Live stock footage

In a brilliant little essay from 1874, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote affectionately about the herd. His outlook still distinguishes him from most social critics, who put down other people by comparing them to beasts of the field.

At the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a digital video projected onto the wall of the darkened gallery demonstrates that cows are neither stupid nor clueless. Engineered by virtuoso animal and plant videographer Sam Easterson -- yet shot by the cows themselves -- this fascinating DVD endorses Nietzsche’s perspective by suggesting that humans could learn a thing or two from animals.

To get the footage for “On the Farm: Live Stock Footage by Livestock,” Easterson stripped an off-the-shelf video camera to its bare essentials, fastened it to a specially designed harness and strapped the contraption to a cow’s head. After the cow rejoined her companions, Easterson started recording from a remote control and let the camera run continuously.

The result is a cow’s-eye view of the world. For the most part, it’s a close-up of the field she’s got her nose to, munching hay by the mouthful. The sound of her breathing and chewing forms a lulling rhythm that’s occasionally accented by the whistling wind, a distant moo or a nearby belch.

The view changes as the cow raises her head to scan her surroundings. She pauses momentarily when other cows are in the center of her field of vision. Most stare right back at her. Each time it looks as if they’re counting the herd and crunching the numbers, but it’s impossible to know if any silent communication actually passes between them.

The most dramatic moment comes when another cow notices the camera and gives it a good licking. A few swipes of her tongue is all it takes for her to discover that she has no use for such technology and that hay tastes a lot better.

Five small monitors display similar footage shot by a chick, two horses, a goat, a pig and a sheep. Each video has its own pulse and character, ranging from the frenetic to the serene.

The pig appears to be a machine with only two settings: high-speed rooting and statue-like stillness. The sheep’s story is the most poignant. He glances back and forth between a farmhouse and the herd, all of whose members stare at him. When he approaches them, they run off as a group. Ostracized because of the camera strapped to his head, he looks back at the farmhouse as if to say, “What have you done to me?”

The Center for Land Use Interpretation, 9331 Venice Blvd., Culver City, (310) 839-5722, through Dec. 27. Fridays and Saturdays only.

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Fine art mingles with daily utility

Gagosian Gallery is dressed to the nines by Jorge Pardo’s playfully elegant exhibition. Three sets of nine lamps, laser-cut from delicate strips of bent plywood and plastic, hang overhead like exotic sea creatures. On the floor stand nine stylish picnic tables, each of their tops a brightly colored abstract painting composed of sophisticated doodles and oddly overlapped patterns. Upstairs, nine more lamps are suspended from the ceiling and bathed in the sunshine that pours through the skylight.

Never a slave to consistency, Pardo banishes that hobgoblin of little minds by limiting the number of his inkjet prints to seven downstairs and six upstairs. Half are rectangles, and half are meticulously cut to resemble lacy pressed leaves or designer Rorschach inkblots.

For Pardo, distinctions between utilitarian design and fine art aren’t worth the trouble. Each of his lamps looks as if it has sprung, fully formed, from a painting by Joan Miro or Paul Klee. Some have the presence of abstract insects, fabulous jellyfish or Leonardo da Vinci’s unrealized designs for flying machines.

Pardo’s paintings resemble the loopy offspring of Henri Matisse’s paper cutouts and Man Ray’s 1916 painting “The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself With Her Shadows.” Presented as tabletops, they go out of their way to pick fights with traditionalists.

But rather than assert that painting is dead -- and needs to be laid in state so viewers can pay their last respects to its well-dressed corpse -- Pardo’s paintings-as-tables suggest that if your walls are full, why not treat your table as a pedestal for a painting? At least you won’t need to worry about tablecloths.

All of his works value the pleasures of social occasions like meals over the solitary contemplation that art usually requires. But that doesn’t mean his works are frivolous.

Years ago, Barnett Newman defined sculpture as something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting. Pardo’s exhibition turns the tables on this idea, simultaneously making fun of painters who detest sculpture and sculptors who hate painting. All forms of philistine singlemindedness get tossed out the window by his thoughtful art, which prefers the generosity of everyday civility to the exclusivity of privilege.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Saturday.

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Sinister visions of the suburbs

The United States may not have invented the suburbs, but it sometimes seems that we’ve done more than anyone else to turn suburban living into an art. At Angles Gallery, four painters born in the 1970s depict the suburbs as strangely alienating places. In their Pop-infected pictures, the comforts of home seem poisonous, suffused with the mutant beauty viewers have come to expect from art on the fringe of respectability.

Todd Bourret’s acrylics on canvas are the most conventional. All four are easy-to-read images of interiors and exteriors, both cluttered and barren. Two are artfully sullied with fugitive bits of synthetic ceiling texture. But Bourret’s paint handling is too perfunctory to get beyond the obvious.

Erik Benson and Nikko Mueller take more distant views of apartment buildings, malls and country clubs. Both painters also take more chances with their palettes, compositions and paint handling. It pays off.

Benson literally builds his images of modernist high-rises brick by brick, gluing carefully cut-out rectangles of dried paint to his canvases as if he were making miniature mosaics. Mueller treats bird’s-eye views of suburban subdivisions as skeletal structures for his own painterly adventures. Dribbling and plastering paint with controlled abandon, he draws viewers into worlds at once tidy and toxic.

Likewise, Liam Jones sticks to the surfaces of things to emphasize that reality is often stranger than fiction. His pictures of trailer homes, partially constructed houses and others tented for fumigation look like the bastard offspring of good ol’ trompe l’oeil illusionism and up-to-the-minute computer graphics.

The muted queasiness that characterizes all their works recalls the art of Georges Seurat, the first great painter of the suburbs. Like his Pointillist pictures of lower-middle-class swimmers and upper-middle-class promenaders from the 1880s, these contemporary paintings make familiar things look strangely unsettling -- all the better to get viewers to pay attention to our surroundings.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Jan. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A Viennese salon in Chinatown

Six students currently enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna strut their seemingly straightforward stuff in a salon-style exhibition at the Black Dragon Society.

The four men paint figures. The two women favor landscapes.

All work from photographs. Their promising paintings blend earnestness and outlandishness. It’s a pleasure to see new work by strangers, especially when it’s in the form of paintings that have so much in common with art from L.A.

Family snapshots provide Robert Muntean and Adam Fitz with their subjects.

Muntean brings the fluidity of watercolors to his large canvases. The best ones convey casual clarity, airy freshness and summery innocence.

Fitz’s smaller portraits are darker and more troublesome. Their blurriness stands in for ambivalent memories and signals Fitz’s impatience with the tools of his trade.

Fantasy takes an active role in Christoph Holzeis’ mix-and-match triptych. Here, Brothers Grimm fairy tales collide with stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Beuys.

Even loopier are Markus Dressler’s comic paintings. In them, sombrero-wearing cowboys, bands of Vikings and the reunited Beatles live happily ever after in the Swiss Family Robinson’s condo-sized treehouse -- accompanied by Dressler’s black cat and a friendly pack of stray dogs.

The landscape paintings also cover a wide range of subjects in a variety of styles.

Vasilena Gankovska’s flat-footed pictures of construction sites, hotels and harbors make labor look dreamy and leisure look like hard work.

Iris Nemecek’s postcard-perfect views of the Austrian countryside show her to command the greatest facility.

Black Dragon Society, 961 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 620-0030, through Jan. 3. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.