ART REVIEWS : David Ireland: Calculatedly Carnivalesque Work

Making art--like making love or buying a pair of shoes, for that matter--requires a careful balance between ego and id. On the one hand, there is deliberation, control and an authorial “I.” On the other, there is abandon, indulgence and the wild vicissitudes of pleasure.

In his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Ruth Bloom Gallery, David Ireland carefully erects this balance only to topple it with a couple of mischievous shoves. What his off-center work suggests is that counterweights like ego/id, art/life and sincerity/dissimulation are not opposites, but mirror reflections. What they are is the same--only different.

Ireland’s fortuitous/fated initials neatly bear this out. Reverse the letters and you get “I.D.”--identity, presence, the self; delete the periods and put the letters in lower case and you get “id”--the primitive component of the psychic apparatus, the seat of play, violence and chance.

And so Ireland does just that, his flipped, rotated and permutated initials forming the leitmotif of this calculatedly carnivalesque exhibition. In the center of the room, the motorized “initial machine” spins the letters “D.I.” around and around at breakneck speed, dissolving them into an abstract blur; behind it, a curio cabinet is stuffed full of pieces of wood, each obsessively branded with the word “id”; across the way, a circular cabinet filled with wood studded with the artist’s initials conjures a roulette wheel, in which risk is recast as a sure thing, and adventure guarantees nothing so much as an ego boost.

Scattered along the floor in random configurations are what Ireland calls his “dumb balls”--masses of wet concrete tossed from hand to hand for 15-20 hours, until they have dried. Resulting from a ritualized process that demystifies the much vaunted “creative impulse,” the 79 grayish orbs pay homage to John Cage, who died this year at age 79.

Marcel Duchamp figures in all this as well.

Ireland’s “initial machine” recalls the former’s rotary plates and motorized devices. More explicit is a piece titled “Penn’s Pocket”--a Sheetrock construction which mimics the tight corner into which Duchamp is pushed in Irving Penn’s famous photograph, accompanied by a copy of the photo itself, illuminated by a single, raw bulb.

This piece--like Penn’s portrait of Duchamp--is deeply ironic. For Duchamp only played at backing himself into a corner, all the while investigating the slippery epistemology of the art object. What he learned--and what he showed Ireland--is how to turn the corner inside out, how to expand that which has constricted into a point into a space of infinite dimension, how to break art’s tyranny over non-art.

“You can’t make art by making art,” Ireland once proclaimed. This exhibition suggests another dictum, both the same and different: “You can make art by unmaking art”--or at least by unmaking its recalcitrant ideologies.

* Ruth Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through Oct . 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Discreet Liaison: There is really no good reason why the disparate works in “Fluid Measure” should have been brought together: a trio of landscapes; a series of plastic bags with images scratched onto their surfaces; an abstract painting; a photogram; an assemblage of photos of stems and twigs.

Yet this small group show, curated with great care by artist and critic Buzz Spector, works like a discreet liaison--with glances thrown and looks intercepted, correspondences initiated and ideas exchanged, all under cover and in hushed tones.

“Fluid Measure,” after all, takes place in the lobby of the L.A. Public Library in Hollywood.

As if in deference to its site, this work requires close scrutiny. It is subtle, so it doesn’t demand attention; yet once you get up close, you find you must look at it, step away from it, and study it again--this time from an oblique angle, taking in the entire room. Only then does the conversation begin--between the tiny, capillary-like markings beneath the surface of Adam Ross’ magnificently layered pigments and the pulsating, blood-red channels in Erik Kreis’ photogram; between the blurred details of Laura Parker’s generic plants and the exquisite matte finish of Michael Norton’s egg tempera landscapes; between the shadows cast on the fabric-lined walls by Judit Hersko’s minutely etched scenes and the ghostly traces left on those walls of the pictures that hung there before.

In his catalogue essay, Spector suggests that what the work shares is an “interest in rendering visible an elusive, problematic space.” One could argue that what it shares is an affinity for rifts, mysteries and lacuna--the shadows that mark out absence for Hersko; the empty prints in Parker’s photo-clusters; that which has been gouged, erased and abraded from Ross’ highly buffed surfaces. Reveling in what is hidden, this work--and this curatorial endeavor--is necessarily open-ended. Quite simply, how refreshing.

* L.A. Public Library, 1623 N. Ivar Ave., Hollywood, (213) 850-7518, through Oct. 10. Closed Sundays.

Smart Sculptures: A small lead cube placed upon the floor abuts a cavity of identical dimensions and volume, its hollowed-out sides lined with seeds of wheat. Across the room, the pattern is reversed: The cube that rests upon the floor is composed of wheat seeds, while the cube that perforates the floor is lined in lead.

Robert Gero’s smart sculptures at Thomas Solomon’s Garage conjure the familiar litany of Modernist dichotomies--nature/culture, interior/exterior, permanence/evanescence. Yet indeed, there is more. What Gero touches upon (or rather, rips into) is not the logic or illogic of such oppositions, but the pristine borders of the gallery. What he asserts is that gallery space is not a neutral, immutable container for objects, but a highly manipulable object itself.

If Gero’s sculptures excavate the gallery floor, his drawings carve space out of the gallery wall. In “Column 3,” a white pillar constructed of paper protrudes from the surface of the drawing, flanked, on either side, by black, pyramidal accents, which have been sunk into channels removed from the wall.

Here, Gero cunningly enacts a pictorial truism (white projects while black recedes), his purpose to expose the fallacy of illusionism while simultaneously assailing the Modernist creed of “flatness.” Yet his criticality is shaky. He can’t seem to help intimating the transcendence and wonder of art--so remarkable that it forces the walls to expand and contract in its very presence; so powerful that it transforms the concrete floor into a permeable membrane.

Surprisingly, this shakiness doesn’t compromise the work; it renders its appeal. Eschewing the certainty and the self-righteousness of much post-Modern practice, Gero’s sculptures and drawings are wonderfully ambivalent. The only thing they insist upon in the end (and quite wisely so) is that no system--neither Modernism nor deconstruction--can be expected to remain forever invulnerable.

The most seductive thing about Linda Roush Hudson’s early work was the way it was barely there. Hovering on the margins of invisibility, her deft manipulations of direct, reflected and projected light were difficult to distinguish from the architecture they illuminated--the faintest hint of blue light against a white wall, a transparent curtain laid over a door of corrugated steel.

In “Lamp Light,” a new installation also at Thomas Solomon’s Garage, Roush Hudson continues her investigation into the ephemeral effects of light. Yet here, the focus is on how light is emitted from, absorbed by and channeled through objects ranging from the neo-Victorian to the space-age--from cherry-colored lamps and doilies to tiny, telescope-like, glass orbs hooked up to the gallery’s skylight.

Roush Hudson is as inventive as ever, but she seems less in command of her material. Instead of using the objects to get at broader questions--about light, vision and space--she has fallen under their sway. Enthralled by the delicacy of Millefiori glass, by the way tulle looks when reflected in a mirror, by gorgeous colors and lush patterns traced in pastels, Roush Hudson has had to sacrifice too much. What she has wound up with is work that is simply too precious. It’s wonderful to look at, certainly; but this work has been--and certainly can be again--about much more than that.

* Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, both shows through Oct. 4. Closed Monday and Tuesday.