ART REVIEWS : Duchamp With an American Twist

“Honey I Shrunk the Art Collection” could be the title of Richard Pettibone’s exhibition of stamp-size paintings and dollhouse-scale sculptures at Michael Kohn Gallery. Including 95 pieces made between 1964 and 1992, this retrospective of miniature masterpieces that Pettibone copied from such luminaries as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Pablo Picasso and Ezra Pound is cute, critical and, above all else, funny.

About a third of the works shown are from 1964-65, when Pettibone meticulously reproduced, with acrylic paint and sometimes silk-screen, photographs of Pop paintings he found in art magazines. Just as the art image took up only a portion of the magazine page, so his tiny pictures filled only a section of the canvas. Where the text should have been printed, he used a cheap rubber stamp to label the image with its title, date and original artist, under which he also stamped, in capitals, his own name and the date of his “new” work.

Pettibone’s appropriated paintings take Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the ready-made one step further. The father of Dada continually repackaged and re-presented his own works as souvenirs of themselves, culminating in his 1941 “Box in a Valise,” a vast edition of his most famous works in miniature, each of which fits into a convenient carrying case that unfolds to form a mini-museum.

Pettibone’s version of this impulse to catalogue, collect and re-present one’s art gives this endeavor a youthful, American twist. Too impatient to wait until he had a career and a body of work of his own from which he could quote, he went ahead and used the work of other, more famous artists. Rather than waiting for the magazines to acknowledge his work, he bypassed their power and sought fame by association. The size of his paintings, however, prevented them from being taken too seriously. They undercut pretense and brought a sense of humor back to Duchamp’s work, which had become shrouded in the mystique of European sophistication.

From 1966-69, and sporadically thereafter, Pettibone stopped referring to the pages of art magazines, and instead framed his little reproductions just like the big originals. These paintings are sometimes criticized for being nothing more than gift shop souvenirs of serious objects of art. Some say they lack the critical interrogation of mass reproduction that was so much a part of his earlier works. Even so, they are among the funniest--and surprisingly critical--exhibited.

Four from 1969 are exact duplications of Stella’s oddly shaped, mural-size “Protractor Paintings,” which the abstract artist designed in 1967 by tracing a protractor he flipped around on a sheet of graph paper and then filling in the overlapping bands with colored pencil. He then had them enlarged to the monstrous scale required by museums, airports and corporate lobbies. Pettibone’s reconstructions are perverse homages. They combine an avid fan’s obsession with imitation with the simple misunderstanding that the environmental scale of the Stellas is essential to their meaning.

In the ‘70s, Pettibone overlapped abstractions by Stella with cropped canvases by Lichtenstein and Warhol, as well as with photographs of Playboy bunnies and his own “original” oil paintings. The collision of separate styles in these works loses the precarious balance between mockery and reverence that Pettibone masterfully maintained in his earlier works. Too directly critical, they suggest that all of culture’s forms have collapsed into a jumble of indistinct references.

The shrinking expectations that accompany cutbacks and recessions are more subtly and humorously embodied by his tiny reconstructions of single paintings. In these works, Pop art’s dream of a more democratic culture lives on as a nightmare of overpricing. Pettibone’s little paintings illustrate how popular commodities have gotten so pricey that even a square inch of one is too expensive.

The understated humor of his earlier works re-emerges in the ‘80s and ‘90s in his imitation Picasso etchings--over which he scribbles his own, self-effacing, attention-getting notes. His most recent renditions of the covers of old books of Pound’s poetry return to the quirky silliness of Pettibone at his best, undermining arrogance with the wide-eyed but hardly naive eagerness of a loyal fan.

* Michael Kohn Gallery, 920 Colorado Ave . , Santa Monica, (310) 393-7713, through May 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Reticent Paintings: Jonathan White’s strange paintings at Thomas Solomon’s Garage have the appearance of science experiments waiting to happen. With time, patience and a willingness to follow the subtlest of suggestions, they quietly demonstrate that their real subject is the study of intuition.

Each of White’s seemingly blank paintings supports an apparently empty glass sphere on a little canvas-covered shelf mounted at its center. These extremely reticent works allow the viewer to pay utmost attention to the way ideas enter one’s mind.

By refusing to disclose any specific visual meaning, they intensify abstract paintings’s desire to communicate by means of extra-visual sensations. At the beginning of the century, this art eliminated figurative references in order to offer a more unmediated experience of the intangible. Where traditional abstraction too often fell for a transcendent, disembodied spiritualism, White’s highly untraditional paintings return these experiences to the bodies of their individual viewers.

His works put the viewer in the presence of an invisible something that is impossible to discern by conventional means. The fragile glass spheres are resonators designed by an obscure 19th-Century German psycho-physicist, Hermann Helmholtz. Each one has two circular orifices that pick up the ambient sounds in the room and transform their incoherent hum into a single musical note.

Like sea shells that have been perfectly calibrated so they function like tuning forks, these remarkable spheres are complete unto themselves. They cleverly turn abstract painting’s dream of utter autonomy or perfect self-sufficiency into an open-ended experiment whose significance builds when a viewer is added to the equation.

Looking at--or listening to--White’s paintings is something like entertaining the idea of what the sound of one hand clapping might be. The point of both exercises is not to arrive at a conclusion but to regard one’s mind as it circles around a question that cannot logically be answered.

White’s carefully thought-out works invite one to look at the activity of looking and to think about the activity of thinking. The blankness or emptiness of his passive paintings makes it impossible to distinguish whether one is projecting ideas onto them or receiving input from the objects.

* Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through April 26. Closed Mondays.

Decorative Junk: Joyce Kohl combines discarded machine parts with sun-dried clay to shape solid, medium-size sculptures. The materials of her five abstract works at Space Gallery have the presence of cleaned-up ruins. Like the weathered remains of vanished civilizations, they call to mind the passage of great expanses of time.

The forms into which Kohl sculpts these materials, however, undermines their capacity to evoke the mysteriousness of the past. Formally refined to the point of being almost elegant, her competent and promising sculptures do not escape the realm of well-crafted decorations.

“Untitled (‘Top’)” typifies Kohl’s attempt to fuse junked industrial equipment with a natural material taken directly from the earth. This squat cylinder consists of a spiral of rusted steel on top of which sits a similarly rusted plug-like device. Kohl uses the found metal as a sort of skeleton, filling in the spaces between its “ribs” with flesh-colored clay.

The reference she makes to a child’s toy is apt. Her sculpture plays with a number of possible meanings, and could take off in several directions at once, but does not follow through with enough resolve to reach any definite conclusion. This insistence on utterly pointless movement is displaced by Kohl’s emphasis on mere prettiness. Her tasteful work goes nowhere because it spins around its own self-involved formalism, turning possible significance into an unchallenging game of safe decorative refinement.

* Space, 6015 Santa Monica Blvd., (213) 461-8166, through May 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Images of Banality: At Boritzer/Gray Gallery, photographer Ken Botto uses children’s playthings to fabricate miniature scenes of the mindlessness served up by advertising. His color prints of Barbie dolls and toy cars, model houses and kitsch statuettes depict a world overrun by banality.

In “The Strip,” garish toy billboards advertise fake Holiday Inns and McDonald’s. An awkward ceramic copy of an armless Greek statue and a dashboard version of Jesus tower over an overcrowded, trash-filled street, competing for the attention and money of the doubly dwarfed consumer. In “Sunday Afternoon,” plastic dolls in ‘50s fashions stroll on a littered street before grimy model buildings, one of which displays a mural based on Georges Seurat’s famous pointillist painting of the Parisian bourgeoisie trying to relax on the grassy banks of a river.

Botto is right to align his mean-spirited photographs with Seurat’s masterpieces. The 19th-Century painting reveals middle-class pleasures beginning to dissipate into isolation and anomie. Seurat invented pointillism as a symbol of this cultural breakdown: The people in his image seem isolated and silent, more like toys going through motions than individuals enjoying a pleasant afternoon. The park in his painting is downstream of a factory that daily dumped sewage into the river.

Botto is wrong, however, to imagine that his photographs tell us anything new about the emptiness of modern life. Where Seurat’s painting gave form to an emerging reality, Botto’s photographs return to an outdated idea about the evils of consumerism. Their finger-pointing moralism oversimplifies problems that have been with us since the camera’s invention.

* Boritzer/Gray Gallery, 903 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-6652, through April 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.