Liddell’s Works Bear Transparent Message

The current art world infatuation with the barely there, the almost missing, the nearly immaterial, etc. is a curious thing. On one hand, it implies that we still haven’t gotten over the relentless noise and bombastic display of the 1980s. On the other, it bears out the sorry notion that most people would be happiest if artists, like children, were neither heard nor seen.

Siobahn Liddell’s art is trendy--to use what has become a pejorative word in a way meant to be descriptive. She works with bits of cellophane, transparent wire and sticks to create sculptures that question the very weight of the term. Her art increasingly ups the invisibility ante, such that Liddell recently showed a piece consisting of nothing but a faint trace of color added to a pilaster.

Though they don’t exactly announce themselves, Liddell’s new works at Kohn/Turner Gallery aren’t too hard to discern. These are drawings on white paper with things cut and punched out of them: little flights of stairs, looping forms that look like the letter B and simple, cursive phrases.

Also on view are block-lettered texts, for which Liddell has become known, formed out of fine bits of copper wire, colored filament and pins. These texts don’t just say their piece; they’re coy, stretching horizontally across walls, turning corners and taking unexpected vertical dips. They conjure Lawrence Weiner’s linguistic commands, though their discretion and low-tech poetry recall Richard Tuttle.

Yet, they aren’t quite poetic enough. One piece reads, “How far do you dare to go before you turn back or how do you know how far to dare as if daring itself is beautiful?” If it is difficult to make out the text, which plays at hiding in and on the wall, the sentiment itself comes across so clearly it dares nothing. Both form and content are thin--miserly rather than romantically insubstantial.

Writing in the 1930s in the Surrealist journal “Minotaure,” Roger Caillois insisted that biological mimicry and camouflage are not adaptive mechanisms but psychotic behaviors, insofar as they signal the subject’s abnegation of the self and surrender to the lure of space. Caillois’ renegade interpretation seems particularly germane today, when the threat of the disappearing artist is all too real.

* Kohn/Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453, through Saturday.

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Compact Construction: I am tempted to say that Henry Vincent’s smallish paintings of familiar Los Angeles buildings are accidentally interesting, which is to say their humor caught me totally off-guard. Silhouetted against the inevitably blue sky are views of the Pacific Design Center, the facade of Nate ‘n’ Al’s restaurant, a flag flying off of the top of Museum Square on Wilshire Boulevard and the seesawing letter R of the Roxy.

Though painterly, and occasionally exaggeratedly so, the works fall flat. They are remarkably, even proudly, dull. Offering neither a complete view (which might be interesting in a historical sort of way) nor a detail so small as to be indistinguishable from an abstraction, these architectural part-images function so obliquely they almost don’t function at all.

Yet they do have something to say, and contemplating their weird reticence suggests that these are cues, prompts or notes, scripted in pictorial shorthand. What these signifiers signify, however, are less the sites they depict than the photographs upon which the paintings of those sites were based.

Certainly Vincent has some interest in kitsch, and the pompous curves of the Forum, the Chinese-style letters of the Formosa Cafe’s sign and the much belated Modernism of the PolyGram building are duly noted. But this isn’t quite the point.

Like Judy Fiskin’s tiny photographs of vernacular architecture, Vincent’s work is about modes of vision and methods of classification. Photographs document effortlessly; paintings don’t. In fact, the very concept of a painting that resists its aesthetic mandate is funny, as John Baldessari’s “Painting That Is Its Own Documentation” will attest.

Vincent’s paintings are likewise funny, but not at all ironic. They sneak into a broader discourse than that to which they play at belonging.

* Kantor Gallery, 8642 Melrose Ave., (310) 659-5388, through April 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Bible Stories: “Sisters and Brothers,” Ruth Weisberg’s installation of paintings at the Laband Art Gallery, reflects upon portions of the Book of Genesis concerned with Isaac’s sons, Esau and Jacob, and Jacob’s wives, Rachel and Leah. Two tiers of 14 paintings are suspended from a massive, tent-like structure that dominates the room.

The paintings are rendered in dark rusts, golds and reds so that they possess the nostalgic quality of Renaissance frescoes or fading photographs. They depict moments of rivalry, deception, betrayal and reconciliation.

Weisberg wants to show that these dramatic instances are both particular to these biblical stories and universal--thus, her insistence upon the characters’ modern dress. That these stories have much to teach us about our own lives, however, is a truism; it doesn’t get at much more than the obvious.

Less obvious is how to deal with the question--or the very possibility--of a religious art in the 1990s. Weisberg attempts to invest her realistic style with spirituality by referring to Renaissance fresco cycles, and by housing the images in an enveloping structure that conjures the eccentricities of Baroque church architecture.

In this century, so thoroughly dominated by secular Modernism, the most spiritual art has tended to be the most abstract. “Brothers and Sisters” isn’t successful enough to suggest a paradigm shift. Any power it possesses resides in the authenticity of its strivings.

* Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, 7900 Loyola Blvd., (310) 338-2880, through April 13. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

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No Way Out: Yunhee Min’s installation at ACME Gallery feels remarkably authoritative, like a declarative sentence, a technological imperative or a traffic chart. Min has painted three walls of the gallery with yellow and red horizontal stripes of varying thicknesses. It’s sort of like being inside a Modernist painting, one that knows what it wants to say and does so with equal parts cool and brio.

Yet it isn’t precisely this, because the field Min creates is not continuous but broken in the middle by a doorway. No matter, though: The effect is of no way out.

If Sol LeWitt’s luscious wall paintings respond to an audience’s desire to be overwhelmed, Min offers the paradox of generosity. Her work is vast, but it is less enveloping than aggressive.

This is due in no small part to that nasty red and that bilious yellow, both of which happen to be “mistints”--specially mixed shades of paint that nobody wanted in the end. As with Daniel Buren’s regulation striped fields, the point is not aesthetic reverie; it is instead to mark off your territory.

* ACME Gallery, 1800 B Berkeley St., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5818, through April 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.