Checking Out Poetic Vision That’s Already in the Cards

While working on a public art commission at the newly restored L.A. Central Library, David Bunn salvaged the entire contents of the library’s deactivated card catalog. At Burnett Miller, he makes a spectacle of the card catalog’s obsolescence while culling poetry from the ruins.

Elegant and droll, Bunn’s work has been missed over the past few years. In the meantime, however, something distinctly romantic--perhaps even sentimental--has been thrown into the mix.

If the stark white walls of the gallery make a fetish of the new, Bunn takes pains to celebrate discards. Labeled from A to Z and stacked so that they cover an entire wall, cardboard boxes of the now-defunct catalog cards bear the irresistible patina of age. Masquerading as a massive three-dimensional grid, these forms slyly pay homage to their contents--the tens of thousands of cards they continue to conceal.

Those cards that have been liberated serve the cause of poetry. Emblazoned with shifting typefaces and yellowed to various pleasing shades, they are layered and framed so that the titles of the books to which they refer form the basis for Bunn’s own slightly condensed lines of verse. These are themselves framed and placed directly above their sources. The humor lies in the juxtapositions, which have the virtue of appearing random despite the obvious care with which they have been made.

“Stuttering and Allied Disorders/Stuttering and Lisping/Stuttering and What You Can Do About It,” for example, is paired with “Take a Number/Take a Number/Take a Number/Take a Number/Take a Number/Take a Number, Darling.” The pleasure at discovering such an absurd concatenation of book titles is matched by the pleasure of watching the text repeat itself several times before getting out another word.

Bunn is fond of textual gymnastics, but he is cautious about getting too cute. Not unexpectedly, then, several of the ad hoc poems comment upon his own self-effacing brand of conceptualism. Among them: “How Sweet It Is/How Sweet It Was” and “It’s Never Over/It’s Never Over Too Late/It’s Never Over Too Late/It’s Never Too Late to Learn.”

* Burnett Miller, 2525 Michigan Ave., B-2, Santa Monica, (310) 315-9961, through May 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Feminine Critique: Rachel Lachowicz received a great deal of media attention several years back for re-creating well-known modernist masterpieces--Richard Serra’s steel pieces or Carl Andre’s lead squares, for example--in bright red lipstick and multicolored eye shadow.

If her approach was equal parts wicked, aggressive, indispensable and simplistic, one hoped that Lachowicz would move on from there. This exhibition of new work at Shoshana Wayne suggests that figuring out precisely where to go has been difficult.

Here, Lachowicz remains pretty much true to form. A series of open cubes, for example--one made of wood; another of metal, punctuated with bits of red lipstick; another of flexible white rubber; and a fourth of lipstick-red rubber, collapsed on the ground--refer to work by Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris’ 1970s critique of the Minimalism LeWitt emblematized and Lachowicz’s feminist critique of the whole lot.

The problem, of course, is that celebrating “feminine” materials or subject matter (as in Lachowicz’s “Form Into Uniform Into Formlessness,” in which a white miniskirt undergoes the kind of transformations LeWitt reserved for the cube) can only be a preliminary step. Feminizing what has been a masculine discourse is strategic, but inverting male logic still leaves male logic, however disguised. What is elided in the formula are the particularities of female desire, that “riddle” that Freud, among a legion of others, never dared to figure out.

In “Was ist Loos,” Lachowicz begins to get at something more provocative. It juxtaposes a photograph of Adolph Loos’ design for a never-built house for Josephine Baker, a photograph of herself as the famed chanteuse and a sleeping bag/structure that represents Lachowicz’s attempt to fulfill Loos’ desire to fulfill Baker’s desire. (According to her memoirs, Baker doesn’t even remember having met Loos.) Seductive, complicated and implicitly feminist, the piece suggests how the artist might move forward without abandoning her own history.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B-1, Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through May 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.