Set the table? Let us count the ways

“Fifty Ways to Set the Table,” a 26-minute video by Judy Fiskin documenting a peculiar L.A. County Fair event known as the “Tablescaping Competition,” begins with a dry excoriation by the event’s two female judges. Apparently, one poor contestant’s decorative beads don’t drape properly.

“They’re all stiff and wiry,” one judge points out, “like the kind you would use in crafts. If they’re going to have beads, they ought to have like the Jackie Kennedy beads [on another table], the long pearls, you know? You can get yards of old pearls in craft shops that just” -- she makes an arcing gesture and a shhhhew sound -- “drape.”

“Detracts from elegance,” the other inscribes on an evaluation form, articulating the syllables slowly as she writes. “De-tracts.”

Such flaws would seem to abound. The cloth on the next table, the judges note, is “so white it makes the salt look off-white,” and on the following table -- well, they “would have chosen different flatware.”

In trailing these women -- who are, to be fair, neither as old nor as prickly as their initial comments might suggest -- through the gaudy archipelago of tables that constitutes the 2001 competition, Fiskin enters into a sphere of American culture all but ignored by the sophisticates of the urban art world. Her video, which had its debut last fall at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is now at the Angles Gallery.

Adrift in a cavernous exhibition hall and bordered by a white picket fence, the display is a decidedly homespun affair but one that offers testament to the persistence of the creative impulse. In a city with more than its share of high-paid caterers and party planners, the enthusiasm with which these nonprofessionals set about designing and constructing their settings -- gastronomical installations, they might be called -- is a truly refreshing sight.

The first segment of the video (after the aforementioned prologue) focuses primarily on the participants themselves as they unpack their crates and carefully assemble their tables. There are six categories in the competition -- Valentine, Magic, Sports, Lion King, Vineyard and Country Christmas. We get a taste of each, pausing frequently to observe noteworthy details, such as the tiny black beads one woman substitutes for caviar or the mock rawhide menu that a man has constructed for his Lion King spread.

In the second segment, we rejoin the two judges and follow them through the elaborate process of assessment and appraisal leading to the selection of best of show, a task they approach with an appealing mix of reverence and humor. Fiskin, for her part, is inconspicuous. She stays carefully outside the frame (despite the judges’ occasional solicitations of her opinion), avoids any sort of commentary and keeps artistic embellishments to a bare minimum.

As in her photographic work -- a nice selection of which is displayed alongside the video -- she achieves a tone that is dry, even deadpan, without coming across as detached or sarcastic. More important, she gives her subjects their due, honoring their endeavors with an appreciation that is neither patronizing nor unduly romantic.

Unlike much of Judy Chicago’s recent work, which reflects a similar interest in domestic crafts and populist traditions but suffers from a cloying sentimentality and a bloated sense of self-importance, “Fifty Ways to Set the Table” offers a genuine glimpse into the soul of America. The video moves beyond the mere spectacle of kitsch to approach the questions of why we make art and how we go about evaluating it.

Angles Gallery, 2230 and 2222 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Feb. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Deliberate irreverence

At the Earl McGrath Gallery, “Raising the Brow” showcases eight of the best -- and best-known -- artists now working in the vein generally referred to as lowbrow. It’s a satisfying sampler of that vibrant field. Considering that the venerable hub of L.A. lowbrow is La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Hollywood, where six of these artists have previously shown, the Westside locale exemplifies the genre’s increasing visibility.

The show’s title is somewhat misleading in its suggestion that these artists are in the process of somehow transcending their roots -- aiming for highbrow, as it were. Considering both the quality of the work and the quantity of red dots on the checklist -- signifying “sold” -- not to mention the success that many of the artists have achieved outside the fine-art sphere in illustration, design and animation, there seems little need for them to aim anywhere.

The painting by Ron English from which the show’s title is taken is considerably more ironic in its implications. A sublimely creepy portrait of two boy clowns wielding drinks and cigars and entreating viewers with grotesquely enthusiastic blue eyes, the work suggests not an elevation but a gleeful perversion of taste. It typifies the deliberate irreverence that runs through much of the work of this ilk.

Equally unsettling, though very different in tone, are the ever-exquisite images (here drawings and prints) of Mark Ryden, whose young, nude, saucer-eyed waifs seduce and alarm in equal measure, and the chilly works of Eric White, a painter almost too virtuosic for his own good, who simulates photographic effects to lend a surreal distortion to his imagery.

Also included are three handsome, melancholic images by Alex Gross (a painting and two prints); two sprawling, expressionistic paintings by the Clayton Brothers; and characteristically stylized, cartoonish works by Gary Baseman (known for the children’s TV program “Teacher’s Pet”) and Josh Agle (a.k.a. Shag).

The one unfamiliar name is a newcomer to the L.A. scene, Nils Karsten, a New York-based artist who is represented by four marvelously delicate works, perhaps the most nuanced in the show, that explore themes of childhood and memory.

Earl McGrath Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 657-4257, through Feb. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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From frozen lakes to Malibu coast

The photographs in Catherine Opie’s last series -- images of ice-fishing shelters on the frozen lakes of Minnesota, made during a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and exhibited at Regen Projects in 2002 -- were elegant, nearly monochromatic compositions in which the distant structures appeared suspended in white, all but unmoored from geographic reality. The 14 landscapes in her new series -- also predominantly white (though with a slight grayish tint) -- are strikingly similar at a glance, but they represent a very difficult locale: the foggy Malibu coastline.

Instead of buildings hovering around the midline, one finds shifting constellations of small black dots -- the bodies of surfers bobbing in the waves, skirted by faint patterns of swirling foam. Installed edge to edge along two adjacent gallery walls, the series makes a spare and beautifully serene installation, exerting a lulling effect not dissimilar from that produced by the ocean itself.

The nine other photographs in the show are portraits depicting individual surfers. These images aren’t fog-bound but bright and clear, taken at close range and marked by the same generosity of spirit that’s distinguished Opie’s portraits in the past. Fresh out of the water, the subjects are dripping and disheveled but at the same time remarkably vivid -- charged as well as battered by the sea.

Regen Projects, 633 N. Almont Drive, Los Angeles, (310) 276-5424, through Feb. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Revisiting works by Bothwell

The oeuvre left by Dorr Bothwell, who died in 2000 at the age of 98, reads like a microcosm of mid-20th century American Modernism. Endowed with what was clearly an eager and restless spirit, Bothwell came to art young and meandered over the course of her career through a wide range of styles and media. She explored many of the impulses, concerns and pitfalls now understood to define the era.

The current exhibition, which features work from 1926 to ‘54, is Bothwell’s third at the Tobey C. Moss Gallery in five years (the second since her death). Although it doesn’t reveal anything new about the artist -- many of these works have been shown previously -- it does offer an opportunity to revisit several memorable works.

The most appealing pieces are those that manifest Bothwell’s enthusiasm for the interplay of form, line and color: the tight, rhythmic string of pitched roofs in “Pensioners Row, Port Gamble” (1926); the springy abstractions that animate “In Flight” (1949); the jaunty red line that slices across the sage-green field of “Southwest” (1952). The sense of play these works embody is infectious.

Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 933-5523, through Feb. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.