Art review: Bruce Conner at Michael Kohn Gallery

The first exhibition of Bruce Conner's work since his death last year zeros in on the 1970s. It's a peculiar choice for a show and one that Conner, an irascible malcontent, would probably love.

His works from that decade are not as revered as his groundbreaking movies from the '50s, his gnarly assemblages from the '60s, his rollicking collages from the '80s or his mesmerizing inkblot drawings from the '90s and on. The '70s seemed to catch Conner in a rut, stubbornly persisting against the futility of it all and never breaking through to an aesthetic resolution that would make it all worthwhile.

 At Michael Kohn Gallery, the 45 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, books, lithographs and movie brought together for Bruce Conner in the 1970s make you think of the legendary artist's work from that decade differently. Rather than being the low point of a long career filled with highlights, the '70s represent the purest expression of Conner's profound suspicion of anything that smacks of success, stinks of inauthenticity or reeks of entitlement. It's all about defiance and rejection.

At the same time, he never romanticized failure for its own sake. His handcrafted abstractions, made with common felt-tip pens on ordinary sketchbook pages, begin with small, meaningless marks. Slowly, restlessly and intuitively, they worm their way toward something like the grungy underside of cosmic insight. Call it gutter sublime. It's also there in Conner's modestly sized two-tone paintings, in which exhaustion is palpable and despair too close for comfort.

His point-blank photographs feature famous and forgotten members of San Francisco punk bands performing as if their lives depended on it. Conner's pictures are intimate and alien, matter-of-factly capturing the way disdain and desire energized these misfits.

The paralysis and insanity of full-blown paranoia are a hairbreadth away from many of the works in the smartly selected show, and their menacing proximity gives Conner's powerfully conflicted works their bite and bravery.

– David Pagel

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 658-8088, through Dec. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.kohngallery.com

Image: Roz of the punk rock band Negative Trend, 1978. Credit: From Michael Kohn Gallery.

Art review: Tom Wudl at L.A. Louver Gallery

Some artists work with their ears to the ground, listening to the buzz to try to make their works relevant. Others pay no attention to external interruptions, concentrating instead on the voices in their heads. That's what Tom Wudl does. His paintings, drawings and prints describe a world so dense with detail that it's a treat to visit, a delight to contemplate and a joy to know.

 At L.A. Louver Gallery, Wudl's first solo show in four years features 15 intimate works on paper and canvas. Most measure no more than 4 or 5 inches on a side.

Only one is bigger than a sheet of notebook paper. It's a fanciful, multi-eyed portrait of Wudl's teenage son, and its dreamy virtuosity is intoxicating. The rest of the works in "Specimens From the Flowerbank World" are inspired by the Flower Ornament Sutra, a revered Huayan Buddhist scripture.

Many depict solitary roses, their soft pink petals and vivid blue grounds made up of tiny club motifs, like those found on playing cards. Glistening jewels, floating eyeballs and other types of flowers also appear, as if orbiting a central rose or simply floating before the vastness of infinity, which is also abuzz with Wudl's ubiquitous clubs.

Every work is exquisite, so fantastically rendered and precisely crafted that many seem to have been made with the aid of a microscope. But none are fussy, precious or breathless. That's the magic of Wudl's art. He manages to make intense concentration and laser-sharp focus look relaxed, not quite casual but serene and welcoming.

Laurel and Hardy even appear in one drawing, adding just the right touch of comic relief at just the right moment. Unlike much art based in painstaking devotion, Wudl's never gets portentous or overzealous. Its vitality is mature and seasoned, a pleasure to breathe in and be in the company of.

– David Pagel

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com

Image: "Waking." Credit: from L.A. Louver Gallery.

Art review: Lee Mullican at Marc Selwyn Fine Art

In 1959, L.A. painter Lee Mullican spent a year in Rome, soaking up the sights and sounds of the city and looking at its artistic treasures. He also painted furiously, churning out works on canvas and paper that are a little looser and freer and more fluidly animated than his usual tautly structured compositions.

At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, five of Mullican's Rome paintings fill the main gallery with an abundance of fun, bustling energy. All are on paper. One's backed by canvas. Four are approximately 5 by 7 feet. One runs nearly 12 feet long.

The palette is black and white, painted and drawn with charcoal, ink and tempera, except for one, in which gray graphite lines are softened by watercolor washes in a deliciously rich range of golden yellows and lovely blues.

The surfaces of all of Mullican's works are jampacked with swift little marks — mostly circles, semicircles and rectangles, but sometimes triangles and odd polygons as well as stray lines. These rudimentary units resemble the letters of the alphabet after they've been tossed in a food processor or run through a paper shredder.

It's amazing how much energy and movement Mullican gets out of such basic forms and common materials. His abstract compositions never depict anything realistic (although sometimes you swear you see body parts in them). They are urgent and unfussy, like everyday street graffiti. Yet they are also erotic, their sensuality and charge as electrifying as any finely rendered illusion.

The fun Mullican must have had that year in Rome lives on these works, which look as fresh, sumptuous and spunky as the day they were made.

– David Pagel

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101, L.A., (323) 933-9911, through Dec. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcselwynfineart.com

Image: Untitled painting from about 1959. Credit: Robert Wedemeyer / from Marc Selwyn Fine Art.

Art review: Jeff Koons at Gagosian Gallery

Andy Warhol was fascinated by boredom for two perfectly good reasons: It allowed him to see things he otherwise would have missed, and it meant that, overall, things were going pretty well if life's daily dramas were not overwhelming, debilitating or too upsetting.

At Gagosian Gallery, 10 new paintings by Jeff Koons flesh out both aspects of Warhol's love affair with boredom. If Warhol is the father of Pop Art, Koons is a chip off the old block, an unparalleled imitator whose imitations are so cockeyed and corny that they come off as originals, weird as that is.

Despite their size (approximately 9 by 12 or 9 by 7 feet), flashy colors (metallic silver, verdant green, fleshy pink), sexy subjects (naked models posing languorously in luscious landscapes) and painterly flourishes (juicy smears of semi-translucent pigment), Koons' pictures are boring.

To look at them is to see too many easy nods to works by too many other artists, including heavyweights Roy Lichtenstein, Sigmar Polke and Cy Twombly, super-heavyweights Georges Seurat and Gustave Courbet, and lightweights Christopher Wool and James Nares, not to mention Koons' own over-designed porn pictures of himself and his ex-wife, Cicholina. His new paintings seem to suffocate under the preposterously long list of sources.

And then they get interesting.

Art review: Josh Kun at Steve Turner Contemporary

Josh Kun’s smart exhibition in a small upstairs gallery at Steve Turner Contemporary focuses on two types of popular music made in Mexico and the United States in the 1960s. With great clarity, “Last Exit USA” demonstrates that culture is not a conventional commodity: Neither imported nor exported like ordinary goods and services, it instead grows out of back-and-forth exchanges that are far more fascinating than those accounted for in terms of trade deficits and surpluses.

Best of all, Kun’s exhibition is a lot more fun than that sounds. There’s plenty to look at, plenty to listen to and plenty to think about, all presented in an easy, see-for-yourself way that leaves visitors free to go at their own pace and make up their own minds.

Narrow shelves on each of the four walls display 44 album covers from the 1960s. Most have “Tijuana” in their titles. The imagery falls into three groups: women with come-hither eyes, bands dressed in mariachi costumes and barely road-worthy cars. Sombreros abound. Other clichés, such as tequila, banditos and burros, appear frequently.

All of the albums were made in the U.S., by big record companies. All followed hot on the heels of “The Lonely Bull,” a 1962 hit record by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, which is also displayed.

Art review: Alexis Zoto at Overtones

 The bittersweet pang of days gone by is not easy to capture in art. Alexis Zoto’s sculptures and monotypes at Overtones are too generic to give such nuanced sentiments their due. Visitors are left with a general sense of standard-issue melancholy, which fades all too quickly because it lacks specificity and precision.

Zoto makes found-object assemblages out of lacy doilies, old jewelry, a religious statue, a family member’s oven, broken furniture, ostrich feathers, buttons, branches and artificial birds. These objects probably mean much to Zoto, who recently changed her surname from Weidig to her mother’s maiden name.

But they do not go far enough to convey the particularities of their passions, glossing over the conflicted combination of regret and indebtedness that forms any contemplative individual’s relationship to her past.

 Zoto’s prints, depicting the silhouettes of little birds in faded pinks, blues and greens, also come off as clichés. Like her sculptures, they’re too bland to do much more than scratch the surface.

– David Pagel

Overtones, 12703 Venice Blvd., (310) 915-0346, through Nov. 7. Closed Sunday-Tuesday. www.overtonesgallery.com

 “Muse” by Alexis Zoto. Image courtesy of Overtones gallery. Photo credit: Alan Shaffer

Art review: Brad Eberhard at Thomas Solomon Gallery

Crossing boundaries has been such a staple of Modern art for so long that it has produced a slew of academic works whose sole purpose is to pass as something else. Paintings pretend to be sculptures, videos masquerade as installations and photographs pose as paintings.

It’s far more interesting when works are so peculiar that they make you forget about categories altogether; instead, you get so caught up in their details that they become worlds unto themselves — expansive spaces too big to be bothered by what names they might be given.

That’s what happens in Brad Eberhard’s 11 works on paper at Thomas Solomon Gallery. Made of torn and cut paper and oil and acrylic paint, the L.A. artist’s visually dense pieces jam together solid chunks of basic colors, delicately incised lines, leftover bits of printed images and a cornucopia of abstract passages.

They include whiplash scale shifts, radically fractured picture planes, carefully composed collisions and enough casual happenstance to give even world-weary viewers some gee-whiz delights.

Art review: Jennifer Steinkamp at ACME

Jennifer Steinkamp’s five new pieces at ACME  are so individually absorbing that a lot of time can go by before you notice the magnitude of her achievement. She almost single-handedly transforms the medium in which she works — projected digital imagery — from a one-at-a-time, one-after-another setup into an all-at-once immersion in a stimulating environment that leaves you with more freedom than you came in with.

I love it when that happens.

Here’s how Steinkamp, who has been exhibiting projected imagery for more than 20 years, makes it work: She treats each of her meticulously engineered animations as if it were a painting.

Not because of what it’s made of. There’s no mistaking Steinkamp’s gorgeously composed constellations of shining light as oils on canvas.

And not because of what it depicts. The swirling leaves, budding blossoms, undulating trees and jiggling squiggles in her pulsating pictures never pretend to be anything other than what they are: super-sophisticated computer animations.

Art Review: Kati Heck at Marc Selwyn Fine Art

I don’t know why tourists like to have their pictures taken with their faces peeking through oval holes cut in plywood sheets painted to resemble cartoon characters or local legends. It must have something to do with being in a new place, not fitting in and feeling both uncomfortable and amused by it all.

At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Düsseldorf-born, Antwerp-based painter Kati Heck turns the pedestrian experience of being a misfit into a powerful meditation on what it is like to live in a world out of sync with itself. Her six mural-scale paintings and two loaded drawings give stunning form to a harrowing place that’s not all that different from everyday life, except for the compression and clarity of their vision.

In terms of drama, nothing much happens in Heck’s paintings. The largest, “Rudi’s Angebot,” recalls Manet’s “Le dejeuner sur l’herbe.” It depicts three life-size figures lolling about in nondescript grayness as an Edvard Munch-style goblin steps, Keep-on-Truckin’-style, out from unpainted nothingness

“Die Raucher” evokes the ghost of George Grosz and shows two men taking a cigarette break. “Der Kugelfrab” features a pair of nude models posing for a life-drawing class. And “Die Fratzenpleite” displays a fleshy old woman leaning or falling backward as a huge cartoon tear spills from her eye.

Heck paints with amazing virtuosity. She transforms the formulaic deadness of old-fashioned Socialist Realism into a sort of skeptical humanism that is by turns biting and touching, scary and embarrassing, clinical and sensuous. Her mixture of realistic illusionism, point-blank abstraction and goofy cartoons recalls the cheeky Postmodernism of David Salle and Eric Fischl.

But cleverness for its own sake has no place in Heck’s art. She paints like she means it. And her paintings reveal real passion for finding the cracks in the theatrical facade of contemporary existence, where individuality peeks out whenever it can.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 933-9911, through Oct. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcselwynfineart.com

--David Pagel

Above: "Rudi's Angebot"  Photo credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Art Review: Doug Aitken at Regen Projects and Regen Projects II

Every part of every piece in Doug Aitken’s three-part exhibition at Regen Projects and Regen Projects II has had so much attention paid to it that you’d think the life had been squeezed right out of it. That’s what happens with lots of movies; as production value goes through the roof, emotional effect diminishes.

In contrast, Aitken’s 24-minute movie and suite of illuminated photographs demonstrate that gorgeousness and psychological resonance are not inversely proportional. The L.A. artist does this by making works in which the parts do not add up to tidy wholes but leave so many loose ends and send so many mixed messages that it’s impossible not to follow one or two out of the gallery, into the street, the city, the world beyond.

 In the Almont Drive gallery, Aitken has installed a big but not quite full-size billboard on which “migration” is projected. No people appear in the movie, and no words interrupt the lovely soundtrack. From beginning to end, we visit generic motels and hotels, entering room after room as if we’re in some kind of pleasantly existential drama, a kinder, gentler version of Sartre’s “No Exit.”

Things take a turn for the Surreal, à la Rene Magritte, as animals appear in the rooms: first a horse, then a pair of birds, a raccoon, a buffalo, a fox, four rabbits and so on. Aitken’s isolated menagerie recalls the biblical story of Noah’s ark and Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic “Waiting for Godot.” Like those tales of ends and beginnings, Aitken’s visual poem — first shown at the 2008 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh — gives form to the sense that the landscape of the United States is not what it used to be and that what comes next is anyone’s guess.

In the Santa Monica Boulevard gallery, seven wall-mounted light-boxes, most in the shape of words, illuminate photographs of the Western landscape, including aerial views of suburban developments, a sunset over a Cadillac dealership and a partially demolished casino in an empty parking lot that seems to recede into infinity.