A late ‘80s date gets penciled in

Karl Haendel’s solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a facile rehash of an exhibition the museum presented in 1989.

Seventeen years ago, “A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation” brought together works by 25 New Yorkers and five Angelenos more eager to comment on the difficulty of meaningful communication than to communicate meaningfully. Rather than defining a movement on the upswing, “A Forest of Signs” sounded the death knell for a pompously academic, SoHo-centered strand of contemporary art. Today you’d be hard pressed to find a museum exhibition with five times as many New Yorkers as artists from other cities, much less a show so grandiose about the rudimentary mechanics of its derivative imagery.

Over the last 15 years or so such navel-gazing was laid to rest by a raucous onslaught of art about bodily vulnerability, the politics of identity, beauty’s destabilizing power, entertainment’s accessibility and anti-corporate rebellion.

To walk into Haendel’s exhibition of approximately 30 graphite and charcoal drawings and two black-and-white photographs is to step into a time warp. Everything interesting that has happened in art since 1990 goes up in a puff of smoke.

Haendel is a hard-working illustrator whose drawings mimic basic photographic processes. His show focuses on the photograph’s capacity to be enlarged and reproduced without losing detail.

Most of his drawings depict images from the mass media, including newspapers, magazines and advertisements, as well as from textbooks and family photo albums. To make a drawing, Haendel photographs one of these sources, prints a transparency, projects it onto a large sheet of paper affixed to his studio wall, traces the outlines and fills in the shapes. Two of the largest show a shiny penny and a shiny Cadillac Escalade.

Each has been rendered in the manner of a dutiful journeyman, with equal attention paid to the highlights on Lincoln’s cheeks, lips and earlobes as to those on the vehicle’s wheels, grill and headlights. Even though you need 5,605,500 pennies to buy the big black SUV, Haendel has given the coin and the car the same chance to shine in the spotlight.

The dull punch-the-clock workmanship with which all the works in the show have been executed emphasizes the artist’s embrace of objectivity. It also casts him as a detached observer, an armchair sociologist more interested in pointing out the irrationality of society’s crass values than in risking failure to shake things up.

Yet all is not equal in Haendel’s dispassionately analytical art. He tips his hand by enlarging the penny more than 75 times its actual size, to a diameter of nearly 6 feet. If he did the same to the life-size drawing of the SUV, it wouldn’t fit in the gallery. These shifts in scale reveal that Haendel’s sympathies lie with the nearly valueless penny, which he endows with enough power to go nose to nose with his image of the eight-cylinder gas guzzler.

Such sentiments are sweet but commonplace. They are even less developed in Haendel’s other drawings, which careen, like the moods of an oversensitive teen, between the conviction that art is a worthless exercise in futility and that it is the most important thing in the world -- if only because it is made by him.

One of the show’s earliest works, all of which were made from 2000 to 2005, is a poster-size drawing of the front page of Pravda published the day Haendel was born, July 1, 1976. The only connection between the stories reported that day and Haendel’s birth in New York is the lack of connection.

By making a handmade copy of the front page 24 years after it was on newsstands, Haendel cultivates the sense that this drawing, like all of his works, is out of time and out of place. Social detachment is also suggested by a drawing of a newspaper article with the headline, “Men who live alone ‘are more likely to die young’ ” and another that reproduces an advertisement for a study of depression.

Two large drawings are super-sized versions of little scribbles Haendel made on notebook pages. He even ripped up one carefully copied scribble and stapled it back together -- as if to suggest that he copied the original incorrectly, decided to destroy it and then changed his mind. At once pompous and incidental, self-involved and anonymous, these works fall flat because they want both the incidental ordinariness of the penny and the overblown arrogance of the Escalade.

A similar sense of wanting it both ways explains the presence of Haendel’s studio walls, arranged in a zigzag pattern in the middle of the gallery. The half-dozen 8-by-12-foot chunks of drywall are utterly unremarkable. They are no different from those of any other working artist -- marred by tape, staples, holes from push-pins, lines that went beyond the paper’s edges and the notes artists write to themselves while toiling away.

Some of Haendel’s messages are amusing: “I hope nobody’s drawing on this” and, in a corner just above the floor, “Stay exactly where you are.” They presumably give the otherwise dry exhibition a personal touch. Other messages are sappy, “How can you know what’s in another heart?”; presumptuous, “get collector to pay back my graduate school debt”; or merely clever, “T-y-l-e-n-o-l l-o-n-e-l-y-T.” Visually, the best part of Haendel’s walls is where they have been smudged by his shoes.

The walls make a fetish of Haendel’s touch, which he goes out of his way to eliminate from his drawings. Both compare unfavorably to many of the works in “A Forest of Signs.”

Haendel’s reproductions of New Yorker cartoons resemble entry-level versions of Richard Prince’s joke paintings. Haendel’s slogans, “Make War Not War” and “We (heart) Abortion” recall Jenny Holzer’s bumper sticker messages. His draftsmanship is pure Robert Longo; his focus on newspapers mimics Sarah Charlesworth’s; his interest in scribbles apes James Welling’s photos of crumpled foil; his quotidian imagery evokes Thomas Lawson’s hand-painted Realism; and his process duplicates Sherrie Levine’s tactics.

Another L.A. artist who works mostly on paper is Dave Muller. But Muller’s lovely watercolors are all about the social relationships that art generates, the living friendships and enchanting fascinations that happen whenever art makes its way out into the world. In contrast, Haendel’s art stays in the studio, making in-jokes and insider references that are as inconsequential as ivory tower exercises and as grandiose as late ‘80s art stars.

It’s a claustrophobic parlor game that is depressing when artists play it and even more dispiriting when museums get in on the act and organize exhibitions that rehash old ones.

*

‘Karl Haendel’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Ends: April 17

Price: $5 to $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222; www.moca.org