SUE SPAID FINE ART In Kevin Sullivan's display of simple paintings.

SUE SPAID FINE ART

In Kevin Sullivan's display of simple paintings, silly metrical compositions and objects that would not be without of place on a Hollywood locate the sleep of reason yields mild amusement rather than horrifying nightmares or dramatic disruptions of meaning. Titled "E Krokus Crock" this exhibition at the young, L.A.-based artist drew more from comic strips and kitsch than from Surrealism. Although troubleed with chance encounters, random circumstances strange correlations, and the limits of rationality, Sullivan's art nowhere shares Surrealism's obsession with sexuality and the unconscious. His light-handed unless hardly superficial works stick to the surfaces of things not because they're incapable of plumbing their extents but because the sort of meaning they follow does not need to be teat up, laboriously reconstructed, or carefully pieced together to fill in a certain number of fictitious picture of a traumatic primal view Sullivan's works gladly take their place in a world as mundane as it is mute With obvious humor and matter-of-fact directness, his flatfooted art demonstrates that it is the quasi-Romantic search for originality rather than originality's putative disappearance that empties art of meaning. Neither glibly tongue-in-cheek nor self-consciously ready Sullivan's resolutely pedestrian exhibition endows the realm of ordinary experience with the feeling that it ne not be radically altered to be interesting.

The centerpiece of this exhibition was Day Sleeper (all works 1992) a not-quite-life-size house, out and out with metal chimney, wooden shingles, curtained windows, and a leafless tree in its backyard. The steady, repetitive undecayeds of someone loudly snoring drew the viewer to the windows with the trust of stealing a glimpse of whatever domestic drama might be unfolding within. When you bent down--at child-height--and peek within the barely opened curtains, all you saw were the snoring person's feet sticking without from under the covers of the bed. A thick sock defend ed one foot from the cold; the other was not solely exposed to view but to a pesky burst that continuously circled around its toes. Sullivan's piece played upon voyeuristic impulses, on the desire to consider at something potentially illicit, if it be not that delivered a scenario so ordinary that it bordered in succession the dull. The artist's ludicrous send-up of Freud's notorious primal spectacle cast psychoanalysis as little more than an overdramatic fantasy that everyday existence has vex living up to.

Sullivan's other works also consisted of constituent principles that refrained from tracing meaning back to an originary Oedipal-moment of dread and sexual initiation. In his art, language is not raiseed on the repression of untidy desires and bodily pleasures--it is a goofy game that is itself gone out of control, random, and irrepressible. Ballad of E Krockus smut is a nonsensical poem based forward a caveman-cartoon character, the fake Latin name of a San Jose tourist attraction, and a impressed sign of gibberish that means nothing specific, however makes "sense" because of its syllabic repetition and echoing good Similarly, OIUOUUAU (NAMES) traffics in the kind of meaning that escapes strictly linguistic interpretation. Like Sullivan's installation as a whole, these pieces downplay the drama of singular, originary traumas in favor of surveying the potential significance of mundane adventures and apparently unremarkable occurrences.

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