Crafting Forms Steeped in Playfulness

Since the mid-1970s, Peter Shire has been making impeccably crafted objects that are usually called “teapots”--words being as elastic as they are--but probably shouldn’t be. Despite possessing all the requisite parts--handles, bodies, spouts--these witty, occasionally acrobatic and usually architectonic creations couldn’t be further from the generic version perched on your stove, or indeed the playful pumpkin, Noah’s ark or gingerbread house-shaped jobs at your local five-and-dime.

Shire’s merrily nonutilitarian pots--some dating from the ‘80s, most brand-new--are now showing at Frank Lloyd Gallery. With their designer colors, perverse morphologies, industrial look and arty allusions, they stake out a position in the strange but attractive space where categories collide.

All of them play around with geometric form. This can mean glistening golden globes emanating from an assemblage of cones and interrupted planes, like a Constructivist painting extruded into 3-D; or, a make-believe orange slice balanced on top of what looks to be a watering can with a cocktail-olive spout; or, in the most elaborate example, a teapot-cum-tableau, which masquerades as a scale model of a Postmodern piazza, complete with already ruined colonnades.

These latter pieces strain a bit at being charming, and if on occasion the teapots are less insouciant than they should be, this is the rule in Shire’s sculpture, which is concurrently on view at Bobbie Greenfield Gallery. Again, the Constructivist forms are trotted out, in combination with polished tree branches, paint-speckled wedges, raw wood planks and steel armatures. But they suffer the ignominious fate of being used as props in a rather dull, Tinkertoy-esque experiment.

These works are meant to be whimsically subversive, but in trying to have it both ways they are neither. Buying into the notion that art is entertainment is a dangerous gambit--especially here, where Hollywood already does it better.

* Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866; and Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-0640, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Into the Light: Eric Orr’s “Electrum” at Fred Hoffman Fine Art invites you to move through a series of receding spaces. On the level of metaphor, the experience might have translated into the passage from the ridiculous to the sublime, if Orr’s vision of the sublime weren’t itself so ridiculous.

To get to “Electrum” you have to navigate Hoffman’s first gallery, whose bright lights and garish Tom Wesselmann painting don’t exactly set the mood for spiritual enlightenment. You proceed, in any case, into two darkened chambers.

The first is covered in sheets of lead. Its doorway acts as a frame for the space beyond: a carpeted and soundproofed hall, at the end of which is the installation’s raison d’e^tre--a vertical panel of “electrum,” which consists of gold and silver combined as they were centuries ago in obelisks and the summits of pyramids.

The panel glows with what I am tempted to say is an unearthly light, both circumscribed and unbounded. But it’s difficult not to let cynicism take over as you find yourself literally walking toward the light--the hitch being that near-death experiences in art galleries aren’t exactly rare occurrences.

Orr is one of the key figures in the Light and Space movement, and this piece is a variation upon “Silence and the Ion Wind,” a well-known installation he created at the L.A. County Museum of Art almost 20 years ago. Yet despite its pedigree, “Electrum” exemplifies a New Age techno-spirituality rather than Robert Irwin’s or James Turrell’s uncanniness.

The pungent scent of negative ions being pumped into the gallery, thanks to the Alpine Non-Filter Air Purification System, doesn’t help matters. Instead of pacifying nervous Moderns, it--quite like this whole setup--does nothing so much as trigger skepticism, the healthy albeit old-fashioned kind.

* Fred Hoffman Fine Art, 1721 Stewart St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3330, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Personal Painting: Steve Hurd’s new paintings at Dan Bernier Gallery are simulations of a sort. There are magazine advertisements for hand-crafted dolls, the cover of the art world gossip sheet Coagula, Andrew Wyeth’s kitsch classic “Christina’s World” and more.

Though he’s capable of precious, trompe l’oeil renderings (witness the shelves of Olde English 800 malt liquor bottles that materialize here and there out of nowhere, like hallucinations), Hurd muddies up his art world still lifes with the full battalion of high art drips, runs and oozings.

Though it is often said of Hurd that he is working through the contradictions of hand-painted Pop, he seems to be taking on a whole lot more: the impossible purity of genres, the by-now predictable admixture of High and Low, all of Conceptual art, and so on.

It’s probably best to strike the notion of “working through,” however, for it implies a therapeutic agenda that Hurd will have none of. If anything, painting for him is cabalistic--at once coolly intellectual and mystifying.

While it can’t help but be personal when an artist makes work about art and its tropes, derivations and milieus, there’s personal and then there’s personal. In “Safe Passage,” Hurd replicates an L.A. Times review by another writer--on balance, negative--of his last show at Dan Bernier and dribbles all over it, literally dissolving the prose and symbolically eroding its authority.

Artist Marc Pally has gone this route before, as have others, and while the pleasure the artist must take in this kind of exercise is palpable, self-referentiality doesn’t wash when it’s merely an excuse for payback. The piece rankles in an otherwise interesting show.

* Dan Bernier, 3026 1/2 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4882, through Jan. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Infectious Spirit: It doesn’t take a great deal of perspicacity to notice that a slew of L.A. painters are working in the unholy gap between organic abstraction and decorator wallpaper. Mixing up the ornamental, the kitschy and the swoony, their work is not so much ironic as egalitarian.

The paintings in “Teeming,” a group show at Post Gallery, are particularly open-handed, not to mention unpretentious, assured and infectious. Marie Thibault shows the most muscle, ripping up pictorial space with self-conscious abandon, which is the kind of non sequitur these painters thrive upon.

Robin Mitchell is more controlled, structuring her fields of spiraling color around neatly articulated, spine-like forms. Merion Estes, whose paintings are concurrently showing at Gallery LASCA, is theatrical but refined.

If Estes’ aestheticism revamps Gustav Klimt’s fin de siecle extravaganzas, Linda Day (whose work is also shown in a small solo exhibition upstairs) does a number on Monet’s waterlilies. Whereas Monet pushed the real to the point of non-legibility, Day is hooked on the artificial from the word “go.” Her swarming disks of blissfully synthetic color cluster around one another, and then, as suddenly, dart out of one another’s way. Their movement apes not nature, but the relentless shifts, swipes and swivels of a machine, without being in the slightest way mechanistic.

* Post Gallery, 1804 E. 7th Place, (213) 488-3379, through Saturday.