The Cold Shoulder

It’s one thing to applaud new ways of making art in retrospect. But at the moment these movements are born, some viewers may not understand what the artists had in mind and suspect a put-on.

The coolly detached vibe of “Chill”--a six-artist show at the UC Irvine Art Gallery, curated by acting director Brad Spence--is part of an often baffling approach that has been infiltrating Los Angeles art for the past few years. It demands a lot from viewers and can be stingy about return favors.

But it surely is symptomatic of a strange time for art, which is becoming increasingly involved with the minutiae of everyday life while appearing more and more aloof and forbidding to the uninitiated viewer.

Imagine a piece that consists of a crudely altered Kellogg’s Apple Jacks box and a plastic foam cup from 7-Eleven, displayed on an old vinyl-topped card table. What could be simultaneously more familiar, yet more alien in the context of an art gallery?

Spence explains in a statement that he is employing Marshall McLuhan’s sense of “cool” versus “warm” technology. One model for viewing “cool” art is the Internet, which obliges users to constantly pick and choose among alternate universes of data.

The idea is not to transform an ordinary object, as Duchamp famously did by turning a urinal upside-down--but to isolate it and change it slightly. The resulting work, which has no inherent emotional or moral content, is meant to make viewers aware of their own actions as creators and consumers of information.

Sam Durant aptly titled his installation “MDF Particle Board, Projection, Confusion, Grid-Like Structuring.” It consists of a group of fiberboard containers sparsely furnished with a variety of objects: how-to, biker and “shelter” magazines; hardware store flyers; a People magazine with a cover story about the victims’ families in the O.J. Simpson case; instructions for crafts projects, and a bunch of liquor bottles holding burned candles.

The piece may seem to be a comment about mass taste: dumb household projects, dumb curiosity, dumb ways to spend your leisure time. But there is also a whiff here of good old American know-how (one magazine promises “Help for Inventors”), and of the many ways people earnestly aspire to make their surroundings attractive.

The “projection” in Durant’s title is important, because each viewer will bring a different interpretation to the raw materials--if, that is, they get past another apt word in the title: “confusion.”

Photography figures in several bodies of work, each one using its familiar look to leverage the creation of new meaning.

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Amy Adler superimposes a drawing of a child at a kiddie birthday party over a snapshot of the scene and rephotographs the entire image. The girl’s large, solemn face seems to be somehow more “frozen” than the rest of the scene, nudging the viewer to slow down and scrutinize the import of a casual snapshot.

Ellen Birrell’s untitled photographs of faces, each glimpsed dimly (and, in one case, not at all) through a chunk of cast acrylic, seem to be exercises in determining the least amount of information viewers need to process the identity of a face.

Richard Hawkins, the author of the card table piece--”Untitled (Taizo in City)”--also has several magazine photo collages in the show.

He uses the narcissistic pretty boys in ads and fashion spreads from men’s magazines to portray an ironic, latter-day incarnation of the late-19th century French gay male aesthete. Fragments of writing strain to evoke snatches of symbolist poetry; an ad for antique Chinese porcelains offers an instant symbol of ultra-refined personal taste.

But there is a yawning gap between the pop culture vacuousness of Johnny Depp or Japanese bug decals and the hothouse aestheticism of a Walter Pater or a Baudelaire. That unrecaptured distance may or may not be the point of Hawkins’ work--it’s hard to say.

More immediately comprehensible and visually engaging are Mitchell Syrop’s grids of black-and-white yearbook photos from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, laser-printed to ensure basic uniformity. Each grouping organizes faces of a particular gender and ethnicity in such a way that each image seems to morph into the one adjacent, creating a continuous stream of resemblances.

In this show, faces of high school girls and a few older women (teachers? mothers?) are arrayed on lengths of monofilament to form 3-D grids. The striking similarities among the faces--seen in the curve of an eyebrow, the width of a nose, the breadth of a smile--suggest a bizarre twist to the old theme of the “family of man.”

Family resemblance also figures in “One Hundred Percent Wool Flannel Covered Pets,” Izumi Tachiki’s flock of squat, white objects swathed in neatly sewn pieces of white flannel. Vaguely resembling duck bodies with one or two knobby protrusions made from women’s shoe heels, these pieces look like rejected prototypes for a would-be new craze, dating somewhere between the “pet rock” and the virtual-pet eras.

Old-fashioned in their careful attention to detail, these mutant “pets” are nonetheless singularly devoid of effect. They are animal shapes that don’t fulfill the seemingly overwhelming human desire that domestic animals be lovable or funny.

Like everything else in the show, they are stubbornly unrevealing despite the mental workout that “Chill” demands of its viewers.

* “Chill,” through Nov. 1, UC Irvine Art Gallery, Fine Arts Complex, off West Peltason Drive (formerly Bridge Road), Irvine. Noon-5 p.m., Monday-Saturday. Free. (714) 824-6610.