Dam’s Sculptures Advance the Notion of Asymmetrical Beauty

Wouter Dam’s tabletop sculptures look like the highly evolved offspring of fine-tooled machinery and shelled sea creatures. Imagine what would happen if Dr. Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde and Mies Van der Rohe collaborated on the design of lightweight shells for conchs and mollusks, and you’ll have an idea of the whimsical intelligence at work in the Dutch artist’s abstract ceramics at Frank Lloyd Gallery.

Eight gorgeous pieces make up Dam’s L.A. solo debut. The earliest, made in 1997, most closely resembles a thrown vessel--a graceful, large-mouthed vase that’s been set on its side and had its base and part of its body surgically removed. Stripped of its function, this thin-walled cylindrical form seems to be waiting for further developments.

They happen quickly. To sculpt the next work, from 1998, Dam began with a similar, horizontally oriented form. This time, however, he cut away a larger section of its curved side and seamlessly grafted the flat wall from another vessel in its place. The resulting hybrid recalls the work of a plastic surgeon with a perverse sense of humor, or a genetic mutation whose purpose is as troubling as it is beautiful.

In the rest of the works, all made last year, Dam refines his technique, building increasingly sophisticated (and increasingly warped) structures that combine the precision of high-tech machines with the streamlined sensuality of organic forms. Some consist of only two paper-thin slabs of clay that have been fused into bulbous forms, their abruptly truncated ends attesting to the decisiveness with which they’re made. Others have up to three separate sections grafted into their ribbed exteriors, which recall the hulls of wooden boats and the curves of crashing waves. A few of these resemble 3-D versions of popular computer graphics, in which individual components are spliced together with the touch of a key.

As Dam’s delightfully useless works evolve, they get less and less symmetrical. Although traces of wheel-thrown vessels can be discerned in the final forms of many, the best ones are so idiosyncratic that symmetry has nothing to do with their peculiar beauty.

This is no mean feat. Since the Greeks, our notion of beauty has been based in the balance and harmony of proportionate forms. Without fanfare or theatrics, Dam’s understated sculptures articulate a radically different notion of beauty, in which oddness and exaggeration satisfy the needs once fulfilled by symmetry.

* Frank Lloyd Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through Feb. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Surprises: If you’ve never seen Richard Artschwager’s sculptures that resemble plywood shipping crates, when you enter Daniel Weinberg Gallery you might think that the show has not yet opened and the installation crew is behind schedule. Scattered around two rooms are seven custom-made containers whose specialized features and odd shapes suggest that fine art is inside.

But an even bigger surprise awaits viewers who are familiar with this series of sculptures, which the New York-based artist has been making for the better part of the last decade. As each year passes, these blocky structures look less and less like playful gags and more and more like art. That is, you stop wondering what’s inside them and start paying attention to what they do once they get inside your head.

At first, it’s easy to imagine that Artschwager’s works are making fun of people who are so gullible that they stare with wide-eyed wonder at any object in a gallery and blather on rapturously about its formal refinement. In the end, however, the joke is on people who think that contemporary art is a joke, a sarcastic attack on the romance of everyday life.

If you’ve got enough common sense to actually look at Artschwager’s crates, you’ll see that they’re fakes. Although sturdily built of no-nonsense materials, most have lids that cannot be removed without detaching two or more sides. No self-respecting carpenter would build a crate out of boards and panels whose ends and edges are screwed together in such a labyrinthine fashion.

Aside from a 2-foot cube that has been affixed to a corner of the front gallery like an overhead kitchen cabinet, all of Artschwager’s perfectly useless boxes mimic the shapes of home furnishings. One looks like a bed; a tall one resembles an upright piano; another recalls a fireplace; and, a fourth could be a doorless doghouse.

The more time you spend with these clunky pieces of simplified furniture, the less you fantasize about their shadowy interiors. After all, their scale is slightly smaller than life-size. If anything were inside, it would be child-size, a mere toy or plaything that refers to the full-scale objects of the adult world.

Rather than inviting viewers to escape into their imaginations (or memories of childhood), Artschwager’s abstract (yet far from idealized) sculptures invite us to pay attention to what we can actually see--which, in the right frame of mind, is nothing if not wondrous.

* Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 6148 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 954-8425, through Feb. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Out of Proportion: At Gagosian Gallery, six big paintings by Carroll Dunham look as if they’re a lot smaller than they actually are. Part of this impression is due to the high-ceilinged showroom, which favors the display of massive sculptures and diminishes the impact of two-dimensional images. But the bulk of the responsibility lies with the paintings themselves. Dunham’s cartoonish profiles of crudely configured men and unflatteringly simplified women lack the emotional potency suggested by each piece’s use of more than 30 square feet of linen.

Worse, these dreary, dispiriting caricatures of ugly pink people who grit their shiny white teeth as wads of dirty blond hair flop over their eyes do not repay the effort required to survey their badly painted surfaces. More often than not, you get the sense that Dunham is merely filling up space, going through the motions of making a big statement in paint when a little gesture in pen and ink would be more suitable.

Philip Guston was a painter who made the experience of futility into the subject of his art, often transforming unendurable despair into moments of sober hopefulness. In contrast, Dunham’s lumpen cartoons are too glib to capture the queasy drama of Guston’s dark art, from which Dunham borrows a bit too freely for his own good.

He also steals a riff or two from Peter Saul’s over-the-top canvases, which give new meaning to the phrase “loose cannon on deck.” But it’s difficult to imitate maniacal energy and, despite their self-conscious grubbiness, Dunham’s paintings are too stuffy and buttoned-down to do much more than pretend to get down and dirty.

In the back gallery, a series of 13 page-size prints lacks the bombast of his big paintings. Square inches suit the New York-based painter’s talents, which are adequately served by the scale of comic books.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Feb. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Rethinking Abstraction: At Manny Silverman Gallery, six paintings by Morris Louis (1912-1963) look so fresh and joyous that it’s hard to imagine that they once formed ground zero of an incredibly divisive debate about the function of art and the meaning of life. Today, these deliciously energized pictures demonstrate that no matter how much criticism is piled atop an abstract painting, words cannot bury works of art.

In the late 1960s, Louis’ mural-scale abstractions were lightning rods for all sorts of outlandish claims. Modernists saw these often huge expanses of raw canvas, into which the artist had stained flowing rivulets, dancing blobs and thin veils of acrylic resin, as pinnacles of Western civilization, some of the very few remaining crucibles of existential freedom. In contrast, socially oriented writers dismissed such formalist works as corporate decor, toothless exercises that maintained the status quo by failing to challenge its hypocrisy.

Until very recently, the vehemence of the polarized argument overshadowed paintings like Louis’. But with every new generation of artists comes the potential for a new view of history. For the past five years or so, many young painters have been ignoring what they’ve been told about Color-field painting and looking for themselves. Seen through the lens of their work, Louis’ works have taken on new life.

Made between 1958 and 1962, his six horizontal canvases demonstrate what paint can do in the hands of a master. Setting your eyes in motion, they get you to follow the path of the paint as it traveled across unstretched canvases and was quickly absorbed into their woven surfaces.

Louis’ images are all about speed and art’s ability to orchestrate meaningful sequences of rhythmic movement. Ranging from jubilant displays of gravity-defying verve to elegiac mediations on encroaching darkness, these resilient images speak silent volumes.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 659-8256, through Feb. 28, Closed Sundays and Mondays.