AROUND THE GALLERIES

San Diego is a sleeper in the art world, always overshadowed by that rather larger cultural engine 120 miles to the north. If institutional and commercial infrastructure has often been the city’s weakness, its community of artists has consistently been its strength.

Much of the credit goes to UC San Diego, whose visual arts department was founded in the late 1960s as a conceptual enterprise in itself and emerged over subsequent decades as a haven for experimentation, interdisciplinary practice and impassioned irreverence. Unfortunately, a thorough history of the department and its broad impact has not yet been written; a show at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art serves as a compelling proposal for just such a text.

“San Diego and the Origins of Conceptual Art in California” feels like the outline for an introduction, notes toward a thesis. The show identifies a dozen central players in the evolution of a local scene -- not just at UCSD but also elsewhere in San Diego -- with international scope.

Eleanor Antin’s brilliant “100 Boots” (1971-73) starts the show off with a bang of humor and pathos. The legendary series of 51 photographic postcards (shot by another participant in the show, Phel Steinmetz) tracks the exploits of a troop of surrogate Everymen, following the empty boots as they seek work and wander the streets, ever in search of a place and some meaning. An excerpted sequence of eight postcards aptly represents the work’s unprepossessing power.

The Southern California strain of Conceptualism tended to be juicier than its East Coast counterpart -- socially engaged but also funny, intellectual as well as amusing. Antin is a prime example, as is John Baldessari, who grew up in San Diego and was one of the founding faculty members at UCSD before heading north to CalArts in 1970. A pithy little sticker by Baldessari, made in collaboration with George Nicolaides, hangs in the show, as well as a small abstract painting from 1966, minor in itself but notable as a survivor of Baldessari’s publicly announced “cremation” of his own work dating from 1953 through early 1966.

Baldessari took the so-called de-materialization of the art object to its fatal extreme in that 1970 bonfire, but others of that time and place nudged the process along as well. In a recorded 1966 lecture, Allan Kaprow (at UCSD, 1974-93) issued directives on “How to Make a Happening.” He starts out by admonishing artists not to make a painting, not to make poetry and not to write plays, but to make something new that doesn’t remind you of culture as you know it, something that arises from the real world and happens in natural time.

David Antin’s talk-poems evolved around the time he directed the university’s art gallery (1968-72) and subsequently taught there; a DVD of one of his 1992 performances skews the show’s chronology a bit but gives a taste of his work’s rich personality. Founding faculty Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison delve into ecological stress points around the world through a combination of handwritten narrative poetry, drawings, maps and photographs, exemplified by their “Book of the Seven Lagoons.”

Wry investigations of conventions of all sorts (aesthetic, cosmetic, domestic, political) dominated the work of the rest of the artists: Martha Rosler’s tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of the “North American Waitress”; Allan Sekula’s self-portrait as three types of artist; Russell Baldwin’s printing plate, ironically both canceled and gold-plated; and Steinmetz’s four-part family portrait with spare and dour captions.

Another highlight from this unwritten chapter of art history is Fred Lonidier’s 1974 “The Double Articulation of Disneyland,” a photo-text installation chronicling a trip several of the artists made to the theme park only to discover its most prevalent theme to be corporate branding. Beneath the plainly stated captions to the pictures runs the text from an academic critique of Disneyland as an ideologically driven model of utopia. Performative and playful, self-referential and slightly subversive, the piece, like the formative moment it hails from, is worth revisiting.

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, 8568 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 815-1100, through April 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .cardwelljimmerson.com.

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It’s America, close-cropped

One sign of a generous photographic image is its continuously unspooling details, narratives and readings. As long as you attend to it, it just keeps unfurling. Mark Cohen’s photographs at Rose Gallery are like that: small snippets of reality, densely packed with possibility.

The pictures were shot in the artist’s hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., mostly during the 1970s, commissioned by the George Eastman House to encourage Cohen to try Kodak color film. (The prints on view are from a recently released portfolio of 14-by-17-inch dye transfers.) Cohen had established himself as an assertive street photographer in the vein of William Klein and Lee Friedlander, and with this body of work, he added bold color to ferociously honest gesture.

Cohen’s pictures are lean and tight, radically trimmed of pictorial fat. Heads and feet are commonly missing; fragmentary details tell the story. Naked torsos of two young boys lie on an “Improvised Beach” of newspaper atop dirt. A man in the proverbial and literal driver’s seat cradles his beefy, sticky-nosed baby. The white whiff of smoke released from the red-slicked lips of a woman wrapped in a royal blue scarf adds up to a close-cropped grab of natural Americana.

The mining town setting plays a bit part in this epic of stills, the images being more about moment than place. Each picture is an improvised steal; even the posed shots reveal the unexpected. Buck teeth, a toothless grin and protectively closed smile rhyme in a photograph of three young boys. Proustian power seeps from a picture of a lanky girl, shown neck to thigh, her navy blue top turned up at the bottom to nest a small crop of blackberries that have stained her fingers and nails. Grimy, tender, true, these moments keep on lasting.

Rose Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through May 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .rosegallery.net.

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Peaks scaled in the quest for self

The mountain man in most of William Crump’s modest but affecting sketch-pad-size works on paper at LittleBird Gallery is always alone, usually atop a craggy peak. Wearing a look of deep introspection and patient endurance, a full, cheek-creeping beard and sturdy hat, he seems to hail from an earlier era, a rugged individualist in the period of westward expansion.

In one marvelously elaborate pencil drawing, the man’s lonesome quest is fueled by dreams of bounty. Swans, snakes, spiders and butterflies populate his private Eden, a plot of earth floating freely between hilly ground and slender rainbow. Crump manages some of the same fantastic incongruity in other pieces mixing pale graphite renderings with bold veins of opaque gouache. The push-pull that results is not just formal (the pencil lines faint and receding, the vibrant colors coming forward) but temporal, as if a collision of past and present visual idioms. In one drawing, the man stands cloaked in stripes of ocher, pink, lime and taupe, pointing his gun westward. In another, he sits on a rocky rise as below him a horse writhes on its back within reverberating streaks of acid yellow, slate, pale blue, brick and khaki.

Crump’s work feels vaguely anachronistic, like the so-called antiquarian avant-garde photographers who favor obsolete techniques but whose images often contain contemporary references. Mainly, the New York-based artist’s L.A. debut reads as a thoughtful meditation on the discrepancies between external and internal journeys, the real and the ideal.

LittleBird Gallery, 3195 Glendale Blvd., L.A., (323) 662-1092, through April 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .littlebirdgallery.com.

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A messy kid and a mapmaker

Painting has been unbound (from representation, the canvas, the wall) for some time, but reveling in its liberation can still be exhilarating. Or not.

Richard Jackson’s entry in a two-person show at the Otero Plassart gallery is a folly of paint-pooled dishes and pigment-juiced chandelier bulbs. “The Kids’ Table,” resting on a large smiley-faced jigsaw puzzle, is set as if for a conventional meal, but what’s served up is paint, encrusted on the plates, a dry lake in the pitcher, stilled in the IV-like tubing that shoots up to the blinking neon light fixture overhead. The installation is a relic of a romp, the residue of an action painting that erupted within a Pop-ified environment. It might have nourished the chef, a California Conceptualist whose favorite ingredients are chance and disruption, but on its own it stands as messy affectation.

Franz Ackermann’s “Mental Maps” sprawl across the gallery walls with far more stimulating abandon. Each of the German artist’s three works (two are 11 feet wide; one, more than 20 feet) layers collages or photographs atop a crisply delineated wall painting of sinuous circuitry. The tight control of the base paintings (in an energetic palette of neon orange, violet, coral, crimson and midnight blue) frays in the overlying, more improvisational imagery, whether round gestural canvases or irregular paper panels inset with photographs of foreign cities and beaches. Place and movement reckon with each other. Fruitful frictions buzz between map and sketch, stasis and change, macro and micro structures, a sense of vigorous connectedness and rootless instability.

Otero Plassart, 820 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 951-1068, through May 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .oteroplassart.com.

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