Global perspectives as tent show shtick

Long before museums sprang up in cities across the country, enterprising artists carted big paintings and bigger tents from town to town, setting up temporary exhibitions the locals paid to see. The Nomadic Museum, installed on the beach next to the Santa Monica Pier, brings this tradition into the 21st century.

From the outside, the gigantic structure is flat-out ugly. Designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, the 56,000-square-foot pavilion has been constructed from more than 200 steel shipping containers (stacked in checkerboard pattern), tons of cardboard tubes (fashioned into 50-foot columns) and loads of specially designed awnings (supported by an impressive web of metal struts and cables).

The museum uses the term “nomadic” loosely. Construction took more than a month and required enough trucks, forklifts, cranes, laborers, engineers and electricians to form a small company. This is nomadism with big corporate backing. (It’s funded by Rolex SA.)

Inside, 76 sepia-toned photographs by Canadian artist Gregory Colbert line two long halls. The images, printed on 4-by-8-foot sheets of handmade paper, depict robed men, women and children posing with elephants, whales, manatees, cheetahs, eagles, falcons, baboons, gibbons, orangutans, elands, meerkats, ibises, cranes and rhinoceros hornbills. Stylistically, the pictures resemble industrial-strength greeting cards. Generic and excessively mannered, they dress serenity, peace and brotherhood in the garb of global village primitivism.

Most are stills from three films that are continuously projected in three large spaces. Water is a recurrent motif. In the main attraction, Colbert improvises an underwater ballet with a whale. In two others, exotic women in dugout canoes bend over backward to bathe their long hair in rivers as exotic animals look on.

The camera lingers lovingly -- and fetishistically -- over every sun-dappled detail. The slow pace of each scene is interrupted by a fast cut to the next one, which delivers more of the same. Imagine the signals for a segment of “Animal Planet” getting crossed with a high-end shampoo commercial and then filtered through 1960s performance art, without the nudity.

The dimly lighted interior of the museum includes raw wood planks laid out among smooth gray stones, abstract banners fabricated from Sri Lankan tea bags, potted plants and piped-in music.

It recalls a spare-no-expense Hollywood theme party.

If P.T. Barnum came back as a New Age entrepreneur, he would be right at home in this hokey attempt to mass-produce enlightenment.

The Nomadic Museum, adjacent to the Santa Monica Pier, closed Mondays. Adults $15; seniors and Santa Monica residents $12; students $10; children younger than 6 free; ends May 14. Tickets available at the door or at (866) 468-7619. www.ashesandsnow.com

A creation story, winningly told

When people say that artists have godlike capacities for creation, it’s often implied that these powers are terrible, dangerous and undeserved. But all that depends on one’s view of divinity.

At L.A. Louver Gallery, an installation by Peter Shelton suggests that God is a whimsical tinkerer whose most profound creations have the potential to be just about anything. The same can be said of artists, whose works require the unpredictable participation of viewers to be more than well-meant intentions.

Titled “godspipes,” Shelton’s installation consists of 181 semi-translucent sculptures hung on the four walls, as well as a single figurative form, which resembles a dressmaker’s dummy, standing near the far wall. Made of resin and fiberglass sandwiched around malleable lead armatures, all are hollow.

Many resemble tree trunks and branches, the limbs of cartoon characters or the sleeves of oversize clothes. Others recall medieval armor, fanciful gutters, idiosyncratic drainpipes, strange musical instruments and the shells of imaginary sea creatures.

There’s not a straight line in any of Shelton’s organic sculptures, which evoke plumbing, both bodily and urban. The impressive inventory of forms has been hung from floor to ceiling in sensible clusters, like the tools in a craftsman’s workshop. To stand in the gallery is to feel as if you have stumbled into a magical factory where living things are assembled.

The sculptures have the presence of prototypes, experimental forms from which innumerable duplicates might be mass-produced. Their surfaces have been sandblasted so they are as smooth as young skin. From different angles, their tints shift from soft yellows to warm blues and greens.

Shelton made each piece by molding it over the components of previously completed works. He began in 1989 and, working intermittently, finished in 1998, when “godspipes” was exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

Today it is accompanied by a single piece in an adjoining gallery: “godshole” is a 6-by-5-foot doughnut-shaped sculpture that appears to hover above the floor, like a 3-D computer illustration of some cosmic phenomenon. In Shelton’s world of infinite possibility, there’s plenty of room for irreverence.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Feb. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com

Art to live with, full of wonder

Jim Isermann is a master at packing loads of visual impact -- and long-lasting satisfaction -- into works of all sizes. His first exhibition at Richard Telles Fine Art in five years consists of only two works: a handsome room divider made of 64 octagonal pieces and a sleek wall relief made of 84 isosceles triangles.

Neither takes up much space. But each draws the imagination into action, inviting visitors to picture its components in custom configurations. Fantasizing about how either would look at home follows naturally.

The room divider is vintage Isermann: simple shapes shifted just off-center and then arranged in patterns that are mind-bogglingly beautiful. The 12-by-12-inch octagons, made of hand-cut plywood, are neatly stacked, the angled corners of each creating diamond-shaped openings that alternate between horizontal and vertical.

Four golf ball-size holes, like the dots on dice, have been cut into one side of each olive-colored octagon, revealing a deep blue interior. An abstract shape that resembles the silhouette of a skewed star or a four-pronged pinwheel is cut into the other. The room divider changes dramatically from different perspectives. It blurs the boundaries between public and private, suggesting a dynamic give and take between these ordinarily opposed ideas.

The wall relief is also vintage Isermann: fabulous design that almost disappears into the background while subtly and significantly altering the space around it. The nearly 10-by-10-foot grid of white styrene triangles catches ambient light and transforms architectural rigidity into cushiony softness.

As a pair, Isermann’s untitled sculptures describe the two ways he has worked over his 25-year career, patiently crafting objects by hand and designing works to be industrially fabricated. It’s an efficient little survey that makes wonder seem to be perfectly reasonable.

Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 965-5578, through Feb. 4, closed Sundays and Mondays.

Mix-and-match, messy yet crisp

Richard Artschwager’s exhibition of new paintings at Gagosian Gallery could easily be mistaken for a group show. Landscapes hang alongside street scenes, interiors, still-lifes, abstractions and portraits. Influences range widely, with Cubism, Pointillism and Pop exerting the most pull. And the artists who come to mind form an even odder constellation, which includes Giorgio de Chirico, Jasper Johns, Wayne Thiebaud, John Wesley, Ralph Humphrey, Thomas Nozkowski, Malcolm Morley and Robert Zakanitch.

It doesn’t take long, however, to discern that the 14 sofa-size pictures were made by the same artist and that there’s a method to the mix-and-match madness.

The surfaces of Artschwager’s works resemble sheets of paper that have been crumpled up and thrown away only to be fished out of the wastebasket, uncrumpled and reread. He uses a type of rough fiber panel that makes burlap seem as smooth as porcelain.

From close up, all is chaos -- a jumble of splotches, fragments and mistakes. But from a distance, the messy edges and blurs settle into crisp configurations that are as vivid as cartoons and as rich as real landscapes.

In terms of visible drama, nothing much happens in Artschwager’s paintings. The sun shines in the desert; a stanchion supports a rope barricade between two sets of stairs; green lines wrap around gray ones; a man sits in a room, dwarfed by a ladder; and a plain rug lies in a dark hall.

But the awkward compositions and idiosyncratic paint-handling infuse the matter-of-fact atmosphere with psychological complexity. Space warps. Time stops. And it’s difficult to stop looking at Artschwager’s curiously potent paintings, which stick in the mind’s eye long after you leave.

Artschwager is an American original for whom such niceties as consistency and predictability lead to lazy complacency and stuck-in-a-rut boredom. Too civilized to embrace shock for its own sake, the 83-year-old painter -- who has exhibited regularly since the early 1960s -- instead makes a place for quiet little epiphanies. His profoundly strange paintings occupy those deliciously alien moments when the world’s weirdness is undeniable and indescribable. Everything changes, even if no one else notices.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Feb. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com