History in Colors, Collars

The giddy optimism embodied by oddly familiar, bright-colored circles floating in empty space drew my attention to one of Michael Gonzalez’s “Wonder Bread” pieces at a group show in Santa Monica last year.

Snipped from plastic bread wrappers, arranged in various patterns and fastened between slices of plastic, the works’ buoyant imagery evokes the popular but much-derided bread’s heyday in the ‘60s.

“Wonder” was the operative word at a time of space exploration, drug experimentation and still-burgeoning optimism in the U.S. economy and its amazing products, including a cottony, vitamin-studded bread that promised to help kids “build strong bodies 12 ways.”

It turns out that Gonzalez has done all sorts of other interesting things, some of which are collected in a delicious show organized by curator Marilu Knode: “Michael Gonzalez: Look Busy,” at the Huntington Beach Art Center. Its companion piece is “Joseph Havel,” an exhibition of work by another idiosyncratic Southern California artist, organized by guest curator Peter Doroshenko with an exquisitely perceptive essay by David Pagel, a Times art reviewer.

Together, these shows (both through June 16) make the center’s galleries glow with the quiet assertiveness of highly intelligent new work. Viewers may well be reminded of the late, lamented “New California Artist” series at Newport Harbor Art Museum, when Knode and her mentor Anne Ayres--now director of the Otis Art Gallery in Los Angeles--were running that program.

“Look Busy” surveys Gonzalez’s output primarily from the past eight years. In 1988 he began embedding erasers in small sheets of silicone or urethane squeezed between sheets of glass held together by little clips. These works, all mysteriously titled “U.T. (EP),” are quite luscious, with their luminous areas of color, piquant geometric shapes and use of lettering as a formal motif.

But the work is really an illustration of how to fit oneself into the history of modern art (much as the erasers neatly slot into their places) while managing to be utterly contemporary.

*

Erasers are humble draftsmen’s tools, but they imply the power to negate everything that has been created. Harnessing the mute power of these tiny revolutionaries, Gonzalez calls attention to the enshrinement of succeeding generations of artistic innovation. Most famously, Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased DeKooning Drawing” of the early 1950s was an audacious bid to wipe out the ultra-serious Abstract Expressionist hegemony and replace it with the celebration of provocative gestures.

Gonzalez also alludes to other aspects of modern art in these pieces, including the look of Russian Constructivist paintings, Kurt Schwitters’ Dadaist collages from the 1920s and commercial-art adaptations that have lingered into our era.

Some of Gonzalez’s metal pieces also have a striking visual presence. An untitled piece consists of drooping lengths of metal braid with tapering ends individually hung on the wall to form what looks like a drizzle of vaguely menacing graffiti in an alien script.

In a different mood, “Key Ring Matrix” employs black and metal-colored rings in a three-dimensional pattern reminiscent of Op Art paintings. By translating a short-lived, hard-edged painting style with sophisticated aspirations into a homespun construction that sets up softly echoing shadow patterns on the wall, Gonzalez offers a wry alternative to the lock step of technological and stylistic innovation.

*

Havel also works with some unlikely materials: shirt labels, collars and buttons. Once again, this is work deeply aware of the weight of modern art’s history. In “Tumbling,” for example, the tall stack of white shirt collars balancing on one another inevitably recalls the soaring totems of Constantin Brancusi.

But, as Pagel explains, the work is really about what happens when you pay attention to it--about the way ordinary materials can, in his words, “rise to the occasion.”

Men’s dress shirts naturally suggest issues relating to white collar labor: climbing the corporate ladder; dressing for success. But Havel doesn’t limit himself to obvious sociological references, preferring to let the imagination--his and ours--roam.

His shirt collars balance adroitly: some on the points of their collars; others, slipped down slightly, like acrobats steadying themselves in preparation for the next stunt. Facing in alternating directions, the collars have a sort of Janus-like aspect (as if looking both into the past and the future), a counterpoint to the “aspiring” quality of the rising column.

In this sense, “Tumbling” can be seen as an open-ended allegory of human endeavor at the same time that it invokes a delicate, almost Dada-esque spirit of playfulness recalling the gently witty, early films of experimentalist Hans Richter.

Other works in the exhibition involve the viewer’s changing perceptions of such things as tiny clustered objects (shirt labels suspended from the wall by shirt pins) or seemingly weightless bronze shirt-sleeves supporting one another with the greatest of ease. Magical is the word for these subtle and quietly sunny works of art.

*

“Action Required” (through May 12), a show guest-curated by Michael Lewis Miller, occupies the center’s third gallery. The idea was to assemble a group of works that require active involvement and, as Miller writes, “conscious use of creative imagination” on the part of the viewer.

Unfortunately, little thought seems to have been given by most of the artists as to what constitutes a fruitful creative discovery and how to maximize the possibility that viewers will have one. The pieces tend to offer materials lacking in striking visual or tactile appeal, and the presentation is generally either too open-ended (heaps of stuff) or too limiting.

Conversely, Young Chi’s “Two,” is very simple, very specific--similar, in fact, to a party game--yet likely to offer an unusual experience and a certain level of insight. You select a short piece of cord and fasten one end to your wrist, the other to a partner’s. After going about your business this way for at least 10 minutes, while trying to act normally, you untie yourselves and discuss the experience.

Tulsa Kinney plays a crafty little game with viewers in “Psychological Moment,” a mock-up of a psychoanalyst’s office, hung with nutty thrift store-type paintings.

Suckered into watching a boring, one-sided reenactment of a therapy session, you may not at first realize that the piece is really about the moment when you, the “patient,” define your terms by choosing the specific counseling tape you want to watch.

Leland Means’ “Thunderation”--a big sheet of metal that produces a crack of thunder when you activate the handle--also amply fulfills the mission of this show by satisfyingly mingling feelings of God-like power, hokey stagecraft and the simple, slightly anarchic, pleasure of making a big noise.

Time spent trying to get involved with most of the other pieces might pass more fruitfully in the Havel exhibition, where your imagination can go to work on “Seam III.” This delicate, almost invisible piece consists of a row of ordinary shirt buttons marching up a bare wall. When you finally spy them--at first as barely more than glints of light--the gallery gently metamorphoses into giant white shirt.

* “Michael Gonzalez: Look Busy,” “Joseph Havel” (both through June 16) and “Action Required” (through May 12), Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St., Huntington Beach. Hours: Noon-6 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday; noon-8 p.m. Wednesday; noon-9 p.m. Friday, Saturday; noon-4 p.m. Sunday. General admission: $3, students and seniors $2. (714) 374-1650.