Hmm, let me see what I can do with that

“The art of the past no longer exists as it once did,” critic John Berger wrote. “Its authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose.”

There are few, at least among contemporary artists, who have used it quite as cleverly and ardently as Richard Pettibone, whose first major retrospective, curated by Michael Duncan and Ian Berry, is on view at the Laguna Art Museum, which organized the show, along with the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.

Berger, writing in the early 1970s, viewed the situation as one of latent revolutionary potential. In an era of photographic reproduction, he argued, anyone with access to a museum shop, a stationery store or a few magazines and a pair of scissors can build a world-class collection in the space of a bulletin board, reclaiming art from the province of the cultural elite (“the few specialized experts who are the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline,” as he put it) and making it personally relevant.

Pettibone’s oeuvre feels, in many ways, like just such a bulletin board: a space of collection and contemplation, deeply personal and passionate. It also looks much like a bulletin board: packed with images from art’s recent past -- from Duchamp, Warhol, Johns, Stella, Lichtenstein, Mondrian and others -- all reduced in scale and often skewed or overlapped, like so many postcards hastily pinned to the wall. These are Pettibone’s influences, not invisibly absorbed or coyly alluded to, but generously imported wholesale. They are, quite literally, the language that Pettibone’s own work speaks.

The difference between Berger’s bulletin board and this exhibition is the fact that Pettibone’s reproductions are paintings, not photographs. More to the point, they’re exceptionally beautiful paintings: sharp, skillful, meticulous and tenderly crafted. His later sculptures, most of which are made out of wood, are also exquisite. This devotion to craft tempers the mechanization of the copying and collapses the ironic distance that tends to characterize artistic appropriation. If, in Berger’s terms, the image loses its authority in reproduction, Pettibone restores that authority by reinvesting the object with an irresistible presence.

Pettibone’s capacity for the balance of these tensions -- between painting and photography, concept and craft, originality and imitation, irony and emulation -- is the most impressive aspect of this extensive and important exhibition, which covers more than 40 years and makes a strong case for Pettibone’s standing among the top tier of L.A.’s Ferus-generation artists.

So 20th century

Although he has lived in upstate New York since the 1970s, Pettibone was born in Alhambra, went to school at Otis College of Art and Design, and had his first solo show at the Ferus Gallery in 1965. Combining elements of Pop Art, conceptual art, minimalism, assemblage, photorealism and appropriation, his work touches on most of the major American movements of the late 20th century without capitulating to any one, or feeling scattered or overextended.

One of the threads holding the work together is the artist’s inveterate wit. Pettibone was just out of art school when Warhol showed his soup can paintings at Ferus Gallery in 1962, and the Pasadena Art Museum mounted its Duchamp retrospective a year later (what a year!). These two artists hover above his work like trickster patron saints, inflecting nearly every gesture. From the earliest copy paintings, which Pettibone scaled to the size of art magazine advertisements, to the exhibition’s catalog, designed to resemble an old issue of Artforum, the show is densely, consistently and often precociously clever.

Several of the earliest works revolve around images of trains (a childhood passion of Pettibone’s) juxtaposed with images of women erotically reclining, as if poised to be either penetrated or run over.

A number of subsequent paintings depict trains rolling over Warhol soup cans. (One of these reads, in Pettibone’s trademarked stamped lettering, “Train Destroys Valuable Art Object.”) Another work involves a tube of paint that Pettibone flattened beneath the wheels of an actual train, then mounted on canvas.

Yet another involves a Pettibone copy painting of a Warhol soup can subjected to the same fate, its lower stretcher bars crushed and its canvas soiled and tattered.

The best known works in the show are the first wave of copy paintings, made in the early to mid-’60s: Warhol’s soup cans, flowers, celebrities and Brillo boxes; Lichtenstein’s comic book figures; Johns’ flags and targets; Stella’s geometric configurations -- some presented singly and stamped with the names of Pettibone and the original artist, some arranged in collage-like clusters on elaborately constructed canvases.

These early works have their charms -- they’re bold, clever and delectable as objects -- but it is to Pettibone’s credit as a thinker that they’re not the apex of the show. In the context of the artist’s entire career, they come to seem youthful and rather thin.

One of the exhibition’s principal pleasures is the opportunity it affords to watch the impulses behind this early work develop and expand into other arenas. Not all of these developments are equally successful. Pettibone’s one foray into portraiture, from a series of family snapshots, comes off stilted and somewhat strange looking. On the whole, however, these later works accumulate in richness and complexity.

Into the 1970s and ‘80s

Throughout the ‘70s, Pettibone’s play with the line between painting and photography grows more self-conscious. He makes paintings of other paintings hanging on a wall, presumably on the basis of a photograph, or paintings of the backs of those paintings, or paintings of photographs of paintings lying on a table. In one work, he juxtaposes a painting of a photograph of a Thomas Eakins portrait lying on a white, flat surface, its edges slightly curled, with two paintings of the same portrait hanging on a wall, viewed from two slightly different angles -- then smears the whole thing with white and black pigment and marks it with a big, wet fingerprint.

Among the most enchanting works in the show are several involving jewel-like details drawn from Ingres’ “Grande Odalisque” and “The Princess de Broglie,” juxtaposed with graphic images from Playboy and in one case with a Ferrari. Combining these two views of the female body -- historical and contemporary, painterly and photographic, suggestively sexy and overtly pornographic -- has the curious effect of simultaneously implicating and redeeming both of them.

As if to prove that he’s not taking himself too seriously, Pettibone throws owlish, bespectacled self-portraits into several of these erotic works.

Text becomes more prominent in the work of the 1980s. Several paintings consist solely of text, handwritten and printed. Around this time, Ezra Pound also enters in, with Pettibone painting Pound’s book covers and inscribing his cantos across other canvases and sculptures.

The most recent works include copies of Mondrian paintings, Brancusi sculptures and Shaker furniture. Duchamp and Stella, clearly never far from Pettibone’s consciousness, also reemerge.

If there is a single unifying theme to the show, it is a tireless -- and gleeful -- preoccupation with the many facets of “objectness”: with the art object (Pettibone’s own painting or sculpture), with the object that his object represents (the painting, sculpture, book, body, car, etc.), with the concept of the object and with the process of objectification.

For all the entertaining conceptual gymnastics, however, the real merit of the show comes down to two basic, universally accessible qualities: passion and craft.

Art about art can be a tiresome enterprise, but this is art about the experience of art, which is to say art about a vivid, essential aspect of the human experience.

*

‘Richard Pettibone: A Retrospective’

Where: Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily

Ends: May 28

Price: Adults, $10; students, seniors and active-duty military, $8; 12 and younger, free

Contact: (949) 494-8971; www.lagunaartmuseum.org