Squeak Carnwath’s paintings are too big to be shoplifted. Otherwise, I would happily “own” one or two of the idiosyncratic, icon-addled, blackboard-sized canvasses from her first solo museum show at the Oakland Museum of California — at the tender age of 62. As one of the leading California artists no one’s ever heard of (unlike her cohorts Viola Frey and Jay DeFeo), Carnwath fuses the personal symbology of a genius Waldorf preschooler with the flawed humanity of the psychotherapy couch. The result is pure Californication.

I couldn’t not love her recurring guilt-free zones (Everything(2)), or her collection of good luck symbols (Good Luck ), bunnies (Long Happy Life ) and record albums (Side One ) — the latter representing about the side-oneness of life. There’s a shameless appropriation of periodic table grids (Four Months), confession (Promise) and assorted visual elements that once led people to associate her work with outsider art. Each painting reads like a short story asking universal questions. Then on the video at the end of the show, there’s Squeak with all the answers. And you walk out feeling like you just had a great talk with your therapist.

Painting Is No Ordinary Object runs through Aug 23.

Side One.

Reflection.

Gone.

The Story of Painting.

Trying Simply to Be Happy.

Think About It.

Promise.

Right Now.

Trying to Know Lost.

Carnwath talks about her work, in a video at the end of the show.

I had never wanted to hug intestines until I saw Marina Vendrell Renaut’s knitted sculptures at Johansson Projects, part of a group show called Flaming Furbelows. There were eviscerations, udders and other mammalian pudenda hanging like stalactites from the gallery ceiling. Undoubtedly, they’re meditations on the love/hate/grossness we feel towards our innards. And Renaut employs reduce-reuse-recycle tactics like a good citizen. But you just can’t get past how fun the pieces must have been to make. Imagine sweater heaven at the Salvation Army, combined with flea market furs and afghans. Grandma would turn in her grave if she saw the oversized tentacled sock monkey called Coochie Boo Hoo, and her phallus-enhanced tea cozies fitted over remote-control toy cars. But the cherry on top are the five bissected marmots, above. Pull the tassels and they croon lullabies like ghoulish mobiles.

Unfortunately, Renault’s humorous touchables make the paintings on the walls — by Kate Tedman and Eric Siemens, working collaboratively here as “Kate Eric” — look fussy and cold by comparison. The pair must love watching the Discovery Channel. Tiny alien hybrids of bugs and fish alternately war, screw and puke in heavily impastoed acrylic on paper. The technique is as precise as a Dungeons and Dragons drawing, so that you have to examine each monster up close. The animal violence provides a stark contrast to the jellyfish-like silks billowing through the compositions. But ultimately, between chopped up animals and light existential drama, the artists are well-paired, echoing each other in mutually controlled chaos.

Flaming Furbelows runs through May 2.

Click on images to supersize.

Reanimated, by Marina Vendrell Renault.

Coochie Boo Hoo, sock monkey gone seriously crazy.

The man-sized varicose vein called Clot.

The metastasizing pinata: Conglomerate.

Nature porn: Studies in Bug War 4 by Kate Eric.

Flurry and the Inners. Would make a good band name.

I had visions of China as I strolled through Mahjong, the exhibit of contemporary Chinese art currently on display at the Berkeley Art Museum. Maybe even visions of Chinatown, of commodities bought and sold. Personally I was relieved. I did my time with Chinese art chaperoned by my parents. The natural shanshui landscapes and watercolors were a yawner. The historical and spiritual implications were so vast, I just couldn’t get into it. But here at Mahjong was a consumer vocabulary I could understand. There were fun clothes and bright constructivist posters and plastic tchotchkes, all sensationally over-obvious in their message. I wanted to buy, buy, buy!

Then I began to get bored. And a little panicky.  That spiky-haired, black-shirted Chinese museum security guard who busted me taking pictures didn’t help matters. I suspected Triad ties. So I escaped to the Urban Outfitters next door for some retail therapy. As I chilled out on the Anywhere Sofa ($325), under a speaker blaring rap as if it were nationalist slogans, I realized that the wares that surrounded me were all made in China. I had left the Mahjong exhibit, only to find myself in its American mirror image. Heck, the museum and Urban Outfitters even sport the same warehouse chic. And all I could think was, ’Wow, these faux vintage tees and graphic bedspreads would look great with Chanel No. 5 by Wang Guanyi or Mao/Marilyn by Yu Yuhan printed on them.’

The show is up until Jan. 4th, 2009.

Click on images to supersize. More after the jump.

T-Shirt ready: Mao/Marilyn by Yu Yuhan (top left). 

Need a great graphic for a bedspread? Try Taxi! Taxi! by Feng Mengbo.

A rack of Wang Qiang’s standard issue Mao Coat with a naked woman painted inside would be a hot sell at any Hayes Valley boutique.

Imagine Christmas ornament-sized versions of Wang Jin’s polyvinyl imperial robe. 

Amid the potential merch, there were a few pieces that tapped into a mature core of Buddhist emptiness. In Liu Wei’s trompe l’oeil photo It Looks Like a Landscape, distant mountains turn out to be nude butts, flaws, hairs and zits intact. Also fascinating was Feng Mengbo’s Wrong Coding Shanshui (not shown), a computer generated traditional landscape that looks like something out of Bladerunner. 

Chen Zaiyan’s Three Famous Xingshu Documents felt the most modern and the most deeply Chinese. The calligraphy is burned away, with only the ghost of the characters left on the page. Without brushstrokes, the document is empty of memory, meaning and spiritual context, leaving only text.

A view of the installations inside the museum…

Compare and contrast to Urban Outfitters: The irony, the aggressive kitsch, the pop, the brightest of duotones. It was all unexpectedly familiar. The made-in-China-ness gave way to a more subtle “Chineseness” that couldn’t be bought, sold or copied. Wait, is that a word? Not yet, it isn’t. Send in your definitions and let’s make one up.

Additional Reading: Kenneth Baker of the S.F. Chronicle interviews Uli Sigg and Ai Weiwei about the show.

Barry McGee serves up his signature urban flavors, topped with a few new sprinkles in a surprise show at Ratio 3 in San Francisco. (Bring your own funky glasses to view the infinitely precise 3-D hand drawings in more than one dimension.) The rest is classic McGee…or “Lydia Fong,” as his current alias goes. Color exercises crawl aggressively up three walls like deboned Rubik’s cubes. Contrast that with the sad faces, a gaggle of meticulously rendered masks, hair monsters, and framed napkin doodles. In between the human and the abstract, other urban detritus bubbles up: surfboards, cardboard, a decomposing orange with fruit fly, a baby in bubblegum pink. Oh wait, the baby’s mine.

But what’s outside the Ratio 3 Gallery is just as cool as what’s inside. It’s a one-way alley in McGee’s own Mission Street neighborhood. Next door a woman rescues half-wolf dogs that shelters won’t take. Down a ways, murals and motorcycles take up the sidewalk. All around, there’s weed smoke and freeway noise, Chinese dollar stores and taquerias amid super-eco-chic shops. Welcome to Barry’s world.

The show runs through October 18th.

Click on images to supersize. Much more after the jump.

This would be the decomposing orange.

Outside the gallery, looking like an installation by Cai Guo-Qiang, a wolf dog observes the goings-on from a small ledge.