ART REVIEWS : Reflections on a Fascination With Trash

Garbage occupies an honored position in the history of modern art. Cubists often used bits and pieces of urban detritus in their abstract collages. Dadaists and Surrealists raised the stakes of this exchange between art and waste by making entire installations out of refuse--such as dirty sacks of coal and rotting lettuce--and even filling a pristine gallery with two truckloads of rubbish.

These anti-art gestures shocked European audiences because they attacked a venerated tradition of high manners and good taste. In the United States, however, where in 1960 two ale cans cast in bronze were seen first as sculptures--and only secondarily as throwaways--garbage and “high art” have always had a less antagonistic, more complex relationship.

When Pop Art emerged as America’s first original and indigenous form of modern art, it did away with oppositions between timelessness and disposability. The supposedly eternal value of art and the shifting, evanescent effects of cheap commodities merged in a chilling, sometimes inscrutable, celebration of superficiality.

Nancy Rubins’ two installations at Burnett Miller Gallery (like her piece in “Helter Skelter” at the Temporary Contemporary), give impressive physical form to a peculiarly American fascination with trash. Her monumental piles of discarded airplane parts and broken water heaters pay homage to the raw, irrational powers at the root of consumerism as they indict our society for its nearly pathological dependence upon planned obsolescence.

“Table and Airplane Parts” enters the privileged space of the gallery only to violate our tendency to enshrine art in a protected domain of desired transcendence. Hundreds of fragments taken from crashed and outdated aircraft spill off of a simple wooden table in a junk heap that is strangely elegant in its stylish composition. Rubins’ wired-together collection of intake valves and exhaust jets, shell-like fragments of fuselages and segments of twisting conduits overwhelms the clean geometry of the bunkerlike gallery.

In a smaller, rear gallery, “Drawings With Water Heaters” also demonstrates art’s inability to keep up with the relentlessness that drives consumerism. This piece consists of approximately 35 discarded water heaters strung together with wire in a cancerous glob over which the artist has draped her trademark drawings of nothingness.

These large sheets of paper depict only blackness. Their surfaces are totally covered over with dense layers of graphite. Each sheet looks more metallic than organic. Literally made of lead, they evoke the deathly quality of this material as they emphasize the immobility of the airplane parts and the uselessness of the water heaters.

Rubins’ intentionally artless works attack the domain of aesthetics not to push Pop beyond its insistence that art and life collide, but to return to an almost European critique of the disposable nature of a society wholly defined by its desire to consume.

Rubins’ extremely straightforward accumulations of junk rely upon, but do not acknowledge, an infamous history of art. Rather than elaborating upon its difficult claims, her works forget about art historical precedents in order to pretend that their own affects are more than merely aesthetic.

* Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 874-4757, through April 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Poetic License: At 69, Charles Garabedian is making some of the best paintings of his career. His most recent acrylics on canvas and paper, collectively titled “Studies for the Iliad,” bring such extreme poetic license to the Greek epic that it functions as little more than a springboard for the artist’s dream narratives. His whimsical pictures are compelling precisely because of their freewheeling vigor: They dissolve the differences between classicism and cartoons.

Garabedian’s idiosyncratic images avoid the pitfalls that plague other artists interested in the fleshy pleasures of figurative painting. His sense of humor embodies a generosity of spirit absent from the shrill neoclassicism of cynics such as Carlo Maria Mariani (currently exhibiting at the L.A. County Museum of Art) and David Ligare, whose lifelessly formulaic paintings prevent any kind of vitality from entering the picture.

In contrast to the over-composed human forms depicted by these well-mannered formalists, Garabedian’s cartoonish figures always seem to be awkwardly trapped in his paintings. It is as if his lumpy, uncomfortable characters know they cannot possibly live up to the overblown roles they are called upon to play in the grand epic of history. Like funny underdogs, they have a sense of humility that allows them to take on an emotional power far greater than that of ordinary cartoons.

Garabedian exaggerates this by depicting them dead or asleep, with missing limbs or lost in reverie. In a 7x20-foot mural-like painting, five fleshy figures float in an abstract landscape in gravity-defying positions as their limbs contort in impossible configurations.

The scene is riddled with so many illusionistic inconsistencies and gaps in logic that its only sense is that of dreams. By cleverly arresting time, Garabedian’s painting suggests that the best reason to go back to classicism is to go ahead with the randomness of fantasy--a spiraling motion neither free of history nor bound by its linear movement.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through April 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Transition Mode: Twenty-four bright-red abstractions at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions catch veteran L.A. painter James Hayward in a remarkable transition.

Each of his modestly scaled paintings consists of a road map almost totally covered over with oils and enamels in shades ranging from intense orange to deep violet. Four bands of fire-engine-red plexiglass perfectly abut each effaced map, neatly demarcating its edges by extending its surface area.

Whereas the frostinglike swathes of paint of Hayward’s previous works fused the freedom of gestural abstraction with the restraint of monochrome paintings, his new works divide neatly into three components: Line, gesture and edge splinter into the distinct territories of overpainted map, schematic abstraction and reflective plexiglass frame.

Hayward’s newest body of work clarifies the concerns that animated his earlier canvases. If those paintings were artificial setups that allowed him to get lost in the hedonistic pleasures of applying luscious swipes of color to raw canvas, his most recent paintings dissect the conceptual underpinnings of that practice.

The dysfunctional maps stand as a symbol of art’s ability to provide a space in which one’s bearings can be lost. The plexiglass bands mark off the blank, impenetrable and self-reflexive qualities that distinguish non-representational painting from other art forms. And the loose brushwork signifies the aimless non-referential potential of this art.

Paradoxically, the part-by-part composition of Hayward’s images is logically more unified than the all-over evenness of his earlier works. His new paintings rely almost exclusively on conceptual consistency to hold themselves together. They show the intellectual rigor that underlies Hayward’s physically resplendent art.

* Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 935-4411, through May 10. Closed Mondays.

Highbrow Tattoos: Tattoos, once the province of sailors and bikers, Japanese warriors and gangsters, are, like almost everything else these days, being packaged for the designer lifestyles the ‘80s made famous.

“Forever Yes: Art of the New Tattoo” would raise this notorious, lowbrow art form to the status of high culture. This elevation seems reasonable because it is the mirror image of “Helter Skelter,” MOCA’s celebration of cultural slumming. The 70 photographs that comprise the exhibition at Bryce Bannatyne Gallery, however, are more interesting anthropologically than artistically.

Thirteen photographers capture the work of 24 tattooers. The tattoos are impressive in their diversity and sophistication. The photographs, when they try to be “artistic,” diminish the power of the tattoos. As a whole, the exhibition pales in comparison to the real thing--the crowd at the opening stole the show.

* Bryce Bannatyne Gallery, 604 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 396-9668, through May 3. Closed Mondays.