Art off and on its pedestal

The survey of Minimalism currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art partly chronicles the disappearance of pedestals from modern sculpture in the 1960s, when art shook off its privileged trappings and got down on the floor it shares with you and me. A savvy show at Sister Gallery uses the occasion to ruminate on the phenomenon -- on what was gained and what lost when pedestals became obsolete.

The title is “The Thought That Counts.” Think of it as a meditation on the pedestal in the age of late Conceptual art. Questions flood the room.

Seven sculptures by eight sculptors make up the show, organized by the always inventive artist Jason Meadows. In his own work Meadows typically brings keen formal intelligence to humdrum materials either scavenged from the Dumpster or acquired at the local “big box” do-it-yourself store. Here the process gets a distinctive twist: Meadows made bases for sculptures by notable artists Liz Larner, Evan Holloway, Mason Cooley, Liz Craft, Pentti Monkkonen, Mark Grotjahn and Sean Landers. (All but Landers, who lives in New York, work in Los Angeles.)

Question No. 1: Is a pedestal made by a sculptor the base for a work of art, or is it another sculpture?

Question No. 2: Is a sculpture placed atop another sculptor’s pedestal one work of art or two -- or maybe even three?

Question No. 3: Does a pedestal lend meaning to the sculpture that sits on it? Or does the pedestal draw its meaning from the sculpture on top? Or does it go both ways -- or neither?

Question No. 4: What would Constantin Brancusi, who raised the pedestal issue in the first place, have to say?

Question No. ... but you get the idea.

Meadows’ bases seem to be in conversation with the seven sculptors’ works, yet the subjects of their chats vary widely. Some are formal, others topical, a few decorative (like small talk).

Larner’s crescents cobbled from foam core might have been pieced together from scavenged parts of Meadows’ open-frame table. One crescent sits on top of the base. The other rests on the floor, as if it had devoured part of the tabletop and fallen through the big hole that resulted.

Landers’ “Football Duck” is an absurd trophy, made by attaching a duck’s bill to a football, gouging out some eyes and casting it in bronze. It comes with its own built-in stand, composed from a pipe on a board. Meadows’ suitably tacky addition of a tall pedestal made from slotted sheets of Plexiglas is at once cruddy and exalting, not unlike celebrity in the NFL.

Monkkonen’s eccentric geodesic design for a beach house, covered with dreamy snapshots of sand and sea, gets a low base shaped like a redwood deck -- leisure-time escape in a consumer society. Grotjahn’s lumpen masks, assembled from paint-slathered cardboard boxes with noses made from toilet paper tubes, get grandiose authority from an aggressive set of aluminum shelves. Craft’s gnarled, bony bronze hands with sharpened fingernails stand on a pedestal like a hangman’s tree.

Cooley’s “Totem Stick” is a tree limb made into a stick figure poised to fly. The shape of its Icarus-like wings suggests a carpenter’s saw, which may be why Meadows raised the figure high overhead on a sky-blue, saw-toothed plinth. Plucky determination meets the crack of doom.

In these seven pungent works -- or is it 14, or 21? -- art is a social activity rather than a discrete object. Meadows’ pedestals emphasize decision-making by artists using materials, and that in turn sets a viewer’s mind spinning. Art is experience, not an inert commodity -- a lesson that cannot be repeated enough, and one Meadows and his cohort offer with panache.

Sister Gallery, 437 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, (213) 628-7000, through July 24. Closed Sunday and Monday.

A windowed sort of claustrophobia

Two things are possible to show in an image of an interior. One is the inside of a building, the other the inside of a mental or spiritual life. The strongest work in the thematic group show titled “Stay Inside” not surprisingly manages a bit of both.

Unfortunately, those examples are in the minority. Most of the works are rather listless. Paintings, drawings and photographs by 18 artists, most from New York but a few from L.A., have been assembled at Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

Jay Davis served as the show’s guest curator, and his own untitled contribution is a standout. Painted in strange blocks of color, it shows a claustrophobic room packed with odd shapes. Somewhere between representations of rugged outdoor terrain and bedroom pillows, felled timber sawed into logs and a braided rug, the shapes bristle with twigs.

Or maybe those squiggly clumps of lines are the stubble of hair. Davis’ dreamlike oscillations of form and implied meaning are repeated in the depicted room’s framed windows, which open onto landscapes that reverberate against a framed painting shown hanging on a rear wall. Looking out and looking in get intimately entwined.

The same happens in a wholly different way in Dan Kopp’s peculiar view into a greenish-blue haze, seen from within the brown contours of a dank cave edged in bright, mottled color. Claustrophobia is made oddly seductive.

Jeff Rugh’s large, deft watercolor shows an elaborate attic filled with stuff -- designer luggage, a Corinthian capital, a machine gun and stacks upon stacks of National Geographic magazines. Through the quatrefoil window in the end wall you glimpse an anonymous modern city in flames. Rugh’s urban paranoia mingles the bland regularity of contemporary public life with the lushness of private imagination, leaving no doubt as to which is preferable.

Campers and tents in vast, wide-open landscapes are the subjects of six color photographs by Una Knox. People are never glimpsed, but an anxious sense of being suspended in a transitory space between coming and going is strong.

The grass is always greener in George Rush’s “Trash.” A potted plant provides transition between dark packing boxes and garbage bags in the foreground and floor-to-ceiling windows in the back, dappled with green light. Life is hard, then you die.

Potted plants turn up again, this time as surrogates, in Jonas Wood’s “Group Portrait.” Exotic species are domesticated in clay pots and arrayed along the bottom edge of a looming, mostly empty canvas. It looks like a grim police lineup, minus booking numbers.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Sept. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday.

A dancer turned installation artist

One great thing about the art world is that it welcomes orphans from other disciplines. San Francisco-born, New York-based filmmaker and choreographer Yvonne Rainer, 70, has long found a welcoming audience there.

A traveling survey show at LACE will be of most interest to modern dance fans, filled as it is with vintage photographs, notebooks, dance scores, posters, performance films, a video “portrait” (by Charles Atlas) and such. They chronicle the career of one of the 1962 founders of Manhattan’s Judson Dance Theater, which was intimately linked to the emergence of Minimalist art.

But the show also has some things to say -- disturbing things -- about the culture at large today. Given Rainer’s street credibility, they’re worth considering.

The show’s most potent element is a 2002 installation inside a small, round room. A video image slides around the white walls in circles, courtesy of a rotating projector suspended from the ceiling. You’re invited to watch while perched on one of two wheeled stools, each with a bulbous, overly inflated seat. Straining to maintain balance on this bubble while your feet keep moving and your eye tracks the video image, you find yourself going around in wobbly circles.

The subject of the video is fin de siecle Vienna and its avant-garde -- Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Adolf Loos, Arnold Schoenberg, etc. But “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid” is no wistful ode to lost grandeur.

Instead it’s a brittle, melancholy admonition. Connections are implied between the decadence, nationalism and social despair of the earlier period and today’s abject condition.

Rainer overlays the swan song of old art a century ago, when Modernism was being born, with that of the tottering Austro-Hungarian empire. We all know what followed in the wake of the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. The work’s insinuations into the present, going around in floundering circles, send a shiver up your spine.

LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 957-1777, through Aug. 8. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

Flowers mean female, yet again

A salutary cheesiness hovers around Betsy Davis’ five wall reliefs at Bank Gallery. Resurrecting a rickety pop symbolism that connects floral motifs with female sexuality, the reliefs are labial abstractions made from sheets of acrylic. The plastic reflects and collects ambient light so that the reliefs’ edges glow, suggesting toxic wallflowers.

Davis builds her sculptures in layers, stacking acrylic sheets cut into elaborate shapes. They recall everything from butterflies to Baroque mirrors. Mostly, they look like Victorian doilies crossed with Rorschach ink blots -- calling Dr. Freud! -- as a sense of propriety and dainty repression merges into dreamy, loose-limbed suggestiveness.

One relief spreads across the wall in 11 parts. Another is projected into space, beginning with a painted shape on the wall and proceeding out into the room (four reliefs are suspended from the ceiling). These studied compositions try to complicate the forms but actually dissipate the works’ resonance. More compelling because more compacted are the three individual reliefs -- especially “Growth,” with its pale, synthetic flesh tones.

Davis’ images of glinting eroticism, android sensuality and mysteries organic and psychological are subtly conflicted. Their frankly synthetic, vaguely crass materials -- commonly associated with commercial signs -- keep them from being seen as old-fashioned essays in “natural” femininity, lending the work a productive edge.

Bank Gallery, 400 S. Main St., (213) 621-4055, through Saturday.