Price’s Lush Work Defeats Language

One of the great art stories of the last decade has been the resurgence of sculptor Kenneth Price. Price has made important work ever since the early 1960s, when he was included in the original stable of artists at Ferus Gallery and emerged as heir apparent to Peter Voulkos among artists who chose clay as their principal medium. However, in the 1990s, Price pushed his work into extraordinary new territory, and he hasn’t let up since. The 11 new painted sculptures in the 65-year-old artist’s exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery include some of the finest works of Price’s long and distinguished career--and some of the finest work being made anywhere today.

The new work may be the sexiest yet. Sensuality and sexuality are recurrent motifs in Price’s art. These lush sculptures, most between 1 and 2 feet tall, arrive at their joyful erotic charge through means both splendidly flagrant and subtly refined. Some grab your attention straightaway, making possible the slow dawning of other remarkable effects.

Price’s abstract shapes, built from fired ceramic clay, suggest aquatic sources: mollusks, mantas, turtles, cephalopods and other squishy, vulnerable sea creatures. Here they metamorphose into allusions to the sea itself--swells that rise into curling abstractions of breaking waves. Blending animal with environment, figure merges into ground.

Like life forms crawling out of the sea, these aqueous shapes further evolve into male and female sex organs. Phallic and vaginal forms interpenetrate.

Together, they suggest something unforeseen. You find yourself unconsciously responding to works like “Flare,” “Mo,” “Venus” and “Pacific” by rolling your tongue around behind salivating lips. The overall form in these sumptuous sculptures bears a startling resemblance to the tongue and soft palate in a human mouth.

Price cranks up the sensuous experience ignited by these tabletop forms by emphasizing richly saturated color. Instead of ceramic glaze, each piece is painted with multiple layers of acrylic. The surfaces were then sanded, so that bumps and hollows in the irregular clay topography alternately reveal and conceal the layers of color.

A surface of metallic grape, for example, will be punctuated by a galaxy of turquoise stars, each of which glows around a radiant nucleus of yellow, orange and red. Elsewhere, the surface of an already fluid form seems to erupt into a volcanic flow of fiery hues. Another is studded with tiny flecks in unexpected combinations of orange, cobalt blue and emerald.

Stressing color, Price italicizes the inadequacy of language to encompass sensory experience. Given these sculptures’ formal resemblance to human tongues, which seem to have risen up in a futile effort to speak, it’s easy to see this new work as a witty repudiation of the primacy afforded language in recent theoretical arguments about art. Price’s lush eroticism suggests that, for art, the tongue has less to do with language than with indulging the spiritual and carnal communions of sex.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Feb. 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Sweet Thrills: Goofiness is liberating in three temporally brief, stylistically pared-down video works by Euan Macdonald at Roberts & Tilton Gallery. Even when you know what’s coming, you greet the little event with a sense of small-scale thrill.

In “Hammock Sleep,” an occupied hammock begins to swing in ever-larger arcs, until the inevitable 360-degree loop sends the body into backyard orbit. A soccer ball floating in a driveway puddle aimlessly drifts across a glimmering reflection of the sun, creating a momentary “Eclipse.” And, in the most quirky and compelling piece, three ice cream trucks converge at a nondescript suburban intersection, like deer wandering into a clearing, while their competing jingles (“It’s a Small World,” multiplied by three) turn into a good-humored lunatic chorus.

None of these three videos is more than a few minutes in length, which fits the scale of the action while paradoxically cranking up the dramatic punch. Mundane events suddenly balloon into acutely observed sagas. Through the simple act of focused observation, the world becomes strange.

Macdonald also shows four drawings (one on painted board). An airplane sports a wing that hangs limp on the tarmac, floppy like a dog’s ear. A small building (a house?) disintegrates in an explosion. A stretch limousine twists into a spiral. A strip of glitter reaches from the head of a reeling boy to the top of the page, suggesting a bright idea or an anointment from above.

Macdonald makes estrangement from the ordinary into a potent method for heightened perception. This is a sweet and charming show.

* Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 549-0223, through Feb. 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

A High-Maintenance Production: Water plays a central role in new sculpture and installation work by Glenn Kaino, as it did in his first solo exhibition 18 months ago. A dozen oversized fishing lures of vacuum-formed plastic melded into Brancusi-style sculptures atop elegant wooden pedestals; a wall festooned with 22 desktop wave machines, their bright-blue liquids rolling back and forth in carefully choreographed unison; and six toy tugboats churning away in modified fish tanks--water features prominently in Kaino’s second show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery.

Still, it’s the battered, jazzy, old-fashioned signage in the lobby, with flashing lightbulbs that spell out “Bruce LeRoy’s Kung Fu Theater,” that sets the tone for this hit-and-miss show. Kaino’s elaborate work constructs a liquid theater of dreams. The narratives are not linear, but instead the stories circle around in fluid motions.

The rolling-wave machines in “Blue,” mounted on a free-standing wall that pointedly recalls a theatrical stage set, offer a vision of harmonious bliss that is gently upended by the exposure of controlling forces operating literally behind the scenes. The elegantModernist lures in “Fishing With Morice” (a code name used in correspondence between Brancusi and Duchamp) are meant to hook you, turning an innocent viewer into the catch of the day.

“Chasing Perfect” is the most elaborate of the show’s four works. Surrounded by matching photo-murals of a palm-studded neighborhood, the six motorized tugboats are tethered by wires to a huge pair of gilded dentures resting on a red velvet pillow in the center of the room. The straining pull of the chugging boats keeps the golden jaws open and tensed, in a decidedly peculiar image of laborious effort with submerged consequences.

The labor-intensive quality of Kaino’s high-maintenance work finally reads as integral to an art concerned with the spectacular deceptions of contemporary life. Sometimes, though, it can feel distractingly overproduced. Production values are most effective when they contribute to the seduction, in which gallery-goers willingly participate.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Feb. 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Time and Loss: At Newspace, the debut solo exhibition by sculptor Byoung-ok Koh is marked by a quietly disorienting sense of time. Koh harnesses basic sculptural properties of gravity and weight to conjure sensations of ephemera and loss.

Koh’s interests have the thoughtful flavor of Conceptual work by the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres, although the young artist employs more distinctly sculptural means. Some works, including coils and squiggles of inch-thick plastic tubing filled with colored liquid, and a field of free-standing wire rods that bend and lean like industrial bamboo, tend to be abstract.

“Cotton Clock” is emblematic of more elusively narrative concerns. A simple white wall clock is stripped of all but its sweeping second hand, which is weighted down by a cotton ball suspended from monofilament. As the hand rounds 6 and heads up toward 9, it begins to slow, held back by the dangling weight of the cotton cloud.

The second hand struggles, stutters, quivers for what seems minutes--then suddenly jerks forward and breaks the impasse. It inches toward 12, then picks up speed and, helped along by gravity, races downhill past 3 to 6, where the slow climb begins again. A clock’s steady, regular measurements of time warp and distend. The clock charts something like a life cycle, from boisterous youth through steady middle years to faltering old age.

“Dancing Fly” pits passing fashion against blunt mortality. A dead black fly is placed atop a white plate--which is atop a black sound speaker atop a white stool atop a black stereo. Sound vibrations from a song by Madonna cause the dead fly, classic symbol of transience and loss, to shimmy and shake. It’s a potent illusion of joyous life.

* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, (323) 469-9353, through Feb. 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.