ART REVIEW : Miller’s Collages a Bland Approach to the Past

Collage is often called the definitive art form of this century. In his paper collages, Pablo Picasso disrupted the space of art with the debris of “real” life. And in her image and text pieces, Barbara Kruger disclosed the abstruse manipulations of the media society.

For these artists--along with everyone in-between, from John Heartfield to Robert Rauschenberg--the power of collage has been its ability to unravel the fiction of seamlessness, the reigning myth of both art and life. What, then, of the collages and assemblages of Gregory A. J. Miller?

Miller is fascinated with the graphic look of American culture of the ‘50s and ‘60s: advertisements from Life magazine, plumped up with exclamation marks and wide-eyed wonder at this or that appliance; semi-sleazy cover illustrations taken from hard-boiled paperback novels; yellowed pages from “Catcher in the Rye” or “The Sound and the Fury,” and pointy-breasted cocktail dresses.

In Miller’s work, such artifacts, both literary and material, are layered one over the other. The results are decidedly bland.

A man’s narrow-lapel suit is covered in cut-out magazine ads and headlines. Pages from a book called “Dangerous Dames” provide the background for a flamboyantly ‘50s drawing of a woman in lingerie. The iconic image of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald overlays a grid of pages from the Warren Commission Report.

What is missing, of course, is any disjunction, irony or wit. These are palimpsests, but they are strangely translucent. Here is the obvious restated, and the fiction of seamlessness reified. Miller exploits a contemporary taste for all things retro, but he fails to do something interesting with it: to interrogate that taste, undermine it or even surrender to it in a provocative fashion.

* William Turner Gallery, 69 Market St., Venice, (310) 392-8399. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through Jan. 30.