An eye for the folly of modern living
Insightful humor is at play in Pippa Garner’s mixed-media show at Redling Fine Art.
Pippa Garner has satire down pat. That’s no mean feat, given the slipperiness of the literary genre.
At Redling Fine Art, two new mixed-media assemblages join a selection of older works — sculptures, short videos and pencil drawings. In a vein more recently mined by artists such as Jim Shaw and Jeffrey Vallance, they wreak havoc on folksy American ideals like ingenuity and open-mindedness.
“Shirtstorm” is a circular mandala composed of twodozen handmade, sloganeering T-shirts — the kind for sale at Hollywood’s Walk of Fame or on the Venice Boardwalk. Recording expressive, mostly prurient outbursts of vulgar annoyance at life’s little nuisances, the T-shirt wall-graphic is a colorful, very witty map of our current spiritual universe.
“Crowd Shroud” is a mixed-up sedan chair — a hired conveyance once used to carry aristocrats through crowded London streets while sequestered from the rabble. Garner’s box, however, with its two-way mirrored windows, is built atop a wheelchair.
This campy apparatus wryly skewers its legacy as aristocratic passenger disability. Yet it also suggests potential liberation through independent locomotion. In the 1960s Garner studied in the automotive design program at Pasadena’s Art Center College, and car culture has been her frequent subject ever since.
In the short videos, Garner gets her deadpan on, playing multiple roles with just the right measure of earnestness and folly. In one, advocating the virtue of self-marriage, she plays both bride and groom in split--
screen. In another, she sends up TV’s domestic design shows that promise better life through lackluster redecoration schemes.
Her primary contribution to trends in domestic products is the homemade Personal Utility Drone — or PUD — a clunky home-missile unlikely to get off the ground except in the artist’s fervid imagination. As inventive American consumption demands, your PUD is accompanied by a guarantee of instant obsolescence. Good design aims toward the future, she advises, but keep in mind that the future never arrives.
Detailed Pop drawings from the late 1970s through the 1990s are like outtakes from the back of old Mad magazine and Archie comic books, where sea monkeys, X-ray specs and mail-order hypnotism lessons were on offer. (The drawings are signed Phil Garner, her name prior to her transition to Pippa.) Drawings tout a men’s hair fashion that advocates letting sideburns grow long enough to braid — “pig-burns,” she calls them — and propose the construction of trailer parks, which are big gardens planted on flatbed trailer-trucks that can be driven to overbuilt urban neighborhoods to provide some greenery.
Garner has an ear for life’s mundane madness, which she turns against itself to throw things into high relief. More Horace than Juvenal, her insightful humor is arch rather than piercing.
Redling Fine Arts, 6757 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Through June 3; closed Sundays and Mondays. (323) 460-2046, www .redlingfineart.com
Finding life in death, sublimely
Simplified forms, flattened color, irregular perspective — stylistically, landscape paintings and genre scenes by Jessie Homer French might be termed naive. French, 77, has been working for more than 40 years but is untrained.
Yet sophistication describes the nine earnest paintings in her enchanting debut exhibition at Various Small Fires. French paints what she knows — or wants to know — rather than recording what she sees. Mostly, this selection of modest easel paintings, made between 1988 and 2014, is a rumination on mortality.
“Road Kill (Again)” shows the quiet, softly brushed corpse of a whitetail deer lying in the weeds, tiny trickles of crimson blood running from its nose and a hind leg. From one canvas edge to the other, lacy patterns of green nature wrap the animal’s body in a delicate embrace. A life cut short by unexpected catastrophe is reverenced.
Two pictures show cemeteries, one in the lush bloom of spring and the other blanketed beneath a deep layer of snow. Both landscapes feature a wide strip of brown across the bottom — cutaways of the earth, where the bodies of men, women and children are laid out in caskets.
Neither cemetery scene is morbid. The juxtaposition of death with spring lushness italicizes the ordinariness of life cycles. The wintry scene features an ominous wolf, slightly oversize in scale, but the dead have nothing to fear. Menace lends a sense of indifferent security to the bodies below.
The artist doesn’t let herself off the hook either. In a dark woodland picture with a blazing campfire built from a pile of discarded paintings, even her own work faces extinction. A scene of failure and loss, it is nonetheless also a picture of light and warmth.
French, who works in La Quinta, has not exhibited her paintings much. (A selection of her needlework quilts was at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts last year.) Happily, the gallery plans a larger show for the future.
Various Small Fires, 812 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. Through May 27; closed Sundays and Mondays. (310) 426-8040, www.vsf.la
Inspiration via South America
Near the end of Bruce Yonemoto’s elaborate, multi-room, video-based installation at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Gallery, a sculpture turns the world upside down and inside out. A potted plant on the floor flourishes beneath a fluorescent grow-light attached to the top of an upside-down table suspended from the ceiling.
It’s as if the plant, thanks to the nurture of man-made light, is being grown to provide the materials to make the topsy-turvy table. Nature and culture coexist in a convoluted tangle.
The sculpture turns up amid a variety of video rooms. “Bruce Yonemoto: The Imaginary Line Around the Earth” contemplates the dizzying impact on worldly experience of reproduction — in camera images and, more recently, digital pictures. The subject has been on his mind — and in his art — for more than 30 years.
Lately it has manifested itself in response to time spent in South America, below the equator’s “imaginary line.” One inspiration is a Buenos Aires event by a relatively little-known Argentine artist. It may well have had stark if under-recognized cultural ramifications for the international development of Conceptual art. In 1966, Oscar Masotta (1930-1979) challenged the claim of American artist Allan Kaprow that a Happening, a genre Kaprow invented, could and should only happen once.
In essence, Masotta suggested that it was certainly true that one could not step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus explained 2,500 years ago. But — and it’s a big but — if the river-stepping was reported in mass media, the happening was being repeated in a new way. He called it a “dematerialized” form.
New York critic Lucy Lippard, who knew Masotta’s work, soon launched into writing “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object.” The text is now a classic reference for Conceptual art.
The Luckman show consists of nine interwoven parts, with individual components made as early as 1991 and as recently as this year. (Some were co-produced with his older brother, artist Norman Yonemoto, who died in 2014, as well as with others.) The assembly of parts is less a contrived, linear narrative than a kind of collaged tone poem about a pervasive sense of dislocation that characterizes our heavily mediated environment. The newest segment incorporates a reenactment of a Masotta Happening. Its most viscerally beautiful element is a video projection of Perito Moreno Glacier, a vast ice expanse in Patagonia, made with art historian Juli Carson.
The static camera looks out over a jagged blue-white field, gray clouds drifting above and the sun blazing through. Perito Moreno is unusual because, for reasons unknown (and unlike other glaciers), it is advancing rather than receding. Looking at Yonemoto’s big projected image, you strain to see the frigid mass coming toward you, nominally upside-down in a hemisphere “underneath” our own.
Masotta’s artistic observation that any Happening does exist more than once — first in the event itself and again in its subsequent representations through media — was born of a cruel political reality. A right-wing military coup was roiling Argentina’s social landscape. As a propagandized means of control, the dictatorship fabricated public crimes and made false claims against purported violent revolutionaries.
Yonemoto’s installation — framed by the chilling, authoritarian power of fake news — is surreptitiously timely. Stare at the giant, mesmerizing mass “The End of the World at the Edge of the Earth,” as the pointed piece is titled, and the glacier is imperceptibly advancing.
Luckman Gallery, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, L.A. Ends Friday. (323) 343-6600, www.luck manarts.org