Review: Odds and ends from littlewhitehead at Marine Contemporary

“Failure” is, ironically, the most successful piece in littlewhitehead’s mixed bag of a show at Marine Contemporary.

The Glasgow-based team of Craig Little and Blake Whitehead gathered leftover scraps from what they deemed doomed artworks from the past six years and packed them into a dense, ragged ball, roughly 3 1/2 feet in diameter.

The tumbleweed of junked ideas contains stuffed animals, a wig, creepy casts of hands and heads, notebook drawings, a toy car, an ink bottle, a towel, a crusty paintbrush and numerous items of clothing, from men’s neckties to children’s pajamas. The lumpy sphere sits on the floor like an abject monument, a concession wrapped inside a joke bundled with both resignation and resistance.

FULL COVERAGE: 2013 Spring arts preview

There are other amusements sprinkled about, but none hold together as palpably as this little planet of aesthetic detritus.

A wall speared by 20 rear-facing stuffed Chihuahuas is good for a chuckle, but little more. Two small faux-leather jackets pack a mildly barbed punch for their miniaturization of macho style. Found photographs from the ‘70s hold a bit of interest, but mainly for the sly hint that at least one of them might be staged, since it contains something on display elsewhere in the show.

Echoes of Maurizio Cattelan’s humor and Mike Kelley’s poignancy waft through this assembly of odds and ends, which ultimately, just isn’t odd enough.

Marine Contemporary, 1733-A Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 399-0294, through June 22. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.marinecontemporary.com

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