Thrilling and Shiny, Bowers’ Works Resonate

It was only a matter of time before karaoke made its way into the world of contemporary art. And there’s no better host for this immensely popular form of participatory entertainment than Andrea Bowers, an L.A.-based Conceptual artist who has, over the last six years, put together a smart body of work in which some good ol’ American pastimes (and some wonderfully silly new imports from Japan) serve as models for how art works in the world.

In contrast to the old-fashioned avant-garde, which believed that art’s job was to offer hope for the future by opposing middle-class values, Bowers throws her lot in with any type of entertainment that gets your juices flowing. Acting as if there’s no better time than the present to change the world, her rollicking videos and fabulously grungy drawings do not present theoretical proposals about how things could be different, so much as they simultaneously stimulate and satisfy desire. They deliver the goods to anyone willing to step up to the plate.

For the inaugural exhibition at Goldman Tevis Gallery in Chinatown, Bowers has built a stage on which three monitors show highlights of various people performing at karaoke bars. A set of speakers blasts out their often amusing, sometimes awful and occasionally moving renditions. One of the best segments presents a young, tough-looking Latino belting out an expletive-filled love song by Ozzy Osbourne.

In the opposite corner, a videodisc titled “Aunt Dee’s T-Shirt Shop” shows a middle-aged Midwesterner giving a no-nonsense tour of her small business. Linking these pieces are five mid-size drawings that depict pairs of female rock stars wearing T-shirts on which are printed various messages, band names and logos.

Bowers has completely filled in the backgrounds of her portraits of such stars as Patti Smith, Madonna, Yoko Ono, Courtney Love and Tina Weymouth with the shiny silver material used to print highlights on T-shirts. Like industrial-strength silver leaf, this durable, machine-washable material takes the place of the golden halos that appear in medieval icons.

Recalling the tinfoil that covered every square inch of Warhol’s Factory, it also functions as a slick, working-class version of the silver screen. Plus, like a cheap, blurry mirror, it suggests that exact reflections--or exact imitations--are often less inspiring than flawed ones.

As a whole, Bowers’ installation lays to rest the conservative European idea that art must be original--not a copy--to be authentic and meaningful. What counts instead is its capacity to thrill you. In the presence of such gritty generosity, everyday drudgery fades into the tawdry background as dazzling moments shine brightly.

* Goldman Tevis Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, (213) 617-8217, through March 18. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Checking Their References: When Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions moved from downtown to Hollywood a few years ago, one of the arguments made in favor of its relocation was that the lively art shown in its galleries would complement and enrich the gritty street life outside its front door. Now that Hollywood Boulevard is becoming a more interesting mix of seedy sleaze and upscale entertainment, it’s strange that the nonprofit venue has frosted storefront windows and no eye-grabbing signage designed to bring passersby inside.

If the institution’s uninviting facade suggests an attitude of stand-apart avant-gardism, this defensive posture takes even more dramatic shape in an exhibition of mass-produced products selected by Nicholas Lowie and Sheridan Lowrey, instructors in the design department at Otis College of Art and Design. Titled “Careless Exhibition of Twentieth-Century Product Design/Poetic Installation of Works by Constantin Brancusi, Ann Hamilton, Bertrand Lavier, Sherrie Levine and Haim Steinbach,” their show is unconventional in that there isn’t any art in it--neither by the artists advertised in the title nor by any others.

In the foyer, Lowie and Lowrey have arranged, in a seemingly haphazard manner, some household furniture and appliances along with a baby grand piano, a manikin and a commercial freezer. If you are familiar with the works by the artists cited in the title, you’ll get the joke: The objects resemble (in form if not substance) the originals they refer to.

For example, an ergonomic cheese grater echoes the shape of a series of small sculptures Brancusi carved from marble and cast in bronze. A fiberglass chair with 10-foot-long metal legs mimics the dimensions of a wooden lifeguard stand from an installation by Hamilton. And the baby grand, similar to ones used by Levine in several installations, is meant to be seen not merely as a musical instrument but as an art historical referent implicated in an endless chain of signification.

For viewers unfamiliar with the history of contemporary art, Lowie and Lowrey have printed a poster explaining these abstract, conceptual references. They have also left the main gallery empty, except for some supplemental information, including five bookmarked catalogs resting on free-standing metal shelves and a prefab shower unit on which they have stuck their version of wall-labels: specially printed refrigerator magnets that repeat much of what’s on the poster.

Although the relationship between Modern art and Modern design is ripe for thoughtful exploration, Lowie’s and Lowrey’s half-baked installation provides little more than an impressionistic ramble through a handful of undeveloped formal connections. If their pretentious show outlines anything significant, it is the difference between scholars and academics. Where the former create sustained arguments, the latter merely rehash cliches, presenting the appearance of analysis as if it were the real thing.

* Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (323) 957-1777, through March 18. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Terrific Textures: Words do not stick to Lies Kraal’s gorgeous paintings. But don’t take my word for it. Visit her breathtakingly beautiful exhibition at Post Wilshire and see for yourself.

Following on the heels of a similarly stunning show of earlier works at Claremont Graduate University, Kraal’s five domestically scaled monochromes are not difficult to describe. All measure 23 inches on a side, are painted on precisely cut hardwood panels and consist of single, unmodulated colors: jet black, creamy white, cool pink, light aqua and moss green.

But that’s not all. Strictly speaking, two of the paintings are diptychs. The white one is made of two identically scaled vertical panels that have been snugly abutted and the moss green one follows a similar format on a horizontal axis.

Things get a little more complicated in terms of each work’s surface texture, and this is where Kraal distinguishes herself as an artist. Where some painters are known for being great colorists and others for the skill with which they build complex compositions, Kraal is a terrific texturist. That this term doesn’t have much of a ring to it says less about her talent than the distance that separates abstract painting from what is written about it.

Kraal has somehow managed to find a distinct if indescribable texture (or two, in the case of one of the diptychs) for each of her paintings. Using many layers of masterfully blended acrylic or acrylics mixed with various amounts of wax or simply powdered pigment suspended in a liquid that evaporates rapidly, she treats the surfaces of her works as delicate membranes that inflect and intensify the ambient light that falls across them.

Two works, whose otherwise smooth surfaces are interrupted by linear protrusions, clarify the way all of Kraal’s panels orchestrate subtle dramas of light and shadow. Like speed bumps for a viewer’s eyes, these built-up elements in the pink and aqua paintings slow you down.

Initially, they introduce a bit of tension, suggesting that something behind the works’ supple surfaces is putting pressure on them. After a while, this sense of disruption dissipates. Absorbing all sorts of visual dissonance into lovely fields of textured color, Kraal’s paintings maintain an unflappable, infectious sense of serenity.

* Post Wilshire, 6130 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 932-1822, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Not a Perfect Fit: Richard Rezac’s abstract sculptures command more space than they occupy. Although all but two of the Chicago-based artist’s eight cast bronze, carved wood and welded aluminum works at Marc Foxx Gallery measure only a foot or two on a side, all have the solidity and weight of statues--a type of sculpture that fell out of fashion when Modernism liberated this art form from its dependence on architecture.

Suspended from the ceiling, cantilevered high overhead or set on the floor, Rezac’s idiosyncratic structures ally themselves with architecture by embracing its capacity for bodily impact. Hung at eye level, like paintings, an equal number suggest that he is not an artist who puts all his eggs in one basket.

Equally concerned with decorative patterning (found in wallpaper, fabric and some types of abstract painting), Rezac’s sculptures generally consist of simply patterned progressions that are repeated just often enough to reveal built-in inconsistencies.

For example, the hanging piece is made of three identical trios of diamond-shaped blocks of wood. Composed of small, medium and large parts, each trio has been linked to the others to form a tunnel-like arch that recalls a traditional post-and-lintel structure. But rather than embodying stability and balance, Rezac’s asymmetrical work is energized by a sense of loopy eccentricity.

You find yourself “correcting” the suspended sculpture, rearranging its sections in your mind’s eye so that they align with your body’s deep desire for balance, order and harmony. Other pieces function similarly, never letting you fit all of their handsomely finished components into ideal geometric structures.

The one that comes closest to being a perfect sphere is actually an egg-shaped form made of pink and blue fabric stretched over a wooden armature. Like all of Rezac’s subtly odd sculptures, it combines the intimacy of organic forms with the rationality and substance of architecture to suggest poetic connections among all orders of experience.

* Marc Foxx Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5571, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.