Variations on a commercial theme

It’s easy to tell the difference between art and advertising. Advertisements are designed to sell stuff and art isn’t.

But that doesn’t mean that art doesn’t have anything to do with advertising. In a sense, art is an ad for itself -- an attractive, often dazzling demonstration of what the world would look like if an artist made it over in his own image.

At the UCLA Hammer Museum, that’s exactly what Dave Muller has done in a deliciously idiosyncratic exhibition of almost 200 poster-size watercolors, several sculptures that look like shipping crates and a bit of ephemera arranged around a sofa and coffee table. Organized by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies Museum in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., “Dave Muller: Connections” is filled with works that hide their wild ambitions behind the casual demeanor of a seasoned do-it-yourselfer. The 39-year-old L.A. artist does not just make a name for himself: He makes the world safe for himself and his view of it by making art out of advertising and advertising out of art.

In 1994, a year after Muller graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with a master’s degree, he painted a watercolor that looks like an oversize postcard advertising Andrea Bowers’ solo show at Bliss, an artist-run gallery in a house in Pasadena. Titled “Damaged Goods,” Bowers’ exhibition included valuable artifacts and irreplaceable objects damaged in the Northridge earthquake.

Muller’s work on paper features a close-up of a cut-glass chandelier, beneath which are written, in elegant script, the show’s dates and the gallery’s hours, address and phone number. True to the spirit of Bowers’ art, Muller has painted his homemade poster on a sheet of paper whose right edge has a bite-size chunk torn from it. His damaged advertisement simultaneously imitates ordinary exhibition announcements and the works in the show.

The majority of Muller’s pieces are variations on this theme. In each, he juxtaposes accurate information about actual exhibitions with beautifully painted images of his own. His compositions are always top-notch. And the pictures he invents to advertise and commemorate his friends’ shows are devilishly clever.

For example, two watercolors based on Carter Potter’s exhibition at Angles Gallery from Dec. 8, 1994, to Jan. 3, 1995, play off of the fact that Potter makes surrogate paintings by weaving together discarded strips of 16- and 35-millimeter film. Using the grid formed by the horizontal and vertical strips of film in the manner of an open-ended crossword puzzle, Muller has filled in its squares with letters that spell Potter’s name if you read diagonally and nonsense if you read across and down. Weaving his own work into the pattern established by Potter, Muller invites viewers to go against the grain of our ordinary visual -- and intellectual -- habits.

While making his signature ads for other artists’ shows, Muller also ran Three Day Weekend, a series of sporadic group exhibitions that began when he tidied up his downtown studio and invited artists whose work interested him to install their pieces over holiday weekends. Drinks were served and Muller, who is also a DJ, spun discs. Between 1994 and 2001, he organized 50 of these events, taking the freewheeling show on the road to galleries and alternative spaces in Houston, Vienna, Tokyo, London and Frankfurt. His hand-painted posters for these quick exhibits, all of which begin, “Three Day Weekend presents...” are among his most elaborately composed and graphically sophisticated.

In 1998, Muller expanded his role of art (and party) promoter to include the duties of critic and commentator. Two watercolors based on a dismissive New York Times review of an exhibition by Sam Durant mimic the format of a before-and-after advertisement. The first dutifully reproduces the compact critique. The second is a loopy love-poem that takes the format of a ransom note or punk album cover. Turning the critic’s words against themselves, Muller’s repaired review talks back to authority by taking power into its own hands, playfully and pointedly.

Other works reveal that Muller finds his heroes, and inspiration, in out-of-the-way places. A diptych and a double diptych from 1998 sketch a scene in which Walter Hopps traces a Morandi drawing for an exhibition advertisement. This tidbit of history provides a toehold for Muller, whose oeuvre does something similar.

His sculptures redeem fakery with a fan’s enthusiasm. Unceremoniously deposited in the middle of the floor, they are indistinguishable from real shipping crates, complete with stenciled warnings, handwritten messages and customs forms that identify the contents as sculptures by little-known Romanian-born artist Andre Cadere. Cadere painted pole-shaped sculptures and surreptitiously installed them in other artists’ shows as well as in museums whose curators hadn’t thought to include them -- or had decided not to.

No gate-crasher himself, Muller turns Cadere’s insouciant spirit into the basis for his own aesthetic universe. Embracing an all-American ethos of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, his works do not stand back and offer detached commentaries on high-profile art-world events. Instead, they roll up their metaphorical sleeves and leap into the messy tangle of art, commerce and life, where real risks are taken and substantial pleasures delivered.

Over the last four years Muller’s works have branched out to include multi-page, installation-scale watercolor pieces in which fine art and everyday life overlap with such ease and elegance that it’s hard to image them existing apart from each other. The newest of these, which features a dreamy, day-after-the-rain view of Los Angeles, is on view at Blum and Poe Gallery in Santa Monica. Similar views of New York and Berlin are at the Hammer.

In a suite of four comic strip-style images from 1999, Muller links Jackson Pollock and Charlie Brown, demonstrating that the spirit with which something is done is more important than the job itself.

In an ongoing series begun in 2000, Andy Warhol and Calvin (from “Calvin and Hobbes”) behave similarly, offering their own unauthorized critiques of established authorities.

Contrary to what curator Amada Cruz claims in the nicely illustrated catalog that accompanies the Hammer show, Muller’s watercolors are not a critique of art found in museums or a mockery of the mass-produced announcements commercial galleries regularly send out. Instead, Muller’s art is a critique of big-budget institutions that use art as an advertisement for themselves to get larger audiences and a larger take at the gate. In contrast, his densely textured works celebrate the organic, hands-on quality of a life in the arts, where intimacy and passion take the place of grandeur and solemnity.

*

‘Dave Muller: Connections’

Where: UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood

When: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays 11 a.m.- 7 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.- 9 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Ends: Through Jan. 5

Price: Adults, $5; students and children, free

Contact: (310) 443-7000