Restless nights of a fiddler on the roof

For the last two or three years, Hirsch Perlman has been staging his own Burning Man festival. But unlike the original, which attracts thousands of thrill-seekers to the Nevada desert every year for a week of Dionysian craziness, the L.A. artist’s version is a stay-at-home affair. Think Walt Whitman meets the frenzied denizens of the raucous bacchanal and you’ll have an idea of the way Perlman fuses far-out weirdness and good ol’ American philosophy.

At the Blum & Poe Gallery, the walls of two rooms have been covered with 78 simply framed black-and-white photographs. In a third, two short videos run continuously. Darkness, both literal and metaphoric, is the ground out of which Perlman’s art grows.

The first gallery displays 41 small, medium and large photographs he shot at night, camping on the rooftop of his Mount Washington apartment building. No fancy equipment was required for these strangely straightforward prints, just an ordinary 35-millimeter camera, a remote shutter release and long exposures that captured the ambient light from neighboring homes, streetlights, L.A.’s downtown skyline, the arcing paths of stars and a bubble-shaped skylight set in the building’s asphalt-covered roof.

A chair, a bottle of water, a pile of books and a flashlight clamped to a tripod show where Perlman sat for long hours, reading peacefully or staring at the moon, like a retired night watchman for whom old habits die hard. In some prints, faint traces of his body take shape. But he rarely sat still long enough to allow his image to come through clearly.

Perlman’s ghostly presence is overshadowed by other human-shaped forms that appear to have visited him on various nights. These include several larger-than-life stick figures he drew in the air with a flashlight, a rocket-shaped contraption made of fluorescent tubes and scrap metal, and a clunky android that resembles a cross between the Tin Man and C3PO.

A fog machine adds a noir touch to the tragicomic atmosphere. But Perlman never strives for the seamless illusionism of Hollywood special effects. It takes time, but it’s fairly easy to figure out how he cobbled together the props for his solitary dramas.

When you do, the sense of mystery intensifies rather than diminishes. The same goes for the 37 still lifes in the second gallery, which he made by photographing deflated beach balls, clumps of bubble wrap and inexpensive strings of Christmas lights. In Perlman’s hands, these unglamorous items resemble deep-sea creatures, nuclear explosions, cosmic nebulae, human brains, meaty mushrooms, cellular structures and malignant tumors.

Sometimes, it’s impossible to tell just what you’re looking at. At other times, you don’t want to know. All that’s certain is that what you see has not been digitally engineered.

Perlman’s images have more in common with 19th century spirit photography than 21st century art photography. His short videos, set to scores by Antonio Ruiz-Pipo and Johann Sebastian Bach, similarly march to a beat all their own.

As an artist, Perlman is so far out of step with contemporary corporate culture that he’s both behind the times and ahead of them. His second solo show in Los Angeles celebrates the do-it-yourself ethos of rebel festivals while offering a profoundly melancholy meditation on the death of individualism. Here, desperate hope and absurdist humor live alongside each other in anxious harmony -- like the calm before an unnatural storm.

Blum & Poe Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 836-2062, through March 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Middle class illustrated

If Norman Rockwell were a living African American who grew up in Florida and went to graduate school on the East Coast, he might paint like Lamar Peterson. At the Richard Heller Gallery, this young artist’s solo debut consists of two paper bag puppets and 12 page-size pictures so neatly drawn and nicely filled in with supersaturated blues, greens and reds that they look as if they were made by a coloring book master.

What’s even better about Peterson’s images of men, women and children at work, rest and play is that they finagle something new from a style that’s often run into the ground by contemporary artists -- especially those with less talent and imagination that Peterson. His faux naive paintings on paper embrace the run-of-the-mill blandness of middle-class existence with the same punch-drunk enthusiasm they have for the uncanny.

Peterson is an equal-opportunity observer of the weird forms pleasure takes in a work-obsessed culture, where success and survival go hand in glove. No stranger to artistic labor, he’s done his homework, drawing on sources as diverse as SpongeBob SquarePants, Caribbean travel posters, online animation, black art from the 1970s and Michael Reafsnyder’s smiley face paintings. It’s a perky stew with great promise.

Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through March 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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In search of a heavenly choir

Twenty years ago, French Conceptual artist Sophie Calle came to Los Angeles and asked everyone she saw, “Since Los Angeles is literally the city of the angels, where are the angels?” At USC’s Fisher Gallery, selected results of her little survey form an amusing time capsule.

Black-and-white photographs of 19 people she polled are hung next to typewritten summaries of their answers. The politicians behaved like sheep, answering safely by angling for the most votes. Mayor Tom Bradley and Councilman Joel Wachs said all the city’s people are angels. Community Redevelopment Agency Administrator Edward H. limited himself to children.

Fred Croton, general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department, went the furthest, claiming that the homeless are angels. Police Chief Daryl Gates opined that many angels lived here but then turned the question into a paranoid discussion of devils: criminals and journalists.

Three ordinary folks Calle stopped on the street generally agreed with the politicians. Penelope Milford said everyone was an angel, Lloys R. thought volunteer workers were, and Antonio Peter Russo stuck with innocent children.

Architect Frank Gehry answered directly: “In my house. My wife and children.”

Artist Edward Ruscha was more elliptical, saying, “There are no angels in Los Angeles, and no clouds for them to sit on.”

If L.A.’s weather makes life tough for standard-issue angels, some citizens have no trouble seeing them in other places. Dale Herd found angels on the daily racing form whenever he picked a winner; mail carrier Jose Valdez flirted shamelessly, insisting that Calle was his angel; and Ramiro Salcedo, owner of the Victor Clothing Building, linked faith and prosperity in typically American fashion by saying that the last three owners of the Victor Clothing Co. were angels.

The most colorful answers came from people who felt that angels had abandoned Los Angeles. Larry Gross said “the whole city is a monument to their failure to appear.”

Richard O’Neill offered an insightfully nutty mix of history and etymology. Rambling from the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries to the Mexican American War, the emergence of Hollywood and the Dodgers’ displacement of the Angels to Anaheim, he ended with advice for Calle: “Anyway, people don’t call the city Los Angeles anymore, they call it L.A.”

USC Fisher Gallery, 823 Exposition Blvd., (213) 740-4561, through April 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Beautiful, just beautiful

The nine oils on panel in Marcelino Goncalves’ second solo show at the Cherrydelosreyes Gallery make you wonder if it’s possible for a painting to be too beautiful for its own good. Poppycock, they swiftly answer -- that’s the sort of mean-spirited moralism that mediocre minds use to drag down standouts, supposedly for their own good.

Plus, paintings aren’t people. To worry about “their own good” is to get yourself in a tizzy over a tired fantasy of artistic autonomy and painterly purity.

The desire-riddled fantasies that take shape in Goncalves’ works are both vivid and dreamy. These gorgeous pictures of a gorgeous man, a German car, a Spanish fountain, a French watch and a couple of American hay bales are as mundane as boredom and as exciting as falling in love.

A true believer in the ideas that life is short and that you can’t have too much of a good thing, Goncalves makes paintings that bathe in the perfume of Impressionism, particularly that of Gustave Caillebotte and Claude Monet, while luxuriating in Southern California sunshine. Aestheticism’s exquisite refinements never looked better, nor decadence more wholesome.

Cherrydelosreyes Gallery, 12611 Venice Blvd., (310) 398-7404, through April 4. Closed Mondays to Thursdays.