ART REVIEWS : Furnishings as Containers for Our Belief Systems

When the 18th- and 19th-century Shakers crafted unadorned furniture with nothing in mind but God and the gratification of their labor, they could scarcely have predicted that one day, their tables and chairs would be enshrined in museums and collectors’ homes as tokens of wealth, status and a taste for simplicity cultivated by Minimalist art.

Tom Colgrove’s magnificently crafted furnishings at Richard/Bennett Gallery suggest that such objects are not just objects, but containers for our belief systems. As such, they’re inherently unstable. It all depends on who is utilizing them and in what context.

And so Gerrit Rietveld’s 1919 high-back chair, the “Rood Blauwe Stoel”--all straight lines and hard edges--is transformed into a gently swaying rocking chair, perfect for the yuppie collector with small baby in tow; or, with the substitution of ball and claw feet, it becomes a must-have item for the buyer who can’t decide between high Modernism and Neo-Classicism.

El Lissitsky’s daring pictorial motifs--a cross between Constructivist and Suprematist ideals--re-materialize on the surface of a velvet-lined jewelry box in exquisitely inlaid wood, revolutionary fervor transmuted into capitalist ingenuity, content materialized as pure style.

This is, of course, nothing new. Such transpositions are rampant in the culture at large, where Mondrian’s geometrized odes to equilibrium are reduced to emptied-out auras, providing a marketable logo for L’Oreal hair products, Yves St. Laurent dresses and a hotel on Sunset Boulevard.

But with the “Shaker Full-Length Mirror”--an item completely antithetical to the sect’s ethos of self-abnegation--Colgrove refuses to let us off the hook. Here, he hits not merely an ironic high, but a perfect metaphor for the things we greedily consume--art and otherwise. What we look for in them is nothing intrinsic to them as things, but rather, a flattering reflection of ourselves--as perspicacious, stylish and cultivated.

Colgrove’s own work necessarily participates in this dynamic. Our appreciation of his subtle deconstructive and art historical twists reflects our education, our refinement and our apprehension of art as intellectual badinage. It is this pleasing image--among other factors, to be sure--that makes us smile into Colgrove’s mirror. But it is his insistence upon the complex operations at work behind this image that makes us do a double take.

* Richard/Bennett Gallery, 2200 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5335, through Jan. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Language of Art: The stacked phrases “left here/put there/for a limited time,” painted in generic capitals upon a wall of the back room at Stuart Regen Gallery, function as an unofficial emblem of Lawrence Weiner’s language-based art. His work has shifted remarkably little since the 1968 publication of this infamous statement: “1. The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated. 3. The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.”

Meaning, quite simply, that presentation (in terms of context as well as scale) and interpretation both remain ever in flux. Weiner’s linguistic fragments might be plastered across the wall of a museum or typed on a 3”x5” card and carried around in a wallet. What is most recalcitrant about the art is the very fact of its contingency.

Over the past 20 years, Weiner’s work in a variety of media--posters, books, films, videos and installations--has distinguished him from the conceptual artists with which he is regularly associated. Unlike Douglas Huebler, Weiner does not use language to document an art that exists purely as concept. Nor does he, like Joseph Kosuth, conceive of language as a vehicle for the exploration of abstract, philosophical issues. Instead, it is the juxtaposition of words that is crucial for Weiner, and the material objects and relationships, metaphorical lacunae and contradictions those words very wittingly conjure.

In “Left Here Put There for a Limited Time” (1976), what is articulated is a relationship between a thing (that which is left here, put there, etc.) and a place. But what is unspoken is the nature of that thing. It’s easy to decide it is the work of art itself, and that Weiner is interested in questioning the work’s dialectical relation with its context. But, with only adjectival phrases in place, meaning remains elusive.

In the centerpiece of the show, an untitled work of 1991, it is a relationship among things in a series. On one wall, the words flour and water are stacked, linked by an ampersand; on the adjoining wall, it is the words salt and sugar . Between them are plus and minus signs, each contained within a set of parentheses. The profusion of linguistic connective tissue signifies the text’s many perforations--things taken away, things held in abeyance. At the same time, the absence of any period signifies its resistance to closure.

Like post-structuralist Roland Barthes, Weiner demonstrates that the text never stops--it signifies infinitely. But unlike post-structuralism in general, Weiner insists that language is not a self-perpetuating game, but mired in social experience. The subject matter of the current work, for example--dietary staples like flour, water, salt and sugar--cannot be read apart from the current economic climate. With this, Weiner’s work transforms the gallery into a political space. And this, in many ways, is the most we can hope for from a progressive art.

* Stuart Regen Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Jan. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Alluring Images: If you crossed commedia dell’arte with Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” and threw in a little of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, you might come up with something like Selina Trieff’s extremely arcane and surprisingly alluring oil paintings.

Walk into the Ruth Bachofner Gallery and turn left, and you confront the strangest image in this very strange exhibition. “Green and Brown” enacts the uncanniness of the double. Here, two identical figures with chalky white faces and smoky black hats and cowls, posed against a backdrop of olive green and softly peeling and cracking gold leaf, stare at the viewer like quietly malevolent monks.

Keep moving, and the image of the unholy twins continues to reverberate at the edge of the mind’s eye, like the lingering afterimage of the sun--only not nearly so sanguine.

Take a spin around the room, and the double begins to redouble. For all the characters play-acting in Trieff’s highly stylized universe wear the same, androgynous mask--the artist’s self-portrait--and many, the same gender-defying white bodysuits.

In pairs or alone, looking at one another or at the startled viewer, these ciphers are caught in a non-space between action and reaction. Placed in theatrical settings that reference both the lushness of nature and the precision of medieval illuminated manuscripts, these seem to be figures not conjured by the artist, but those that materialize when she stops to take a breath.

Trieff studied with Hans Hofmann and Mark Rothko early in her career, and though those influences have clearly waned, they continue to impact upon her work. From Hofmann, Trieff retains the intensely colored fields of paint; from Rothko, the hyper-dramatics and the single, unswerving vision. All her own, however, is the surreal spookiness and the self-absorption that, however unexpectedly, absorbs the viewer as well.

* Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 926 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310)458-8007, through Jan. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Abstract Spirituality: Ross Bleckner’s exquisite abstractions recreate the spiritual in, and for, art. If they allude to the cosmic, they bypass the religious. If they enact the tropes of fin de siecle decadence--glittering chandeliers, vertiginous perspectives, baroque statuary--they do so not to revel in its excesses, but to offer a serious meditation upon its tragic consequences.

This is deeply elegiacal, not moralistic, art. AIDS has long been the subtext of Bleckner’s paintings. The muted white glow, intense spots of light, and streaks of gold lodged in their beautifully scrambled fields create not just a pictorial opposition between darkness and luminosity, but a series of metaphorical oppositions between Earth and heaven, death and resurrection, the fragile body and the transcendent soul.

In the new work at Fred Hoffman Gallery, Bleckner continues to pursue both expressive and symbolic means. Yet he appears less certain of those oppositions, which formerly grounded his work. What Bleckner insists upon here is the body not as locus of death, but as source of life. What inhabits these images is the notion that salvation must come in and through the body.

“Invisible Heaven,” like several of the large paintings, is structured as a loosely gridded dome. Here, a profusion of diamond-shaped forms rushes upward, toward the top of the painting’s vaulted sphere. These forms are not as evanescent as stars in the celestial skies; instead, they are emphatically physical, lodged beneath the painting’s dusky skin.

If painting becomes a metaphor for the body, then Bleckner’s powerful paintings become a metaphor for the body’s vitality. In “Internal Medicine,” an irregular brown circle with a smaller circle of white at its center is obsessively repeated from edge to canvas edge. The image references not only Bleckner’s horror vacuui, but the biological processes of cell multiplication, and thus, the microscopic origins of life. The triumph of the body literally crowds death from the picture. And so, these dark paintings emerge as profoundly optimistic.

* Fred Hoffman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310)394-4199, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.