ART REVIEWS : Vito Acconci’s Massive Sculptures Turn to Thoughts of Home

New York conceptual and performance artist Vito Acconci offers shelter from the storm. He appears here in two sets of massive tough ‘n’ tender sculpture, one shaped like shellfish, the other like brassieres. The artist makes fun of his own heroic scale in engaging fashion. Giant clams are plastic, encrusted with real shells, inset with lights, hinged with hardware as big around as a child’s wrist and lashed to the floor as if they might run off. One is open like a big sofa, another straddles--making a tunnel-- and the third stands ajar. When you walk in, rock music crackles out of a bad radio--like the one in your first jalopy.

Confused recorded sounds filling the gallery are a far cry from listening to seashells for sounds of the surf. The Alice in Wonderland works are like some homeless urchin’s idea of a place even more securely isolating than his Walkman. Small maquettes house Barbie-style couples inside their boat-like shapes, making them look like they’re setting to sea with honey and lots of money. Acconci is sweet and whimsical here, but he builds in a social subtext about a world so increasingly unpleasant that people are inclined to escape, cocoon and clam up.

For sheer size the two huge brassieres out-Oldenburg the master himself, crawling up walls and onto the ceiling. It takes a minute just to figure out they are not pure abstraction. Finally, they look like triple Zs for Missus Mt. Rushmore. Cups are plastic, mesh looks like prison screen and supports are steel re-bar. They aren’t anti-feminist but they do embody classic male mammary fixations on the woman as nurturing earth mother and terrifying challenge.

James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., Santa Monica, to July 7.

Housing Project: Thoughts of shelter also waft from two large untitled works by veteran Minimalist sculptor Robert Grosvenor. One is built of abdomen-high parallel concrete block walls painted silver, and topped with a corrugated metal roof complete with skylight. You can’t exactly argue that this thing exists for purely formal reasons. Anyone who can avoid seeing it as some manner of conceptual lean-to for the homeless just hasn’t been downtown lately.

The other work might be a funeral monument for a dead derelict in a vacant lot. A T-shape of cinder block rests under a catafalque of clear plastic that has a dignified and rather elegant curve--surprising when fashioned of such elemental industrial-age materials.

People who’ve been art lovers for a long time get aggravated these days at the way artists insert themselves into topical social issues. On the other hand, what is an artist if not a humanist? If we’re not always getting the most exalted art from stuff that insists on poking its nose into reality we at least are learning two things. Modernist aesthetics still appear mined out, and the problems of the planet are so urgent they need to be addressed even if the results seem sentimental.

A concurrent show of photographs by L.A. conceptualist Barbara Bloom challenges the theory that such art is a Johnny-one-note affair. Bloom’s largest piece consists of framed photographs of everything from Japanese calligraphy to two girls looking at a nude by Ingres. Everything’s neatly hung in conventional fashion, but the pictures are obscured behind draped white curtain material that covers the walls floor-to-ceiling. An ankle-high railing keeps you close to the pictures, making them yet harder to focus upon.

It’s irritating. She calls the piece “The Gaze� but won’t let you see it. She should have called it “The Gauze.� You wonder if she really had an idea or if this is just some misguided notion of how to put together pictures taken in locations from Tokyo to London. Looks like someone being enigmatic because they have nothing to say.

Gradually it gets a little better. There are feelings of the beauty of anonymous travel--of being deliciously alone in a Paris Metro station or seeing an odd new kind of telephone in Hong Kong. The show never jells, but it has a nice aura of delicate philosophical rumination, like staring out the window of a train.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 817 N. Hilldale Ave., to June 30.

Floating Alone: Robert Jessup was born in Moscow, Ida., which for no explicable reason seems to foster offbeat artists like Robert Helm and Ed Kienholz. Jessup, who now works in Upstate New York, paints in the antic spirit of the fictional Gully Jimson. Everything in his world looks like some lumpish, architectural detail gone barmy. Shapes run to melon-slice and free-form dingbat, and everything appears as if cast in plaster, except everything floats. There is no more gravity in Jessup’s world than there is logic. Paint surfaces are pebbled, like rough-finish cement, and colors are cheerfully decorative. Titles run to things like “Brave Young Bird on a Tight Rope,� in which the bird looks like a calcified dollop of tar-colored frozen yogurt.

For all this nearly metaphysical eccentricity, Jessup is firmly connected to the history of modernist painting from Picasso’s surrealist period to lately unlamented Neo-Expressionism. Pretty good paintings, though.

Also on view are 20 untitled abstract watercolors by the late L.A. artist Patrick Hogan. He avoided the use of black in many sheets, and that contributes to a crystalline quality of light reflection. Others have a spider web structure. One four-paneled piece vaguely suggests images of human figures trapped in their centers.

Hogan, who died in 1988, lived in constant discomfort in a wheelchair, making art despite the ravages of a wasting disease. That fact is both central and irrelevant to his art. He played it straight and asked for no special consideration, but the tight purity of the work often feels like a lyric sublimation of pain.

Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., to July 7.

Soft Rock: Mineko Grimmer inaugurates a commodious new space for the Koplin Gallery with a process-piece called “Eternal Ephemeral.� Typically, it combines modernist moves with a traditional Japanese aesthetic. Two pier-like rows of parallel poles descend in steps across the gallery, each topped with a pile of red pebbles that also surround the uprights with a gravel garden. The work didn’t always look this way. It began with the pebbles frozen in ice and resting atop the columns. As the ice thawed, the garden was formed by falling pebbles. Nice conceit, that.

Grimmer also shows photos of rocks washed by the surf and four maquettes for wood-frame pavilions that take off from Japanese architecture to form the structural component of her characteristic musical-pebbles sculpture. Models are small but suggest ambitious projects.

Robert Schultz’s simultaneous offering is a group of exquisitely rendered pencil drawings in classicized hyper-real style. There is a tension between the artist’s cool, aristocratic detachment and the down-at-the-heels art-studio environment he depicts. Models are young and attractive, some nude, some clad. Schultz’s rendering is so fine that individual lines rarely show, just the gray texture of the paper beneath gray wash.

They look like art done by a prince in exile, discouraged that his figurative style is not in fashion. Even if it were, you’d have to say the drawing lacks the elegant spontaneity of an historical model like Ingres. The work looks engineered.

Koplin Gallery, 1436 9th St., Santa Monica, to June 23.