‘A Swedish Mentality’ Toys With U.S. Pop Sensibility

Considering that what most of us in the U.S. know about Sweden adds up to the banal triumvirate of Ikea, ABBA and Absolut, “Toy Store: A Swedish Mentality,” a show of work by five young Swedes at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, must have seemed like a bang-up idea.

Indeed, who can argue with the zippiness of the following?: a pile of fake snow being blown around by a wind machine (Stig Sjolund); a bucket of green liquid being recycled through a tangle of green tubing and a teeny-tiny pair of upside-down, motorized jeans (Peter Geschwind); an invitation to play a round of hockey in the middle of the gallery, decked out in a pair of roller blades (Ingrid Eriksson); and a would-be roundelay of perversity, starring a trio of bear suits and a thick wooden appendage, set on an AstroTurf mountaintop (Jonas Kjellgren).

Yet, however lively, this array of stunts, one-liners and sight gags is achingly familiar, suggesting not a “Swedish mentality,” but a distinctly American one. This may well be the point: that American pop culture has become global culture, and so, too, has the American art world’s taste for infantilism become an international style.

However, we didn’t need this show to tell us that. In fact, “Toy Store” does a disservice to the artists involved, whose mostly sloppy installations can’t compete with those of their U.S. counterparts (Terri Friedman and Paul McCarthy, among them) especially on the latter’s home turf.

When you’re at LACE, you may notice someone moving a stack of storage boxes one by one from inside the gallery outside onto Hollywood Boulevard, then back in again, then back out again, and so on, presumably until the gallery closes. This is Elin Wickstrom’s piece, “Oh Hell!,” which deserves special mention because it manages to come off as absurd and sophomoric, albeit in a new and idiosyncratic way.

Here’s the catch: The last box to be moved is filled with sand, and the performer asks someone from inside the gallery or, alternately, out on the street, to help her move it.

The whole thing sounds pretty didactic if you reduce it to a commentary on the great divide between the art world and the real world beyond. It’s something more than that, however: perhaps a meditation upon the specificity of place, something that “Toy Store” otherwise strangely elides.

* LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 957-1777, through May 11. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Getting the Signal: In 1964, Wallace Berman was given a Verifax machine, an early photocopying device that used a wet print process with disposable negatives and treated paper. At L.A. Louver, a beautifully installed show of the artist’s Verifax collages, churned out obsessively until his death in 1976, underlines the technological impetus of work that is most often thought of as being beholden to Kabbalah and other bits of esoterica.

The collages are faithful to a single composition: a photograph of Berman’s own hand holding a transistor radio. Where the speaker should be, Berman inserted an image: Marilyn Monroe’s legs, a gun, moons and planets, flowers and crosses, Buddhas and mushrooms, the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald. Playing with positive and negative images, sometimes showing the hand in isolation, other times in square grids of between four and 64 parts, the collages are mysterious, ritualistic and chilling.

However, as is probably inevitable, Berman is best known not for these works, but for the famous exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in June 1957, which was closed down by the vice squad because it featured “lewd and pornographic material”--specifically, an image of a couple having sex that the reclusive artist Cameron made while on a peyote trip. Berman included this image--along with various poems, fragments and other miscellany--in “Semina,” the legendary journal he produced on and off from 1957 to 1964, distributing it (so it’s been suggested) to whomever was listed in his phone book.

The nine volumes of “Semina,” reproduced between 1988 and 1992 in a beautiful facsimile edition by Berman’s colleague George Herms, are also on view here. If ensconcing these pieces reverently in vitrines opposes the spirit of things, it doesn’t detract from Berman’s wonderful sensibility for montage.

Here is the profound, the pretentious, the beautiful, the banal and the inscrutable all brought together to make things happen; and they do. Certain words and images have already become iconic; others will--perhaps after MOCA or somebody else mounts the long overdue American retrospective this artist so clearly deserves.

* L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through May 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Transformative Projections: Long maligned as hallucinatory melodrama, Op art has been slowly working its way back into the conversation, through Philip Taaffe’s 1980s homages to Bridget Riley; Jennifer Steinkamp’s pulsating video projections; and now, in Habib Kheradyar’s writhing ode to moire, at Miller Fine Art.

Kheradyar has covered an entire room in the winningly garish material: three walls in black, the fourth in a luscious pink. The irregular, wavy, even watery quality of the fabric, heightened as it catches the light, causes all sorts of Alice-in-Wonderland effects to take place: Walls quiver, the ground shifts, one loses one’s bearings--happily, I might add.

However, transformations usually entail violence of some sort, and indeed the piece smothers the room that contains it. Doors and windows are leveled into two-dimensional pictures, dysfunctional traces of the living, breathing space that once was. I suppose you could read this as a wry commentary on art’s will-to-power, but I wouldn’t. Kheradyar is too sly for such grandstanding but thankfully not above theatrics.

* Miller Fine Art, 8720 1/2 W. Pico Blvd., (310) 652-0057, through May 10. Closed Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.

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Feminine Perspective: Candice Breitz’s photo-montaged female bodies don’t hesitate to show their scars. Now on view at Craig Krull Gallery, her large (40 by 60 inch) Cibachromes depict women who are literally bisected: Half white and half black, they are agglomerations of body parts taken from random skin magazines and ethnographic-pornographic tourist postcards.

Though she now lives and works in New York, Breitz was born in Johannesburg, and her work quite explicitly challenges the post-apartheid myth of a South African “Rainbow Nation.” These images have aptly been called “the dark side of Benetton,” and indeed they rail against the media’s construction of homogeneity even within difference, calling attention to the erasures that necessarily characterize such operations.

If Breitz herself has also been accused of reiterating the stereotypes she opposes, the work makes clear the extent to which repetition, in the guise of art, is itself a strategy, and a canny one at that. Like Hannah Hoch, her predecessor in photomontage, Breitz understands that alternatives are best framed in and through the language of power, twisted almost imperceptibly against itself.

* Craig Krull Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through May 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.