S.M.S. Project
Elliott Brown Gallery
215 Westlake Ave N,
340-8000.
Through April 14.

I have a little collection of artists' castoffs, which I love rather inordinately. One of them is a piece by Jesse Paul Miller: a collage that uses a smashed DingDong and an illustration of genetic code on top of one of those '70s swirly paintings. It's anarchic, it's silly, and it's even a bit snide when you think about how precious art has become, how sleek its venues.

This or something close to it, I postulate, must have been the genesis of William Copley's S.M.S. Project. S.M.S. stands for "shit must stop," and for Copley, who was that unlikely oxymoron of artist and rich man, the shit was the unbearable cliquey-ness of the art world, a tight cabal of dealers, critics, and galleries. Not surprisingly, he was good friends with Marcel Duchamp, whose work unequivocally tweaked the upright, uptight arterati at the same time it dared them to love it (and buy it, naturally).

There's a healthy dose of the Duchampian gesture at the core of S.M.S., which was a series of artists' portfolios that Copley initiated and funded in 1968. The idea was for artists to create a work with no limitations set on it, except for the dimensions of the portfolio, and then to publish multiples of the work in whatever manner the artist desired, however intricate, however complicated, however unlikely. (This is where the rich-man part comes in; it must have cost a relative fortune to produce.) Over the publication's lifetime, which spanned a year and six issues, S.M.S. attracted artists at various stages in their careers--some established, some still quite young, among them Walter de Maria, Yoko Ono, John Cage, Joseph Kosuth, Meret Oppenheim, Congo the Chimpanzee, and Duchamp himself. The series was sold by subscription, at an astonishing (by today's standards) $125 for six issues; the Elliott Brown Gallery is currently selling a complete signed set for $11,000.

But Copley had already long proved himself to be a visionary. In the '40s he had started a surrealist gallery in Beverly Hills; this was eons before Los Angeles became any kind of art town, before there really were any galleries there at all. "The museum people attacked us," Copley told Paul Cummings in a 1968 interview. "And so did most of the public... they felt the show was shocking and in poor taste. The painters there had just discovered abstract art." He was later, like his hero Duchamp, lauded for his insight.

Much of the work on display at Elliott Brown is fabulous, incredible--but was once considered shocking and hostility-provoking. It's also very funny. Some of them nod to the surrealist obsession with chance and the subconscious, such as John Giorno's Chinese Fortune Game, which invites the player to construct a fortune from a Chinese menu. Ono's contribution is a practical and transcendent Fluxus work called Mend Piece for John; the instructions read "Take your favorite cup. Break it into many pieces with a hammer. Repair it with glue and this poem in three stanzas dedicated to John." A large world of art is represented by these small works: conceptual art, sound art, poetry, pop art, and Dada, much of it perfect nonsense making perfect sense.

These artists rarely forget that shit must stop--or the tweaking must not--and there are frequent references to art's perceived value, to accidents and actual processes. Bruce Conner created dollar bills covered with his own pattern drawings; Richard Artschwager insisted that his work be printed to include the stains from some spilled coffee; Neil Jenney's Bucks American was submitted all smudged and crumpled, a state of affairs the publishers re-created with a "dirtying machine." In one of my favorite works, Paul Steiner transcribed the conversations overheard in the bathrooms of galleries and museums.

Of course, this kind of work has become common currency in much contemporary art: the status symbol that is an intellectual joke we're much too sophisticated not to get. Which is fine by me, but I'm waiting for the next Copley to come along and show me we hate that which we're going to love. It would have to be someone with vision, someone with money, someone with the patience to glue thousands of DingDongs onto thousands of swirly paintings.