question of how to distinguish between creating and collecting in a post-Duchampian universe, where every object seems to come equipped with an aura, even before the artist lays a finger on it. Not unexpectedly, Jim Shaw is included here, represented not by his collection of thrift store paintings (which emblematize this whole paradox), but by a treasure trove of vintage pulp-paperbacks which, as displayed here, quite resemble an artwork by Nayland Blake. So it goes down this particular slippery slope, which, to Petropolous’ credit, is precisely the point.

* Otis College of Art and Design, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0500, through Nov . 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Seductive Mystery: It is difficult to argue that Pae White doesn’t simply want to be obfuscatory. Look at the evidence amassed in “Summer Work,” her new show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. Here are framed copies of the back pages of a German catalogue she recently designed; large wood and plexiglass structures inspired by those she created for a Gregg Araki film she worked on this summer; and white couches shaped after the moons, stars, clovers and hearts in Lucky Charms cereal.

None of this information is available to someone stumbling upon the exhibition. The uninitiated viewer is confronted only by the artist’s obvious delight in color, interest in typography, attraction to defunct design tropes and reverence for mistakes--aesthetically pleasing and otherwise.

It is difficult to escape the feeling that there is a system somewhere in all this, and an ironic sensibility, too (a tiny mobile is priced the same as the huge wooden structures which flank it). But precisely how it all works remains mysterious.

And yet, this mystery is a large part of the work’s seductiveness. Like many of her contemporaries, particularly those schooled at the Art Center College of Design (including T. Kelly Mason, David Bailey and others), White practices a kind of hermetic hermeneutics--cocooning theory and language games within an intensely personal web of reference. The gamble is that the visual environment the artist creates will sufficiently intrigue the viewer to want to participate in the excavation of meaning.

That retrieving all the meanings is impossible makes the work itself all the more desirable. It isn’t just that it feels wonderful to fall into the clutches of someone who knows/feels/experiences more than you do (this is the Modernist model). Rather, it feels wonderful to stumble upon someone willing (but not too willing) to show you how to keep a secret.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Oct . 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.