The persuasion of pervasion

The new exhibit at Laguna Art Museum has the art blogosphere buzzing, which proves the point of the title: “Pervasion: The Art of Gary Baseman and Tim Biskup.” The primary-colored, big-eyed work of Baseman and Biskup is, satirically, everywhere.

This is Baseman and Biskup’s first joint show (which runs through Sept. 24), but they’ve been working symbiotically for years.

When you walk into the main gallery, your first impression may be that you wandered into a Toys-R-Us. There are giant cones reminiscent of Christmas trees (Baseman’s “Magi Spirits”), a totem-like “Alpha Beast” column that runs to the ceiling (Biskup), and if you look across the room you’ll see “Tobys” scrambling over the balcony.

These figures are part of a repertoire of characters that repeat (or, I suppose you could say “reappear”) in various forms and media in Biskup and Baseman’s work. They have a kind of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern quality ? it can be hard to tell them apart until you’re more familiar with their motifs. The idea is to make the characters “pervasive” to the point of “perversion.”

It’s both a comment on, and an exploitation of, the modern phenomena of “branding,” a selling strategy that shoves its way into the world of art.

I took my 18-year-old nephew to the show, and he walked around, circling back to me every once in a while, saying things like, “What’s the name of that big blue guy in ‘Monsters, Inc.’ ”? or, “It’s like ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ ” or, “He looks like Felix the Cat.”

I’m a Gen-Xer, so I’m thinking “Pinky and the Brain,” “Ren and Stimpy,” or even “Samurai Jack.” My first thoughts were actually about Simpsons creator Matt Groening’s early shape-shifting comic strip called “Life in Hell.” But you might also think tattoos, Japanese Noh plays, dada and Mexican folk art.

That’s the point. Go into the gift shop, and you’ll find storybooks, jackets, post cards, pottery and even mints. It’s dizzying, dark and totally charming.

I say it’s dark. It would have to be, or all this cute would be cloying. In Baseman’s “Squeeze My Desire” (acrylic on ephemera), the artist has taken a cliché 1950s scene of a mother and daughter who must have originally been cooking or some such mundane task, and painted in turd-like smiling blobs and bulbous pink creatures. Ah, I thought, irony. A similar work upstairs, “Toby’s Baby Bottom,” takes it further, into the disturbing.

The paintings on the wall do add up to a kind of “Night Gallery.” It’s that moment when something really cute suddenly appears scary, the way film directors can take children at play and turn them into “Children of the Corn.”

Biskup’s large painting “Helper Dragon,” for instance, takes his own character called Helper ? a benign enough creature, a la Cousin It from the Addams Family ? and gives it wings. But there’s no movement here. It’s more like a sampler, those embroidered dishtowels on a large scale, emphasized by the fact that there’s no underpaint, the wood grain clearly visible.

Pitch-black folk motifs surround the furry red beast. The clash of imagery is funny, striking and disturbing at the same time. And the “pervasiveness” of Helper in other forms (other media as well as other paintings) threatens to turn him into something like an archetype for something.

But for what? What, for instance, does Baseman’s Toby represent? Repeated pleather figures, about a foot high, pervade the gallery. He wears a red fez (much like Groening’s Akbar and Jeff) with a skull on it and a red jumper with a big bloodshot eyeball on his belly. In “Toby Army,” a mob of Tobys worship a “giant” multi-armed god. Up on a shelf, a pair of Tobys gleefully hump (the urge to put toys in this position seems to be a basic human drive).

Fun always has a sinister connection to our unconscious mind.

The expansive quality that Biskup and Baseman have created in these characters, the sheer range of the repetition, allows us to take a look at what’s been lurking around in our brains. You can laugh at it, think it’s cute. You can frown at it, think it’s stupid. Or you can allow yourself to be disturbed by it, and wonder.

It seems the urge to buy the little plastic figure that looks just like the character we just saw in the movie is not far off from the urge to buy the little plastic figure we just saw in the painting. What are you really buying if the figure is from a nightmare? Does this somehow make what we fear safe? This is what Freud said about jokes ? we are disarming what we most fear.

Neon green teddy bears bigger than grizzlies. Attack of the killer Christmas trees. Swarming Tobys. Cartoon violence. Nothing is hidden here if you look carefully enough: love, hate, friendship, fear, jealousy, sex, innocence all find a commercial outlet. Stop by the gift shop and you can leave the gallery with a little piece of art. Just make sure you know what you’re getting.