‘Means’ Finds New Meanings in Old Schools of Thought

It must be curious to be an up-and-coming artist today. Given recent history it’s perfectly possible that they started college-level art training when the activity was still considered on the cutting edge of creativity. By the time they graduated, the Cold War had ended and Contemporary Art designated a past period.

How one might cope with all that is clearly and encouragingly demonstrated in “Simple Means: Contemporary Sculpture From Los Angeles” at Pomona College’s Montgomery Gallery. It showcases about five works each by nine artists.

All work inside a system, once liberating, that has grown as confining as any ever concocted. It hedges an artist within so many precedents and prerequisites as to virtually preclude anything approaching an act of structural originality. All this is suggested in catalog essays by curator Steve Comba and his associate Rebecca McGrew.

Reading, we learn that the gray eminence who pulls the aesthetic puppet strings around here is still Marcel Duchamp. He was the rebel who insisted that art is whatever the artist says it is. That seems like a lot of wiggle room but now, almost a century later, the dictum reads more like, “Art is whatever the artists says it is if Duchamp would agree.” Since the canny old Frenchman can no longer speak for himself, that makes jobs for lots of professors, curators and critics who get to impose their notion of what Marcel would have thought on artists who are supposed to be able to think for themselves.

Maybe that’s why one of those on view, Gary Keith, makes works he calls “Marionettes.” Maybe somewhere, down deep, he feels a little manipulated himself. Truth to tell, you’d never guess it from the work. It’s a light-hearted gaggle of things like old kitchen toasters or pet rocks leashed to puppet sticks attached to the wall.

Keith is fairly typical of the group. They seem to know they’re mucked in a historical bog. Rather than succumbing to the annoying self-pity endemic to much of the sphere, they’ve decided to make the best of things and have fun. Not that they’re air-heads. They’re unpretentious, cheeky, smart, funky, brilliantly entertaining and not uncommonly pithy.

Annetta Kapon, like most of the others, works in commonplace materials and objects available at little cost at hardware, dry goods, lumber and similar emporiums. Her “Floor Scale” consists of almost 500 common bathroom scales arranged in a solid mass, on which the viewer is invited to walk. Not only is it a delightfully silly piece of interactive nonsense, it also manages to sneer at present obsession with fitness by registering a different poundage with every step.

Kapon also offers a couple of cameras joined at the lenses in eternal narcissistic preoccupation with celebrity. Her “Your Balance” is a ladder that obliquely suggests the wisdom of avoiding conventional success.

Lynn Aldrich’s wit is elegantly honed. She goes after the consumer society in “Western Civ”--nothing more than a 10-foot-tall pile of paper plates and doilies collapsing into a corner.

There is general preoccupation with celebrating the ephemeral while feeling its poignancy. Patrick Nickell’s “Digging for Gold” is a hopelessly inadequate contraption made of cardboard stuffed with newspaper. Sally Elesby achieves lyric delicacy in structures of unruly colored wire festooned with paper flowers, flesh-colored ribbon and sexy black lace. The work evokes feminine stereotypes with a touching combination of satire and nostalgia.

Terri Friedman is similarly oxymoronic in an installation that ruminates on the state of Sunny Von Bulow. She’s the immensely wealthy woman who, although in a coma for years, is treated like a princess. Friedman evokes all this with a twinkling, visceral Prussian blue lame drapery and a pump that pushes copper glitter liquid through plastic tubing. The effect is a self-canceling rush of sympathy and repulsion.

There is a strong subtext of sarcasm directed at the form of academic Dada the artists themselves practice. In a wall label Michael Gonzalez introduces an anecdote about Aldous Huxley then confesses the literary allusion is a ploy to avoid explaining “my stuff.”

Timothy Nolan comes on like a Bauhaus purist with a lot of chrome and elastic strapping. Then he blows his own cover with “Common Knowledge”--rows of cantilevered books entombed in cotton ribbon and arranged to create an Op Art illusion.

Another general theme--an ambiguous preoccupation with power and complication--focuses in Christian Mounger’s “Jamboree.” It’s a swag of cheerful-looking whistles of the type worn around the neck by cops, umpires and camp counselors.

“Simple Means” asserts that an art need not die even after it’s institutionalized and historically passe. Look at jazz. Look at these new sculptors. They’re rococo but they’re not boring.

* Pomona College, Montgomery Gallery, 550 College Ave., Claremont; through Oct. 13, closed Mondays, (909) 621-8283.