Framing the American Experience From 1820-1920

An extraordinary exhibition of more than 60 empty picture frames at Tatistcheff/Rogers Gallery provides a concise and detailed survey of American frame design from 1820 to 1920. Organized by frame restorers and dealers Tracy Gill and Simeon Lagodich, this beautifully installed show traces a nation’s changing tastes and aspirations.

Plain, unpainted folk art frames hang alongside ostentatious displays of cast and carved ornamentation, often including red velvet liners, layers of gold leaf and elaborate, hand-painted patterns. Odd, asymmetrical representations of fruits and flowers play off lavish, rococo abstractions and neat, streamlined designs.

Transformations in frame design imply transformations in America’s view of art’s purposes. In the 1820s, simple, gilded moldings based on the clean lines of Greek Revival architecture accompanied the radically democratic idea that art was a practical part of every citizen’s life. The conservative notion that art is primarily a sign of its owner’s cultural refinement is evident in adaptations of frilly French designs.

A preponderance of exquisite, naturalistic detail marked frames from the mid-19th century, when paintings of sublime landscapes were fashionable. As the country became more urbane and city dwellers wished to demonstrate their cosmopolitan knowledge of historical antecedents, far-flung styles intermingled in single frames, causing each to resemble a strangely Postmodern travelogue through various places and ages.

At the turn of the century, sturdy Arts and Crafts frames marked a distinctly American return to hands-on, down-home values. Charles and Maurice Prendergast signed and dated the frames they made for their paintings, suggesting the frames too, were works of art.

For all the impressive variety of singular and mass-produced frames in the exhibition, each one once functioned as a buffer zone between the image it circumscribed and the world outside.

Simultaneously separating and integrating art and its surroundings, all frames provide a sliver of space in which pictures might begin to do their unpredictable work on viewers. This is the space that has been off limits since Modernist abstraction and political activism came to dominate art, removing the frame in an attempt to eliminate the distance in which creative (mis)interpretations take place.

* Tatistcheff/Rogers Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1240, through Feb. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Conceptual Shift: At Thomas Solomon’s Garage, a sharply focused show of one early and one recent work by each of three pioneering Conceptualists delineates this movement’s largely successful attempt to shift art away from visual experience--out of galleries or museums and toward logical or arbitrary structures that involve aspects of time and linguistic propositions.

Three pieces from 1969, 1970 and 1971 document the lean, fresh irreverence of early Conceptualism. Douglas Huebler’s small watercolor playfully asserts that images deceive and words tell the truth. Robert Barry’s slim poem optimistically insists that art--meaning thought--is a matter of how you look at the world, not what you see there. And Sol LeWitt’s instructions for making a wall drawing demonstrate that anyone can be an artist if you just put in the time.

Three pieces from the past three years, however, mark a dulling of Conceptualism’s critical edge. Huebler’s printed message, superimposed over a landscape painted in acrylic on canvas, acknowledges the power of pictures, but only as a distraction from language’s true power. Barry’s evocative, individual words, floating at various angles over a pristine wall, and LeWitt’s pretty gouache, depicting irregular, color-coordinated vertical bands, entirely rely on their placement in a gallery or museum.

All three artists’ recent work gets into trouble because it embraces the space of the gallery while maintaining its makers’ original antipathy toward the visual. Late Conceptualism’s critique of visual experience thus becomes a symbolic exercise: captivating not because it’s effective in the real world, but because it’s interesting to look at in a gallery.

Also at Thomas Solomon’s Garage, Linda Hudson’s multiuse installation in the upstairs gallery makes the best of classic Conceptualism, maintaining its desire to dematerialize the art object without rehashing its hypocritical assault on visual experience. Rather than replaying language games or flirting with the power of words, Hudson’s multi-part art revels in the mysteries of the visible.

Titled “Made to Order,” her mesmerizing work deftly plays off the small room’s status as both a gallery and an office. To confuse ordinary distinctions between functional objects and art, Hudson has built a beautiful desk that disappears into the wall. She has also installed a simple polyurethane bench so that its seat and back are far apart and perpendicular to one another, causing furniture to do double duty as a creamy monochrome painting.

Hudson’s backless bench can function as a table for three large glass bowls resting on the floor on a sheet of glass the exact size of the bench. These shallow, translucent vessels seem to overflow with light that pours through a pair of large windows in the opposite corner.

A small abstract landscape painting, framed only on its sides and top, provides a clue to Hudson’s light-handed art. This piece’s only foundation is the thin air over which it’s suspended. Likewise, Hudson’s installation pulls the rug out from under your feet, transforming the seemingly empty spaces between things into an almost tactile presence that may not be fully visible, but is undeniably sensual.

* Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through Feb. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Color Casts: Gorgeous, funny and endlessly fascinating, Ken Price’s ceramic and bronze sculptures at L.A. Louver Gallery rank among the best to come out of Los Angeles. Bigger than anything the consummate craftsman has made over his relentlessly inventive 35-year career, these pearlescent, candy-colored blobs are at once playful and lurid.

The largest appear to be meteorites from a bubble gum galaxy. Sexy folds among their rounded contours occasionally open onto shadowy cavities more inviting than threatening.

“Celtic,” “Bubbles” and “Bronzoni” resemble gigantic molars worn smooth from use, then fossilized in some sort of radioactive stew. Spray-painted with layers of shimmering acrylic, “Celibate,” “Phantom,” “The Squeeze” and “The Kink” change colors as you walk around them, radiating an unnatural, chameleonic glow. Smaller works, like “Bogo Stuff” and “Shapely,” fuse salmon, olive and lavender, transforming bad taste into startling beauty.

Promiscuously mixing metaphors, Price’s fecund sculptures generously demonstrate that when visual pleasure is at stake, nothing is out of bounds. With seeming ease, they deliver pizazz and refinement.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Feb. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.