The Word on Grown-Up Works With Sense of Humor

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater has become a thriving micro-industry in the art world. As anti-artists of all types have made careers out of dismissing every style, idea and technique they can get their hands on, much art seems to be increasingly driven by teenage disdain and insistent juvenile delinquency.

In this hyper-critical environment, it’s refreshing to come across Scott Grieger’s hilarious exhibition at Patricia Faure Gallery. The L.A.-based artist’s bitingly insightful show not only saves the baby from the trash bin, it gets the infant to grow up.

In Grieger’s hands, art passes through the all-or-nothing inflexibility of adolescence to the maturity of adulthood. Neither hectored nor harangued, viewers are invited to participate in a layered expose of the pretense and hypocrisy that block art’s deeper pleasures.

About half of the two dozen images displayed are variously sized pages that appear to have been plucked from illuminated manuscripts. Across their falsely aged surfaces are elaborately decorated letters and beautifully inscribed texts, which describe the virtues of artificial intelligence, automated teller machines and computer chips. Others simply lay out such impersonal monograms as TV, VCR, PC and CD-ROM.

These handsomely crafted watercolors, often embellished with gold leaf, create little warps in time. Locating contemporary art-making somewhere between the painstaking labors of a medieval monk and the rapid-fire exploits of a computer nut, they leave viewers free to do what they like with such wide-ranging possibilities.

Grieger’s faux documents also make fun of image-and-text art, a prevalent type of Conceptual art that valorizes thinking at the expense of visual satisfaction. You get both with his grown-up art.

Other forms of orthodoxy get skewered by two remaining series: a suite of seemingly straightforward sign-paintings and a group of illusionistic blackboards that update our founding fathers’ ideals in unflattering terms. Sensible warnings like “Beware of God” and scathing indictments like “United We Gripe” appear alongside loaded jabs, such as “Squares Masquerading as Artists.”

All of Grieger’s art brings old-fashioned ideals up to date by provoking viewers to take such claims seriously. His worded pictures reject the know-it-all antics of anti-art for the provisional pleasures of the real thing.

*

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Feb. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.