‘Juried Exhibition’ Displays Wit and Elegance of L.A.

One of Los Angeles’ more likable traits is a substantial history of holding big communitywide art exhibitions. Stuffy members of the subculture find them undignified. Not everybody agrees.

This year the “1997 Los Angeles Juried Exhibition” attracted 1,930 entries from 753 artists. Winnowed down to 76 works by 49 artists, they’re now on view at four venues: the Municipal Art Gallery, the Barnsdall Art Center, the William Grant Still Art Center and the Watts Towers Art Center.

In addition to being festive fun for the casual browser, the event serves as an arena for trend and talent spotting.

This time the spirit of the thing is invigorating multicultural chaos. It’s not too great an exaggeration to say that today’s artists feel free to colorfully mix and match media and styles from any and all historical periods into something they find personally gratifying and--especially--culturally relevant.

These artists have things to say and they want to be understood. Cant is at a minimum and even serious intentions come wrapped in smiles albeit often caustic.

If anything seems out, it’s purity and exclusivity. I didn’t spot a single work of rigorous reductivist abstraction in the entire enchilada. Is that a little odd? There are plenty of gifted abstract artists in the vicinity. Do they all scorn such free-for-alls or were they juried out?

The shows have an interesting organizational wrinkle that bears on the question. There were four jurors, but each chose from separate submissions to the various sites. Thus viewers can get a sense of jurors’ aesthetic proclivities.

Artists were invited to enter work at any or all of the venues at $10 each, giving them the chance to pick their juror and neighborhood. A few turn up in more than one location.

The Muni has the largest building and thus the biggest show. It was chosen by Connie Butler, an associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Her choices broadcast an urge to be inclusive. She embraced everything from a playful hammock full of beach balls by S.C. Churchman to Yoshi Hashimoto’s haunting quartet of photos of a derelict hotel.

There’s also a significant brace of punk-tinged work like Gordy Grundy’s “Asian Haze,” an affectionate sendup of the Terry-and-the-Pirates past when hard-drinking white guys saw Asian women as dangerously sexy Dragon Ladies. Larry J. Kline’s “The Decline” finds Mickey Mouse in Venice scaring Pluto with a classical mask.

Butler’s show is professional and even-handed. If it all comes out as a little predictable, that is probably the result of a noticeably bogged-down art world.

By contrast, the exhibition at the adjacent Barnsdall Art Center is small, compact, elegant, funky and intense. Picked by respected veteran L.A. artist John Outterbridge, it is largely a paean to the poetry of Assemblage and Collage.

Mainly ignoring issue-driven art, it concentrates on subtler questions of sensitive execution and timeless themes of memory and longing. Daveed Schwartz is represented by a wonderfully oxymoronic little shrine in homage to Marcel Duchamp. It depicts the grand iconoclast as if he were Leonardo da Vinci. Pat Cox seems to ruminate on Morandi in her mixed-media “Shelf Life/Figures in a Landscape.” Joe Flazh’s “Little Darlings No. 1” is an enigmatic infrared print suggesting 19th century erotica.

The Watts Towers Art Center section was in slight disarray the day I saw it, but the message was clear. Juror Alma Ruiz, a MOCA exhibitions coordinator, selected art that works in illusive ways. Pieces are often composed of two or more parts, for example a large-format color photographic diptych about a tragicomic wedding by the husband-and-wife team of Davis and Davis.

Matthew Ready renders classic jazz figures like Billie Holiday in old New York Social Realist style that seems surprisingly timely. Shin Kyungm painted the covers of several paperback self-help books in actual size with an oblique deadpan that’s curiously hilarious.

All these exhibitions are worth seeing, but the one at the William Grant Still Arts Center is virtually obligatory. Selections by Rick Moss of the California African American Museum almost certainly reflect the interests that made him its curator of history. The work harks back to the “Art about Art” movement of the ‘70s with a refreshing turn. It looks like the visual version of present-day jazz musicians who earn doctorates without losing their street smarts.

The whole thing is a hoot, but some artists stop the show. Rip Cronk’s “Portrait of Picasso” absolutely nails the great Minotaur. He follows up with a self-portrait that manages to combine punk graffiti spray with Seurat and finishes with a “Mona Lisa” variation that does all of the above at once. The guy’s virtuoso wit is breathtaking. James Goodwin’s “Billy Sunday--Incoming” is an assemblage opera on American Myth, and Ursula M. Kammer-Fox’s “Fanaticism” is concrete gospel.

* Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 4804 Hollywood Blvd., closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (213) 485-4581; Barnsdall Art Center, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., closed Sundays, (213) 485-2116; William Grant Still Art Center, 2520 S. West View St., closed Mondays, (213) 734-1164; Watts Towers Art Center 1727 E. 107th St., closed Mondays (213) 847-4646; all exhibitions through Aug. 31.