The Starch of Triumph : Using Bread and Shirts, 2 Artists Make Their Points in Huntington

Oh, the Wonder of it all.

In his book “The Total Package,” design critic Thomas Hine draws a straight line between the monstrance--a heavily adorned container for the bread used in the Roman Catholic liturgy--and the white plastic festooned with red, yellow and blue balloons that is a baby-boomer icon, the Wonder bread wrapper.

The job of both, after all, is to call attention to the invisible within--the presence of Christ within the bread in the case of the monstrance, and the nutritional additives that are said to build strong bodies 12 ways in the case of Wonder. “In the interest of selling a product, rather than partaking of God, modern packaging makes some similar gestures,” Hine writes.

As with so many heavily marketed commodities, other associations abound, from a sunny, early-’60s optimism (ergo TV’s “The Wonder Years”) to darker visions of mass-produced homogeneity. Wonder is a white bread among white breads.

When Michael Gonzalez looks at the Wonder wrapper, he sees, among other things, an encapsulation of recent art history. The Santa Monica artist’s succinct constructions (he calls them “paintings”) from Wonder wrappers are one large part of a body of work currently surveyed at the Huntington Beach Art Center.

“In one Wonder logo, you could construe the entire history of 20th century art,” said Gonzalez, going on to name artists from Piet Mondrian to John Baldassare and styles including Cubism, Dada, Pop, Conceptualism and Minimalism.

His series of Wonder bread works, with bits of wrapper sandwiched between layers of acrylic and held away from the gallery wall, are also a critique on synthetic culture, Gonzalez has said. But the works’ playful and kinetic--sometimes swarming--repetition of the colorful logo and balloons are also an attempt to draw from, and reflect on, the hyper-speed world of computer-generated TV advertising.

“I’m trying to grab a slab of that overstimulation and fix it in time,” Gonzalez said in an interview while the exhibition was being installed last week. “I kind of see myself as a cargo cultist,” grabbing onto bits of postmodern Americana and looking on them as a primitive might, as fetishes from a culture upon which he can only look on--in wonder, naturally.

“Everything,” Gonzalez says, earnestly, “is just so overwhelming.”

During the 11 years chronicled in the Huntington Beach survey, Gonzalez has worked with an unusual array of materials, including erasers, sheets of silicon, metal shaft collars and copper braiding.

The materials present him with challenges of form and of meaning, leading him on a journey that is largely improvisational. “That’s mainly what I do is experiment around,” Gonzalez said.

From the shaft collars, for instance, he created “Shaft Collar Demonstrator No. 3” (1990), a grid-like array of interlocking rings, and the softer “Nude No. 6” (1990), a reclining shape that recalls sculptures by Henry Moore. “Occasionally, these things just fly together,” he said of the latter work. “I tried to do it again, and I just couldn’t.”

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His series of Wonder paintings, which started innocently enough, illustrate his open approach. “Somebody gave me a roll of laminating plastic, and I was laminating everything in my studio,” he recalled. It just so happened that he had been eating hot dogs, with a bag of buns in his studio, and . . . well, the rest should be obvious.

“A new avenue opened up,” Gonzalez said. The overlapping Wonder logos, on clear plastic, were “like the skin of a painting, without the canvas and the canvas stretcher.” From there the works evolved in technical sophistication and variety.

Gonzalez makes modest claims for his works: “My two cents’ worth is all it is. . . . It’s a point of departure for talking about things.”

For the most part, his works are small--most of the eraser paintings are only 5 by 7 inches--and Gonzalez prefers to see them as experimental approaches to aesthetic and conceptual concerns “rather than making some kind of broad statement.”

“I would get paralyzed if I were commissioned to do some big public art project,” he says. “History is a burden. Everything has been done, it seems sometimes. I’m not a big picture guy.”

Gonzalez admits to being something of an odd man out while at CalArts in the early ‘80s, as a maker of small, discreet objects at a time when photo-text pieces and large installations were de rigueur. “I was making little rubber fetishes,” Gonzalez said. “I came out as this regressive little thing-maker.”

The artist says now that he is glad to have graduated with his artistic innocence intact. “It helps to be really naive. Knowing what I know now, I don’t think I would have even tried [becoming a professional artist]. I would have been intimidated by too many artists making too many grand statements. . . . Luckily, I got momentum before I realized what I was into.”

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Joseph Havel is another artist working with nontraditional materials.

His exhibition, which opened alongside Gonzalez’s, focuses on the man’s white work shirt.

There are tiny shirt tags, painstakingly pinned to the wall in rows and collectively resembling a tone painting; shirt collars, hung ceiling to floor with monofilament line; full shirts, stretched, twisted and bronzed; and other creations.

The works were all created for this show by the Houston-based artist, who has built a reputation in Texas and Seattle but is little-known in Southern California.

“I start with an object that has implications, and take it apart and ask questions about it,” Havel said. (An earlier medium the artist explored was lampshades.) With the work shirts, there are issues of fashion and of power, even of whiteness itself: “Why are galleries white? The implication of that . . . is never really explored. . . . What looks very simple has other kinds of echoes and meanings.”

In creating a body of work for this exhibit, “I wanted a very focused show so there would be this kind of intense experience,” he said, adding later, “I want it to be rich and complicated, like life is.”

* “Michael Gonzalez: Look Busy” (curated by Marilu Knode) and “Joseph Havel” (curated by Peter Doroshenko) are on view through June 16 at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St., Huntington Beach. Gallery hours are Tuesday and Wednesday, noon to 6 p.m.; Wednesday, noon to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, noon to 9 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. (714) 374-1650.