A Timely, Ironic Exhibition From Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley hasn’t had a solo exhibition in L.A. since his Whitney Museum survey traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1994, so his new show at Patrick Painter Inc. is bound to be something of an event. Addressing our cultural obsession with celebrity sex objects, this latest body of work is vintage Kelley: challenging, viciously funny, steeped in irony and evincing a casual disregard for the strictures of political correctness. It also couldn’t be more timely.

A framed poster hanging in the gallery entryway details Kelley’s plan for alleviating the country’s current health care crisis. The gist of the proposal is as follows: Since sexual repression is one of our country’s greatest ills, and since celebrity superstars enjoy massive wealth and privilege without providing any tangible public service, why not require the rich and famous to work at government-sponsored sex clinics, where they can finally fulfill the public’s sexual fantasies in the flesh?

To initiate the plan, Kelley has made soft-sculpture floor installations out of loosely jumbled pillows, blankets, fabric and yarn, which he offers as primitive “sexual surrogates” in place of the celebrities. Hanging above each piece are a pair of framed movie posters featuring past-their-prime stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, along with kiddie favorites like Timmy the Tooth and Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen.

Kelley has cut out the stars’ faces from the posters and placed their heads on top of the piles, while boomboxes play looped sound bites taken from the films. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out the purpose of the huge, felt-covered phalluses and the fabric-lined holes in the pillow-beds.

More than anything, Kelley’s latest exhibition reveals that he’s a social satirist at heart. Like a latter-day Jonathan Swift, Kelley roots through popular culture in search of sordid truths we’d rather avoid. Like all great satirists, he’s also a button-pusher, providing plenty of grist for the easily offended.

Kelley’s limp floor pieces (and the low-wattage stars they embody) provoke laughter more than lust, but an underlying sadness, even desperation, clings to them, preventing us from chortling too heartily. His ultra-low-tech sex toys are ultimately the pathetic alter-egos of gleaming “home theaters” and multimedia entertainment centers, which provide private cocoons of pop culture escapism to those who can afford them. At the same time, Kelley’s sculptures recall the makeshift encampments of the homeless, reminding us of an entire disenfranchised class of people for whom escape is not an option.

* Patrick Painter Inc., Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Feb. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Fun With Potatoes: Charles Arnoldi may not be the most consistent artist in Los Angeles, but he is surely one of the most consistently interesting ones. Known for the innovative twig and stick-based constructions he made in the 1970s, and for later works in which he repeatedly slashed his plywood paintings with a chain saw, in the early 1990s Arnoldi began to make large-scale abstract paintings of a more personal nature. The buoyant painterly gestures that animated these bold, inquisitive works couldn’t have been more different from what came before, and as such announced an important shift in a career that has always thrived on change.

Arnoldi’s latest acrylic paintings, drawings and cast-bronze sculptures at Chac Mool Gallery depict unwieldy forms clustered in unlikely states of equilibrium. You immediately notice the paintings’ severely reduced palette.

Black, irregularly shaped ovals suggesting pebbles, eggs or planets float, intersect and gently collide within murky white grounds stained with watery grays and charcoals. This cloudy quality contrasts sharply with the opacity of the black shapes, giving the latter the flat two-dimensionality of cut-outs.

These stolid, endearingly clumsy forms seem to be seeking out ways to comfortably share the same space. A similar idea reappears in the sculptures, where the ovoids assume the earthbound presence of pockmarked, bulbous potatoes. Arranged in twos and threes, these spuds are suspended by a cable from the ceiling, stacked one atop the other, or arranged in precarious and surprisingly graceful configurations.

It takes a degree of self-confidence--or is it faith?--to make something beautiful out of a potato. Arnoldi seems to be having fun with the idea that this homely tuber (which is also considered to be one of nature’s “perfect foods”) provides the inspiration for his latest artistic statement. His new works are just as comfortable in their own skins, yet they also implicitly acknowledge the awkward, fumbling stages that are a necessary part of growth and renewal.

* Chac Mool Gallery, 8920 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 550-6792, through Feb. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Cruel World: At Craig Krull Gallery, a comprehensive retrospective of Charles Brittin’s black-and-white documentary photographs uncovers yet another layer of L.A.’s seminal 1950s--and 1960s--art scene. Curated by Walter Hopps and Craig Krull, this is the first solo show of Brittin’s work since a 1952 exhibition at Wallace Berman’s Semina Gallery in Northern California.

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Brittin migrated to Los Angeles in 1944 and in 1950 began photographing the circle of friends and acquaintances floating in and out of the Venice Beach beat scene. These young, mostly male artists, poets and creative types included Ferus Gallery co-founders Hopps and Edward Kienholz, along with Wallace Berman, John Altoon, George Herms, jazz crooner Anita O’Day and others.

Even as a young man, Brittin seemed keenly aware of the ephemeral nature of his surroundings. Yet his nostalgic tendencies were tempered by an equally powerful desire to confront difficult subjects in a straightforward manner. Some of Brittin’s best photographs were made during the tumult of civil rights protest marches. A particularly strong one depicts the splayed legs of a black female protester, gripped like a pair of garden shears by a white policeman.

Brittin is fascinated by stitches, scars, and processes of material and bodily decay. This occasionally borders on ghoulishness, as in his still-life photograph of a cat’s rotting corpse and a quintet of images that document a cremation. For the most part, though, Brittin’s unblinking yet compassionate approach has served him extremely well, most notably in a wrenching close-up portrait of a woman’s bruised face moments after she was beaten by her husband, and a more recent image of the scarred torso of a female friend battling Lupus.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave. Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Feb. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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On This Site: At Sandroni Rey Gallery, three site-specific installations take shape in the space where architecture ends and the imagination takes over. The three L.A.-based CalArts graduates featured in this unusually cohesive group show create ephemeral, detail-oriented and labor-intensive works that are acutely responsive to their immediate environments.

Carrie Ungerman’s web-like “Vine Structure” is constructed from strands of green floral wire. The tips are shaped into small circles and dipped into small vats of melted colored plastic, which solidifies into flat droplet shapes resembling flower petals, jewels or tiny insect wings. Ungerman’s droopy vines are then strung like Christmas lights from the gallery’s ceiling beams, where they dangle languorously onto the floor, tossing beaded shadows onto a nearby wall.

In a small alcove gallery, Mara Lonner uses powdered carbon and stippled paper patterns to apply swirling, florid designs directly onto the walls and ceiling. Framed graphite drawings detail Lonner’s mock-serious proposal to add Victorian-inspired architectural embellishments to the infrastructure of the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety.

It may take a few moments to notice Kim Lee Kahn’s transformation of the rear gallery walls, but once you do, you’ll want to stare at her work for hours. Kahn uses Spackle to sculpt a network of twisting veins and arteries onto the white walls. Gaze at them long enough and you’ll begin to notice the points at which these vessels meet up with the gallery’s architecture and overhead plumbing, often stretching upward to complete a gesture begun by an overhead pipe or ceiling rafter.

These subtle yet immensely absorbing works grow on you over time. Each demonstrates that ornamentation need not feel suffocating. When employed as judiciously as they are here, decorative flourishes help us recognize the extraordinary potential of ordinary spaces.

* Sandroni Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through Feb. 27. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.