There’s a message in the humor

Jokes have been important to art for a long time. Whether ancient Greek vases making fun of Athenian manners and mores or contemporary photographs of Weimaraners dressed up like eager suburbanites, they are an efficient way to layer levels of potent social meaning in an inviting image. Scott Grieger has known this for a long time.

The 35 works in Grieger’s exhibition at Patricia Faure Gallery form a miniature retrospective. Because the earlier works are not often seen, they are of unusual interest.

The earliest is a wicked collage from 1969, fashioned in the immediate wake of Pop art’s disruptive insertion of mass media tropes into avant-garde practice. Its razor-sharp fusion of humor and pathos is emblematic.

The November Vogue magazine has been slyly altered, simply through the addition of a New Guinea tribesman’s head, smeared with red and blue pigment, over that of the now-obscured cover girl. Her big blond sausage curls frame his grinning, cigarette-smoking brown face.

Vogue meets National Geographic in an issue touting “The Most Romantic Looks in the World” and promising to guide eager consumers toward great new ways to wear their hair. The ridiculous picture is at once funny and deplorable. Any shred of human dignity is transformed into the tragicomic visage of a universal clown.

But who, exactly, is the fool? Grieger’s collage splits the difference between the Papuan and us.

The November ’69 Vogue cover coincided with United Nations’ capitulation to a Cold War-era political move backed by President Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, to allow anti-Communist Indonesian strongman Suharto to annex Papua New Guinea. The stage-managed takeover took place behind a sham election, nobly billed as the “Act of Free Choice.” That oxymoron ricochets off the glossy surface of this American fashion magazine, as if it were a veritable pinball machine.

Perhaps the show’s most intriguing works are a group of 1971 “Impersonations” in which Grieger photographed himself imitating well-known works of contemporary art. In all of them the longhaired, bearded artist wears jeans, a T-shirt and desert boots, standard hippie-gear of the period. Self-portraits of the artist in his studio do double-duty as representations of the artist’s art in his studio.

Grieger, standing rigid with arms at his sides, leans back against the wall to become a John McCracken plank-sculpture. Kneeling on all fours with a tire tube around his waist, he’s the goat in Robert Rauschenberg’s notorious “Monogram.” (Goat, of course, is slang for the butt of a joke.) Suspended on a wall with a black stripe down the front of his white T-shirt, he’s an abstract Barnett Newman “zip” painting. With his head isolated on a white wall surrounded by a cloverleaf of shadows, he’s an illuminated Robert Irwin wall-disk.

Grieger alters the chosen works’ meanings in humorous and revealing ways. Newman’s spiritually oriented abstractions are represented by a Jesus-figure who seems to levitate, as if ascending heavenward, while he’s also a stereotypical pothead getting high. The Irwin-style floating head puts the artist in an intense spotlight, a situation that hadn’t really happened in American cultural life until the 1960s. Meanwhile he’s likened to a trophy captured by a big-game hunter.

Like Bruce Nauman, who was working in Pasadena at the same time these photographs were made, Grieger is visibly ruminating about the conflicted place of art and artists in contemporary society. What makes his work distinctive, however, is also what makes it prescient: To a radical degree, Grieger embraces unadorned entertainment as an artistic vehicle.

As much as Marx, Wittgenstein or any other fashionable theorist of the day, these photographs are indebted to the likes of Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks. (The critic Dave Hickey has taken note of Grieger’s Hollywood adolescence hanging out with comedians.) These exceptional photographs are designated “Impersonations” as much for their showbiz strategy as for the mimicry of art that Grieger so wittily enacts.

Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through April 14. Closed Sunday, Monday. www.patriciafauregallery.com

See it, hear it, experience it

The coupling of two or more bodily senses, known as synesthesia, has an extensive history in Modern art. (The subject was chronicled by the Museum of Contemporary Art in the 2005 exhibition “Visual Music.”) For a solo debut at Bank Gallery, Tyler Adams fuses colored light and sound.

Adams’ “Colour Organ” projects a large square of light against the darkened gallery’s wall. Loud, fuzzy white noise fills the room, emanating from speakers.

As the pitch, tone, intensity and other sound qualities slowly shift, so does the color of the projected light. Purplish magenta slides into aqua blue, which bleeds into bright white and then a yellowish hue.

The chromatic transitions are gradual and deliberate. There are moments when multiple colors seem interspersed, recalling camouflage patterns. It’s difficult to tell whether those colors are actually being beamed by the projector high overhead at the rear wall, or whether they are fugitives generated by fatigued rods and cones in a viewer’s eye.

The rumbling sound is likewise ambiguous. It shifts from recalling natural phenomena (rain, waterfall) to man-made ones (radio static, engine roar) and back again. These alterations seem to be precisely calibrated to the color shifts. But the color remains abstract, rather than suggesting representational images (a sunset, say, or a lava flow).

In essence, Adams is deconstructing white noise. His electronic environment is assembled with a software program that audibly maps a visual range. Its resonance is sliced and diced, and the spectrum of colors contained in white light oozes out.

If there’s a weakness to the otherwise provocative installation, it’s a certain lack of precision. “Colour Organ” suffers from a difficulty that bedevils James Turrell’s early light projections, which require stability to work their visual magic.

Turrell’s projectors regularly go out of focus. Likewise, on the day I saw Adams’ projection it did not create a precise geometric shape on the wall. Across the top and down the left side, the line between dark and light was soft and blurry. Intentional or not, it makes the piece feel slack. For sculpture that relies on acuity, precision seems essential.

Bank Gallery, 125 W. 4th St., (213) 621-4055, through April 7. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.bank-art.com

Constructed free of tension

At the 2005 Venice Biennale, the young Viennese sculptor Hans Schabus encased the Austrian pavilion inside an enormous mountain -- a homemade Alp -- fabricated from tons of lumber and miles of roofing paper. A visitor could climb through it to lofty heights.

That’s just one precedent for Gustavo Godoy’s solo debut at Happy Lion Gallery, a room-filling installation titled “What’s the Big Idea?” Godoy employs 2-by-4s, plywood, Plexiglass, rubber flooring and other building materials to create structures suggestive of a jungle gym crossed with a performance stage.

One savvy feature is that no nails seem to have been used in creating these elaborate, climb-on sculptures. Instead they have been glued-and-screwed together. The artist’s emphasis on structural assembly is matched by an apparent interest in take-it-apart portability.

In the center of the room two tall, jagged lumps of concrete give solid form to the same type of space that can be seen within the built sculptures. The concrete works are nearly Cubist, yet their stolid material works against the shifting mutability of form that Cubism usually suggests. Two large drawings on butcher paper reveal other sources, including El Lissitzky’s early-20th century “Proun” paintings and Hokusai’s print of an elegant, engulfing wave.

Godoy’s sculpture creates a placid balance between construction and destruction, and it’s easy to see a particular resonance with life today. (Aside from the usual building-material hues of brown, black, silver and gray, the structures’ only notable colors are red, white and blue.) Building and tearing down hang in the balance, but what’s missing is a tension between them. Godoy is skillful, but “What’s the Big Idea?” could benefit from a sense of urgency.

Happy Lion Gallery, 963 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 625-1360, through April 14. Closed Sunday though Tuesday. www.thehappylion.com

Gobs create romantic themes

Allison Schulnik’s painting “Flowers for Visitor #3” is only 20 inches square, but it must have at least a half-pound of oil paint on it. The mixed floral bouquet depicted in a clear glass vase is built up from gobs of goo, making the painting as much a temporal gift of perishable loveliness as the flowers represented.

At Mark Moore Gallery, Schulnik’s paintings often focus on romantic subjects stereotypically linked to adolescent girls -- horses, cats, flowers, Niagara Falls, etc. She pumps up a bracing sense of assertiveness with her paint application, larding it on, scraping it off, piling it up, forming it into an almost sculptural relief.

These works take an evident cue from Laura Owens, but most of them remain too much under her spell. The best painting is “White Visitor #2,” mostly because its inexplicable ghostly figure is just plain weird. Schulnik needs to keep pushing in that inventive direction.

Mark Moore Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Saturday.www.markmooregallery.com