ART REVIEWS : ‘Ruins’: An Obsession-Filled Look at Past

Artist and critic Kavin Buck has curated a group show at Ruth Bachofner Gallery around one of those impressive-sounding, but ultimately amorphous themes. “Second Nature: Ruins” purports to concern itself with minor elements, overlooked details and secondary forms. This part sounds promising.

The tag line, “Ruins,” is supposed to clue us in to the fact that the nine artists in the show pick through images, objects and information “that have a predetermined past, be it social, political or historical.’ ” This part sounds less promising, since there’s no way around the fact that every image, object and piece of information has a past.

Once you start moving through the show, the fuzziness of the premise fades in significance, for most of the work is quite interesting. Personal obsessions weigh in heavily here. Julie Becker is fascinated with “Eloise,” the pint-sized heroine of a series of children’s books. Becker displays two letters ostensibly penned by her junior alter ego, as if they were holy relics or psychoanalytic symptoms.

Dennis Balk is driven by the need to dissect the order of the cosmos--thus, the 19 linen napkins pinned to the wall, each covered with elaborate flow charts and abstruse notations linking developments in empirical psychology to Newtonian analytic methods to ancient mythology to explorations of alternate sources of fuel. Mara Lonner is enslaved by an urge to embellish. She takes ordinary shopping bags and cuts intricate patterns and designs in them; here, the untrammeled desire for beauty results in complete dysfunction.

Dysfunction is certainly an issue for several artists in the show. Christopher Dolan’s remarkable video stalks a three-legged cat as the cat himself stalks his imperceptible prey. Peter Santino is more interested in downright failure. Famed for his intricate, tinted sand drawings, he shows here a series of small balls--one covered in gold leaf, another encrusted with pasta and a third made of solid lead.

Affixed to the wall at eye level, the balls suggest stifled ambitions, impacted ideas, smothered hopes and imporous flesh. They are compelling in their poignancy and serve as a wry corrective to unnecessarily overblown curatorial agendas, such as the one in which they are currently entangled.

* Ruth Bachofner Gallery, 2046 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-3300, through July 30. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

For Sale: To interrogate the popular perception of the artist as martyr-saint--endlessly misunderstood and destined to suffer--is one thing. It’s been done by the best of them: Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Yves Klein, Jeff Koons. To buy into this perception is quite another, and rather painful to watch. Self-pity generates pity if you’re lucky and annoyance if you’re not.

In “Contract of Sale,” her new show at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, China Adams brings up this issue, while failing to provoke any serious reflection upon it. Circling the walls of a dimly lit room is a series of 13 medical light boxes, each displaying an X-ray of a specific bone in Adams’ body. Next to the X-rays are purchase agreements in which Adams sells ownership rights to her left scaphoid, her first rib, her right humerus and so on.

These rights, which can be exercised only upon the artist’s death, include the right to “have, hold, display, exhibit and exploit.” The obvious reference is the medieval practice of selling bones from the bodies of the saints. The notion that through possession of such relics the owner could come closer to heaven is here equated with the idea that through ownership of the work of art, the collector can vicariously experience the artist’s genius.

The message, too, is that the artist is a victim, but it’s a hard one to swallow--especially these days, when Van Gogh’s ear is such a debased signifier.

Equally hard to swallow is Adams’ immunity to the insights of art historical revisionism. She appropriates the forms of 1970s conceptualism, where objects on display are considered merely documents of an intangible idea; yet she stops short of acknowledging the impossible utopianism of such a scheme--or even, for that matter, of accepting conceptualism’s anti- aesthetic mandate. Instead, Adams stresses the “artiness” of her X-rays--the images of the left femur, for example, look like gorgeous, if severely minimal, abstractions. In the process, she is a bit too vigorous in pleading her own case as underappreciated aesthete, making it unfortunately clear that she is playing it straight, when critique, if not outright parody, is called for.

* Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 935- 4411, through July 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Light Construction: David Hines’ immaculate paintings at Koplin Gallery depict single houses seen by night. Located along deserted highways, in the farthest reaches of outer suburbia, these anonymous, ubiquitous structures are illuminated by unadorned light bulbs hanging over their garage doors, or by a glow emanating from within, which is neither warm nor particularly inviting.

This is not to say that Hines wants to convey a sense of foreboding. These are not the deserted highways made famous by B-grade horror films, nor the assembly-line dwellings that house burgeoning serial killers. Hines purges his images of all such affect by stripping them of detail--narrative and pictorial. Instead of winding up with visions of American-style anomie, he winds up with a mundaneness so pronounced it appears profound.

By all accounts, then, the paintings should be immensely dull. They are not. For one thing, the elements are so consistent--house, night sky, motivated light source--that these appear to be serial objects. And watching such objects transmute from realist images to minimal abstractions--dark canvases bisected by single lines of variegated light--is quite unnerving. Aesthetic thrills, however, are not what this very mature body of work is about. It is about becoming comfortable with the empty spaces between moments, places and events.

* Koplin Gallery, 1438 9th St., Santa Monica, (310) 319-9956, through Saturday.