Original thinking? Overrated

Remember that kid in high school who could draw perfect copies of magazine ads, celebrity portraits and fancy cars? Karl Haendel’s show at Anna Helwing Gallery elicits a little shimmer of nostalgia for the awe induced by that precocious skill. Then comes the sinking letdown: We’re not in high school anymore and neither is Haendel. Mimicry is no longer enough to impress.

Haendel, to his credit, does more than draw copies of ads, New Yorker cartoons, family photos and art of the past. He does the college-level version of that high school showmanship: He calls attention to the act of copying, laces it with irony and self-consciousness. After all, copying isn’t just copying anymore, it’s appropriation -- a manual process pre-loaded with smart intent.

Appropriation is, presumably, an intellectually robust form of imitation. It triggers associations with theories of originality and the death of authenticity.

Haendel clearly thinks along these lines. Among the images in the show is a giant pencil rendition of a fingerprint, a key emblem of uniqueness. It’s set among drawings made after Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Longo and others. Haendel also redraws graphics staples, such as question marks and exclamation points, in various styles and configurations. A few photographs are thrown in as well.

The images range from modest in scale to nearly 8 feet on a side. Some are framed and hung in a conventional manner, while others rest on blocks, propped against the wall. Some are simply taped to the wall or each other, or hung by pushpins. On one pinned-up sheet of paper is a drawing of a pinned-up sheet of paper. Passing clever. The cartoons reproduced in pencil bring genuine laughter, but Haendel is just the messenger.

Slight themes emerge among clusters of images. The wall with the Longo drawings of women frozen in dance-like postures also contains the emphatically diagonal exclamation points and a New York City view of a skyscraper visible through the slanted silhouettes of two other buildings. Haendel can rhyme and he can repeat, but he doesn’t display much interest in composing.

In fact, in an artist’s statement at the gallery, he proclaims that he doesn’t believe in “originality, inspiration or creativity.” He compares himself to a photographer who “observes the world, points, edits, crops and selects.” He professes a truth to materials and an honesty in his representation of the world that amounts to a manner of humanism, ethical obligations and all. His earnestness is the most appealing aspect of the show.

A few new walls for hanging work have been built in the gallery and left purposely unfinished, in their framed state. Such studied casualness reinforces the notion that all of what’s on view is a work in progress. It’s hard not to disagree. Mostly, though, the show feels presumptuous, as if rehashing images in the popular domain by rehashing strategies in the basic art curriculum would satisfy. It doesn’t.

Anna Helwing Gallery, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 202-2213, through April 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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The beauty of auto racing

Kristin Baker’s “Ride to Live, Live to Ride” is one of the most spectacular paintings to hang in an L.A. gallery in recent memory. At 10 by 15 feet, it’s an immersive bang of color, motion, efflorescence. Petals of color -- persimmon, silver, neon green, white, gold -- erupt from the center of the panel, some opaque, others translucent and streaked like marbled paper or the sheen of an oil slick. The dominant color of this giant blossom of destruction is soot, leavened by a sprinkling of lipstick red, royal blue, forest green, industrial gray, crimson and white confetti-like patches.

Baker derives her imagery from years of observing and photographing at racetracks. Her father became a driver, and after growing up within racing culture, she made it the subject of her art. “Ride to Live, Live to Ride” sheds all literal reference to the sport in favor of a visceral evocation of speed, impact, beauty and violence.

Each of the other paintings in Baker’s show at ACME drop heavier hints about their inspiration. A tire hurls into space in one. In another, ribbons of vibrant color trace the straightaway and curve of the track. A series of paintings of orange traffic cones, stark against blank white Mylar, are inert by comparison. Scraped and rumpled, the cones are petty emblems of aftermath. The rest of the paintings capture the immediacy and speed of the race and the breathless moment of impact.

Painting in acrylic on PVC panels, Baker has developed a style reminiscent of cut-paper collage. Shapes remain hard-edged and discrete, but they layer and interweave with lush intensity. Chaos and control are in exquisite balance.

The surfaces are slick, echoing the sheen of the car bodies and the graphic vibrancy of the logo- and ad-splattered track environment. Even without a single recognizable reference to the racing world, as in the piece de resistance of the show, Baker has captured the thrill and dynamism of the sport -- and made painting just as exciting.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-5942, through April 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Where boundaries get blurred

What artist doesn’t want others to enter his or her reality? Katharina Grosse makes it impossible to keep one’s distance. In her installation at Christopher Grimes, paint stretches across the gallery floor and up the walls. In other locales, her work has covered parts of the ceiling too.

Grosse is part graffiti artist, marking her territory, and part Color-Field painter, saturating surfaces with rich, vivid hues. Walking into the gallery feels vaguely like entering the color-soaked light from a stained glass window. Her work poses questions of boundaries -- between art and life, primarily -- and implies a kind of intimacy even as it occupies a grand scale.

The Berlin-based Grosse paints with a spray gun. Colors mix when she layers them and when they bleed together. In preparation for the show, Grosse propped a large canvas against the longest gallery wall and made a lush, gestural painting across them both. In the show, the canvas hangs opposite the wall it was born on, which sports a white rectangular void, partially filled by another canvas freckled with circles in tangerine, turquoise, emerald and blood. The notion of a site-specific painting on canvas tickles the brain, and the process (the action painting and its removal) is at least as provocative as the material form of the work itself.

In a smaller side gallery, Grosse’s slashes of electric blue, magenta and neon green stain two clothes-strewn futons on the floor. Two adjacent stacks of books, whose titles seem random picks from the categories of travel, food and beauty, are also striped with color. Paint subsumes the domestic still life arrangement on the floor, blotting it out in part, but also redefining it, drawing it into the total act of art, which ends up feeling largely conceptual.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through April 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Some translations that come up short

One of the most memorable works in two recent survey shows -- the Orange County Museum of Art’s 2004 California Biennial and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego’s “Baja to Vancouver” -- was Kota Ezawa’s “The Simpson Verdict.” Ezawa used footage of the closing moments of the O.J. Simpson murder trial as the basis for a short animated video, distilling the figures and setting to simplified tones of brown, tan and gray.

Even in this altered form, the scene of Simpson and his legal team awaiting and receiving the verdict was instantly recognizable. Making it cartoonish played into the media spectacle the event had become but didn’t divest it of its cultural significance. Instead, the form worked to amplify the moment’s psychological weight.

Such evocative transformation is exactly what’s missing from the San Francisco-based artist’s new work, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, in Project Room II. “On Photography” is, instead, more a work of flat translation. Again, Ezawa starts with given photographic images and reduces them to tonally flat pictures of paint-by-number simplicity. These are projected as slides in a continuous loop.

Most of the 20 images are well-known to students of photographic history: a Walker Evans barbershop interior, a shot of Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery, Diane Arbus’ Jewish giant, a Robert Mapplethorpe double portrait, a Nan Goldin self-portrait with black eye, a Cindy Sherman film still and so on. Several don’t register as familiar but relate to familiar genres of war and expeditionary photography.

Ezawa flattens the images formally but also emotionally, deadening them. They have little left to offer but reference to their notable sources. Even the work’s title, “On Photography,” is borrowed, from an oft-cited book by the late Susan Sontag.

In 1979, Sherrie Levine rephotographed landmarks in the history of photography and presented them as her own, ironic quips on the death of originality. The one-liner exhausted itself rapidly, and Ezawa’s work does the same. The graphic punch of his method feels attenuated and bereft even before the loop has completed a single cycle.

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-6488, through May 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.