Art History and Pop Culture: Just a Couple of His Targets

Three high-end record players have been sliced apart and then seamlessly fitted back together, making a single unit, in Sean Duffy’s witty sculpture “Triple-turntable.” The new turntable has three working arms, so it plays a record album at three places at once. Simultaneously, you hear a pop song, you hear what the song sounded like a moment ago, and you hear what’s coming in the immediate future. The cyclical nature of popular taste--where what’s in goes out, then inevitably returns to fashion--is neatly encapsulated.

“Triple-turntable” is both centerpiece and soundtrack to Duffy’s small but engaging show in the upstairs room at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. The oddest feature of the sculpture is not its layered music--which in fact sounds surprisingly good--but the makeshift table on which it stands. Duffy has made the base from wooden stretcher bars and raw canvas. The traditional support for a painting is here used as the physical support for a sculpture.

One result is that the turntable and its spinning record begin to resemble the bull’s-eye target pattern introduced into painting by Jasper Johns and later made into a signature image by Kenneth Noland. Two works in the show--”Instant Party” and “Waiting”--are, in fact, composed of small target paintings, apparently made by placing a stretched canvas on a record turntable, holding a paint-loaded brush against the surface and letting it spin.

Three of these small target paintings hang on a larger raw canvas in “Instant Party,” while four more rest on a canvas shelf below. Four others hang on a bigger raw canvas in “Waiting,” with five more on the shelf below. You can change the paintings around as you wish, letting them go in and out of your own personal fashion.

In “Double-wide Sofa” Duffy melds together period furniture by George Nelson, making the orderly rows of circular vinyl cushions in the designer’s famous “marshmallow” sofa suddenly seem like little targets all their own. Two center rows of cushions have been silk-screened in a fake-wood pattern, which nods to the style of a tract house rec room or perhaps the interior of a mobile home (a double-wide trailer, no doubt, given the sofa’s dimensions). The essential formal purity claimed for Noland’s target paintings is deftly replaced by a distinct sense of social guile.

Duffy is building on cyclical tropes of high art and low art, structural clarity and personal taste, studio work and commercial design that were first notably explored by Jim Isermann. His focus on the image of a target is especially keen, encompassing as it does everything from Johns to Target department stores.

The strange and tangled nature of these sorts of style shifts is encapsulated in a very funny, meticulously rendered drawing. It shows in colored pencil the intricate interlace of a macrame wall hanging, whose pattern is based on the nested squares of a Josef Albers painting. The Bauhaus-inspired fusion of art, craft and design has never looked quite this perplexing before.

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Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5363 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 933-2117, through Nov. 24. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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The Stride, Then a Stumble: Between the end of World War II and the 1960s, modern sculpture had a pretty rough go. Painting ruled the day, and for every Henry Moore there were dozens of lesser-known sculptors whose work struggled to meld grand ideas of universal form with specific observation of the natural world.

Francisco Zniga, the Costa Rica-born Mexican sculptor (1912-1998), managed this integration of form and feeling better than most. In 1959, he hit his stride. Mixing School of Paris traditions of simplified or essential form, familiar from precedents such as Aristide Maillol, with the same pre-Columbian sense of monumentality that had inspired Moore, he began to make life-size bronze sculptures using the indigenous women of Southeast Mexico as his models.

At Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, a show of two monumental bronzes, 13 pedestal-size sculptures and 31 drawings and lithographs displays both the strengths and considerable weaknesses of Zniga’s art. Mostly late work, dating since the 1970s, the show’s sculptures and drawings can appear formulaic and repetitive. Typically frontal, they show women in contemplation or engaged in mundane tasks, like fixing hair or chatting in groups. Time stands still, while timelessness is underscored by a sense of monumentality.

The most compelling works are several pastel and crayon drawings from the 1960s, such as “Nude” and “Reclining Nude,” in which the women seem almost carved from the abstract white field of paper (somewhat like a relief). These sensuous, mountainous figures also suggest an unfolding landscape, while their abstraction assumes a shifting vitality.

By contrast, Zniga’s later drawings and lithographs feel rote, as if they depict inert sculptures rather than living people. The sculptures themselves speak an old-fashioned vocabulary of European art that had been definitively superseded. Like Giacomo Manz, who used motifs from classical Rome the way Zniga used ancient Mexico, the sculptor was undone by the Pop, Minimal and Conceptual revolutions of the 1960s. Zniga’s sculpture quickly devolved into the maudlin repetition of a signature style, with the melancholy of human experience replaced by grating nostalgia.

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Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 938-5222, through Dec. 1. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Industrial Strength: For his fourth show at Newspace, Timothy Nolan has made an elegant and unusual group of 18 white-on-white monoprints on translucent sheets of cast acrylic. At once handmade and manufactured, simple in style yet complex in conception, they occupy an unusually provocative territory.

Made by pressing a textile fragment in white oil paint and then using the textile as a printing plate, Nolan’s works create a type of visual Braille. Your eye reads the intricate linear patterns as dense but fragile networks of surface bumps, ridges and ripples.

The textile fragments were laid out in a variety of ways for printing. Sometimes they’re in rows, sometimes crosshatched, sometimes zigzagged or in waves. The individual titles--”Wave,” “Crest,” “Link,” “Split,” “Whirl,” etc.--loosely describe the form those patterns take.

Mounted on acrylic brackets, the plastic panels stand away from the wall. Each pattern thus casts subtle, indistinct shadows through the translucent panel. The patterns may be printed, but like a fragile memory they refer back to the tangible material from which they were made.

The ancestry of Nolan’s monoprints includes Robert Rauschenberg’s famous “Automobile Tire Print” (1953), made by rolling an automobile tire dipped in black paint across sheets of paper. Playful tension between slick industrial technology and the raggedy human hand is integral to his subject.

Textile production was of course the basis for the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, two centuries ago, while Nolan’s delicate linear patterns inescapably resemble circuit boards; his cast acrylic sheets have the look of a computer screen. Technology tends to be Utopian in its aspirations, but Nolan’s singular monoprints assert that imperfection is embedded in the reality of all technology--not least because flaws are integral to our humanity.

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Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, (323) 469-9353, through Nov. 24. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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In Context: In a somewhat erratic new show at Iturralde Gallery, Mexico City-based Conceptual artist Silvia Gruner continues to focus her work on dualities--absence and presence, hot and cold, broken and repaired. Often, the dualities function partly as metaphors for relationships between people.

Three large photographic diptychs show clusters of ceramic buttons used on commercial faucet handles. “Hot” buttons are photographed with warm, reddish overtones, while “cold” buttons are photographed with a cool, bluish cast. Look closely, though, and you’ll discover an errant cold button among the pile of hot ones, and a lone hot button among the cold. Identity gains meaning from context, and sometimes context overwhelms. Perhaps the black-sheep buttons in these two families are made for one another.

The other strong photographic piece is “Repair” (1999), a grid of 12 pictures of cracked pavement, shown in close-up. It mixes clinical entropy and social dissolution with irrational, emotion-filled romance. The crumbling pavement cracks are covered over with cellophane tape, in a futile gesture at once poignant and vaguely desperate. Everything that can fall apart will fall apart--and, besides, how do you mend a broken heart?

Gruner’s wildest work is a simple video projection. The camera is aimed skyward from the ground, where it indiscreetly looks up the dress of a young woman who dances alone to thumping music. This lurid image is projected down, onto a circle of carpet on the floor. She gyrates in a red, flowered mini-dress, while your voyeuristic lust slides into dizziness and nausea.

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Iturralde Gallery, 116 S. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 937-4267, through Nov. 21. Closed Sunday and Monday.