Mimicry, Gimmickry

Decades ago, artists generally spent years in relative obscurity, showing their work only to a few friends. In a speedier world, artists crave the spotlight. Further down the food chain, dealers, collectors and critics find themselves frantically chasing what they hope will be tomorrow’s wonders.

That’s simply the way it is in a post-Warholian world. Nevertheless, it can feel faintly ridiculous to be standing in a gallery and taking notes on works by artists who may not be ready for prime time.

“Ten Days in February” is the tongue-in-cheek title of a quickie show of work by seven youthful Southern Californian artists at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery.

Selected by director Richard Turner--whose knack for spotting fresh, quirky approaches has proven itself over the years--the exhibition is meant as a casual roundup of intriguing newbies, not a definitive, la-di-da heralding of Major Talent.

Several pieces are indeed appealing in a low-key way, but others lean too heavily on empty gimmickry.

Doug and Gary Quinn have embarked on a vast and ultimately hopeless project: transferring Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 masterwork, “The Oath of the Horatii,” onto a giant mock-up of a Magic Slate. Magic Slates, you will recall, are those wondrous sketch pads you could wipe clean with a flick of the acetate top sheet--if air bubbles or your little brother’s furtive gesture hadn’t already done the job.

The original painting, commissioned by the French court to serve as a symbol of public morality, shows three ancient Roman brothers pledging to sacrifice their lives for their country while their mother and sisters sag sadly in the corner. Lauded for its economical yet forceful composition and clear-cut emotions, the painting launched David’s career as the great political artist of the French Revolution.

The brothers Quinn, who were still laboring at their massive transfer job several days into the show, deliberately chose a medium so transitory that some of the images they set down are liable to disappear before the project--called “David’s Magic Oath”--is finished.

The Quinns’ fleeting and shamelessly mechanical technique for producing art is as much of its time as the classic rigor and brilliant invention of David’s was in his day. But that goes without saying. “David’s Magic Oath” seems little more than a big, cheerful game played at art’s expense.

Skeith DeWine’s blobby, untitled sculptures constitute another gimmick: Their cast shadows resolve into perfectly legible--and indubitably hackneyed--figurative images. But, uh, so what? Neither component of these pieces is interesting in itself, and the technique is nothing new.

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Then there’s Chris Elliott, whose paintings mingle vintage Pop images and lettering. So many young artists have taken up similar styles that Elliott’s smart-aleck jauntiness seems rather clone-like. Still, there is more content here than may immediately meet the eye.

Elliott’s best piece in the show is “Making It Beautiful,” a tidy grid of images: a drunk wearing a lampshade hat who wraps himself around a lamppost; a beer; a bong; a tortured-looking wooden abstract sculpture; and the word “thanks,” painted to look as though it’s shedding big blue drops of perspiration.

The fun in this painting is its juxtaposition of things that are supposed to make you giddy: intoxicants and art. Beauty is the amusing link between clashing leisure-time cultures of the ‘60s: The drunk decorates with a lampshade; hippies favor cute lettering; middlebrow taste runs to abstraction.

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Jason Eden’s collages are the freshest things in the show. He uses small cutouts from magazine photos to fashion meandering organic imagery that embraces human and plant life. One of these untitled pieces--assembled from photo snippets of buttocks and lips and bellybuttons--dances, flame-like, across the page. On the white surface of a canvas, a vast school of tiny human eyes metamorphose into spiraling natural wonders. Vivaciously rhythmic and unpretentious, these pieces are lyrical jewels.

Other work in the show is by Loren Sandvik--who makes antiseptic white vacuum-formed plastic abstractions that recall modular European sculptures from the ‘60s--and Amy Russell, whose drawings of girls evoke a sense of nostalgia and loss.

One, of a teen in a miniskirt and tall boots who sits in a stylized circle of soft-textured rectangles (“Patio”) suggests a memory colored by the clothing styles and domestic settings of a particular moment in one’s life. The older girl in “Carousel,” who holds a tiny toy, seems to be peering down at her younger self, a little girl whose hand also shields a small secret. The design structure Russell imposes on these pieces provides the sense of mystery that keeps them from slipping into the more pedestrian realm of illustration.

* “Ten Days in February,” through Wednesday at Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Hours: Noon-5 p.m. Monday-Friday. Free. (714) 997-6729.