A Lively Conversation in Allen Ruppersberg’s Ongoing ‘Novel’

In a world defined by mass production and media saturation, two activities are commonplace: First, you pick and choose from among the roaring flood of stuff; then, you rearrange things to suit your purpose.

In the latest installment of his ongoing, long-term project, “A Novel That Writes Itself,” Allen Ruppersberg homes in on the practices of choosing and rearranging. The walls of the main room at Margo Leavin Gallery are papered from floor to ceiling with some 1,800 brightly colored, carnival-style posters, which provide a suitably chaotic backdrop for the show. Hanging on top of this cacophonous wallpaper are 46 screen prints, each with a hand-rendered drawing that depicts the same formal library in an old-style manor house.

Ruppersberg’s use of the image of a stately domestic library reads as a sign for privileged refinement and deliberation. The carnival of the public world provides a raucous context for the ordered calm of the private realm.

Each screen print bears a pencil scrawl. “Honey, I rearranged the collection,” the scrawl declares, suggesting a lively sitcom conversation between intimates about art.

What differs from print to print is the subsequent explanation, also in scrawled pencil, of why or on what principle the collection was rearranged: “with artists we only say ‘hello’ to”; “because I have seen God”; “because I’m looking for a good argument”; “with Peggy Guggenheim in mind”; or--my personal favorite--”to let artists speak for themselves. Critics hate that.”

Sometimes, the library image on the print has been colored, doubled, abraded, flopped, collaged, printed off-register or otherwise altered. The alteration comments on the text, while also suggesting that standard signs for deliberation and refinement are not without their own eccentricity and capacity for breakdown.

Which of these wry works is better, funnier or more convincing than the rest? You choose. In the space of his savvy installation Ruppersberg re-creates in miniature the mass-produced, media-saturated modern world, so that your own concentrated picks and choices are thrown into glaring high relief.

This being an art gallery, of course, you’re also invited to go the distance: Purchase of a Ruppersberg work would require, upon its arrival at one’s home, rearrangement of the collection. The reasoning is yours.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through April 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Room to Think: The great Spanish Surrealist Joan Miro (1893--1983) invented a new kind of pictorial space for Modern painting--a vaporous and chromatic space that is atmospheric, all encompassing and omnidirectional. Call it the expansive space of imagination. The Abstract Expressionist art of the New York School in the 1950s, for all of its exciting and energetic newness, would not have happened without it.

At Manny Silverman Gallery, “Intersections: Adolph Gottlieb and Joan Miro, Works on Paper” brings together an uneven selection of 30 drawings and two tabletop painted sculptures to consider the relationship between the Spaniard’s precedent and the American Abstract Expressionist’s art. All but a handful of the works date from the 1960s and ‘70s, long after both artists had established the broad parameters of their mature work. (Gottlieb died in 1974, at the age of 71.) So, the most illuminating aspect of the show will be found in the seven examples made between 1945 and 1956, when Gottlieb was probing to find his own distinctive way, while Miro’s influence was being pressed through a series of exhibitions at his gallery in New York.

The most beautiful Miro in the show is an untitled 1949 ink-and-pastel drawing on a torn paper oval. A strange, insect-like figure sporting concentric circles for eyes and gangly antennae that poke into space seems at once earthy and spectral, tiny and gargantuan. A bug’s-eye view of the world begins to encompass galaxies.

Hanging nearby, Gottlieb’s charming 1952 gouache “Night” is a pictographic work in which a mottled atmosphere of cobalt blue is populated by flat, dark shapes highlighted in crimson. The shapes suggest an archaic language of spiritually inflected signs for people, plants and animals, or perhaps a fragment of a larger and more complex cosmology.

Relationships between the Miro and the Gottlieb are self-evident. The artistic field is conceived as a free-floating imaginative space. Color is embraced for its resistance to rationality. A cosmically inspired union occurs between ancient motifs and futuristic ones.

Gottlieb is plainly building on what Miro proposed. Yet, Miro’s playful wildness never intersects with the grand solemnity characteristic of Gottlieb. What differs between the two artists turns out to be at least as significant as what links them, while the radical difference in tone demonstrates how versatile Miro’s new conception of space turned out to be.

* Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 659-8256, through April 14. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Sounds Cool: The “Cooler Stereo” fabricated by Stephen Shackelford is, in fact, cooler than the average stereo. Made from commercial stereo parts--JVC, Sony and Panasonic tuner, tape deck and audio speakers--that have been disassembled and then reassembled inside six blue picnic coolers of various shapes and sizes, the stereo sprawls across the floor at Acuna-Hansen Gallery in a manner suitably relaxed and casual. Shackelford’s engaging exhibition of sculpture and drawings, which carries the evocative title “Funktionslust,” pushes a theme of leisure to a curious extreme.

This is not assemblage art; it’s re-assemblage art. Rather than put together castoff items salvaged from the urban dumpster, Shackelford takes apart new commercial goods from the local home improvement center or suburban discount department store and reassembles them. The romance of recycling used objects into poetic assemblages that speak of transience and loss is gone.

In its place is a sense of making something playful yet slightly harsh, inventive yet decidedly mutant and, on occasion, even vaguely sinister. (Think gene splicing at Home Depot.) If leisure is a theme pursued by this collection of boy’s toys, so is a concomitant over-production.

“Nitelights (Blue Flowers)” is an elaborate wall decoration made from PVC pipe, electrical cords, artificial flowers and plastic lights. “Fountain” pumps water through PVC pipe, plastic drinking tumblers and a cooler, which is gaily adorned with floral decorations.

“Underdrive” is a motorized lounge chair, with a Polaroid camera incongruously attached to the handlebars and a Sharper Image device for testing blood-alcohol levels conveniently located on a side tray. And, since actual coolers are otherwise employed throughout, “Budweiser Stack,” a tall plywood box lined with foam insulation, is a homemade cooler for 13 lucky cans of beer.

Two drawings in colorful marker pen on Mylar show a sofa and a lawn chair with wings, concise launch pads for daydreaming. Other drawings show brightly colored flowers, loosely recalling Warhol, and a Sony boombox made into a backpack. In all of them, the “permanent” ink of the marker pen bleeds, runs and dribbles in watery flows. Shackelford’s customized re-assemblages are shot through with an occasionally violent undercurrent of things going terribly awry.

* Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 441-1624, through March 31. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.

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Thinking Out of the Box: Each of the three portrait tableaux by New York-based Meyer Vaisman at Patrick Painter Inc. is mounted atop a simple but elegantly crafted plywood cube. Like some crazed jack-in-the-box, it’s as if the elaborate, ingenious, eccentric displays had burst forth from the straitjacketed confines of Minimalist rectitude.

Titled “Surrogate Mothers,” these personalized portraits of sustenance and succor are entangled with familiar Renaissance imagery of death and decay. And, just in case sentimentality or ponderousness might get in the way, a whiff of gentle, cheeky sarcasm is detectable.

One tableau is a post-Freudian Pieta. A blue fiberglass figure of a formidable, shrouded, overweight, naked older woman, identified as a psychiatrist, cradles in her arms the empty uniform of a security guard. Pinned to its lapel is Vaisman’s name tag.

Nearby, three framed photographs of a careworn housekeeper stand vigil, like the three Marys at the tomb, over a foreshortened blue skeleton, laid out on an orange plexiglass plinth in pop evocation of Mantegna’s “Dead Christ.” The third (and simplest) sculpture mixes cocaine paraphernalia with cans of Carnation-brand instant infant formula--two powdered kinds of artificial mother’s milk, manufactured to satisfy cravings for life and death.

What’s curious here is less Vaisman’s imaginative meditations on maternal influence and surrogacy than his implied self-portrait as a dead, vanished or ruined savior. After all, you can’t have a Pieta (even a secular one) without him. For that particular role Vaisman smartly portrays the artist as just an empty suit.

* Patrick Painter Inc., Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through April 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.