Ideas Are Being Bounced Around in These Basketball Puns

Puns have been a staple of contemporary art ever since the rise of Neo-Dada brought Marcel Duchamp back into vogue four decades ago. With multiple and even contradictory meanings packed into a single word or image, they’re perfect for an era of uncertainty (not to mention ecological conservation).

Kori Newkirk spins out puns in his two strongest works on the theme of basketball at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, on the heels of Lakers mania. One is a wall drawing made from creamy, slightly perfumed hair pomade mixed with salt, which is slathered high on the wall in a white-on-white silhouette of a basketball net. The other is a high-style pair of glamorous nickel-plated hoops, whose nets are woven from braided hair extensions. The braids reach all the way to the floor, where they tangle together and unite the individual hoops.

Get it? They’re hair nets. Basketball is merged with hairdressing. Newkirk’s work-with-a-smirk collides activities keenly associated in the popular consciousness with specific gender identities--which promptly get short-circuited.

“Closely Guarded” (the hair-extension hoops) implies conditions of secrecy. “Halo” (the pomade wall drawing) suggests morally upright behavior. In both, the homoerotic buzz is simultaneously submerged and self-evident, coded and clear.

The show also includes five savvy works on paper, in which clusters of photocopied pictures of basketballs generate trenchant associations. There are volatile issues of the genetic roots of athletic prowess and sexual identity (the clusters suggest molecular models in a science lab); heroic cultural mythologies (they also look like constellations--Orion, Leo--in the night sky); and, social manipulation (mutant stick-figure puppets come to mind). Titled “Assumption,” each work wavers between being a simple statement of common cultural supposition today and a send-up of sports-minded anointment.

Newkirk’s approach builds on a variety of well-known precedents, including the work of David Hammons, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roni Horn and Jeff Koons. Sometimes, as in a clock-like installation of 12 basketballs sliced into sections and placed on the floor, where they seem to be bobbing as if in water, the debt is not canceled by the slim artistic payoff. But in pungent works like “Closely Guarded,” “Halo” and “Assumption,” the destabilizing voice is Newkirk’s own.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through July 7. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Hollywood Sweetly Askew: Once, all the world was a stage. Now it’s a three-picture deal with a series guaranteed to syndication.

Leon Fuller makes drawings in crayon, No. 2 pencil, marker pen and watercolor that offer celebrity and entertainment as coloring-book norms. In his second solo show at Richard Heller Gallery, Fuller’s post-Warhol works come across as sweet, mad parodies of the studio pitch. Whimsical and childlike, the 100 or so drawings are casual and accessible, smaller sheets taped together as necessary and everything simply push-pinned to the walls.

Most of these engaging drawings suggest handmade credits to nonexistent movies and television shows, created solely from the collisions of names-names-names common to our inundated culture of celebrity. (A few book jackets and storyboards are also included.) The only figures that turn up among Fuller’s crowded lists of producers, directors, writers, creators and stars are women--invariably young, invariably tall, invariably blond, invariably willowy.

Jerry Seinfeld, Fawn Hall, Jessica Hahn, Bugs Bunny, Debi Derryberry--you saw that show, you know those stars, here they come again! Fuller mixes the known and the unknown, the familiar and the invented, finally making you wonder whether all celebrity isn’t just a crazed composition of interchangeable replicants churned out by an imaginary tool and die company.

The inescapable hommage to Warhol extends to a few unusual drawings of shoes--although these, too, have been sliced, diced and reconfigured by the celebrity Mixmaster. Dr. Heather Locklear-Scholl’s Sashay Exercise Sandals seem a perfectly reasonable product, especially for any aspirant truly serious about getting a foot in the door.

* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through July 3. Closed Sunday and Monday.

An Isolating Experience: In “Pulse,” her new short film transferred to video, Shirin Neshat composes a single extended melodramatic scene that loosely reconstructs the gallery setting in which the film is shown. Neshat, an Iranian filmmaker based in New York who has had more success in the art world than the movie world, here portrays a human yearning for connection through art.

At Patrick Painter Inc., the 7 1/2-minute, black-and-white film shows a sparsely furnished basement room. It’s lit like a Caravaggio painting--murky darkness, punctuated by slanting light. A barefoot woman, seated on the floor in front of what appears to be an old-fashioned radio, communicates in an indecipherable voice that is part song, part speech.

A pulsing sound on the audio track mingles with her quietly plaintive wail. Isolated in her room, the woman seems a prisoner clinging to audible fragments of a faraway world. (The theme of frustrated communication across barriers is also hinted at in a suite of five photographs on view in the gallery’s back room.) The camera floats toward her through the darkened space, lingers in close-up as she seems to caress the radio in a mixed emotion of desire and despair, then casually retreats. Light filters in through a high window, draped curtains hang to the sides.

A draped curtain also hangs at the gallery entrance, while the slanting light in the darkened gallery comes from the DVD projector high overhead. Neshat’s parallelism between depicted image and gallery experience is pronounced, while the sense of isolation and longing is apt. But the overwrought melodrama undercuts this slight, operatic work, making inadvertent fun of the gallery visitor. “Pulse” has the vapors, which is not often a condition associated with looking at art.

* Patrick Painter Inc., Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through July 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

A Little of This: The summer drawings show at Regen Projects includes several gems. With 27 works by 20 artists, mostly American and German, the display is all over the map. That’s exactly what you want from this sort of outing.

Sculptor Jennifer Pastor shows two wispy contour drawings of a woman in a leotard using an exercise ball. Intense physicality gets stretched into a thin, almost spidery line of ink that threatens to disappear.

A pair of charcoal and chalk sketches by John Currin--”Chubby Angel” and “The Witch of Calistoga”--exploit the Old-Master-on-acid manner that has become the New York-based painter’s trademark. These distorted, oddly attenuated drawings possess the look of academic art without any of the claustrophobic high-mindedness. Neat trick.

Paul Sietsema has copied by hand a dry, lengthy text on Modernist art. Using ink and pencil, however, he’s transformed the formulaic lines of printed type into an organic topographical map whose earthy undulations are presided over by a photograph of an industrious, pollinating bee.

Lawrence Wiener’s diagrammatic drawings sonorously explain how to slide down Mt. Etna in a cardboard refrigerator box or by using Kleenex boxes as skis. The instructions are actually unhelpful, just as the loopy event would likely be un-fun.

The most elaborate and resonant drawing in the show is Andrea Zittel’s “A-Z Suburban Islands I,” which is made from 20 images arranged in a grid. One is a gouache, 19 are color inkjet copies of the gouache.

Overall, the work looks like a dazzling kaleidoscope whose rich color and complex pattern is composed from an aerial view of a suburban neighborhood of cookie-cutter streets, greenbelts and homes. Knowing that one section of the grid is the gouache from which the copies have been reproduced makes you closely scrutinize the ensemble, intent on discovering which of the 20 is the original, and which the copies. Finally it’s impossible to tell--and there’s something comforting in that.

* Regen Projects, 629 Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through July 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.