Quirky Angler

California these days harbors a whole generation of stoned, amiable ironists, who work at an angle to the High Seriousness of New York. They needle their audience with the suggestion that art, like experience, is inconsistent stuff, vulnerable and quirky, full of tackiness and paradox. Best known among them is a lanky, mercurial artist named William T. Wiley, 34, who lives and works outside San Francisco in a frame house with (shades of Brautigan!) a trout stream flowing beside it. His traveling show, organized by the University Art Museum in Berkeley, opens this week at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Wiley's paintings, watercolors and constructions have a cobbled-together air; negligence becomes a creative principle, and the joke is always on culture. Of a period spent in New York, he remarks: "I saw a lot of important work being done and thought, 'That's good; I don't have to do important things. It's like all that has been taken care of.' "

The notion that you are what you eat becomes expanded, in Wiley's work, to the idea that you are what you happen to have around, and Wiley has produced a whole iconography from the litter in his backyard. Thank You Hide,

1970, is a fair example of Wiley's bricolage, with its rusty pickax snagged, like an unwanted anchor, on a knotted line from an improvised fishing pole, its ragged sheet of ox hide, its confusingly labeled ("Fresh Bait," "Nietzsche") objects perched on a raw wood shelf. They can only be decoded in terms of Wiley's own convoluted memories, but their point has more to do with a remark of Marcel Duchamp, whom Wiley vastly admires: "There is no solution because there is no problem." This openness and tolerance toward objects and meanings is the essential subject of Wiley's work. It is all about not being hassled.

But attitudes are one thing, results another. Generally, the constructions are the flimsiest area of Wiley's art. His watercolors and oils are a different matter. The White Rhino Injured, 1966, is a marvel of surrealist compression: the unfortunate pachyderm's skin is reduced to several turns of gray, wrinkled hosepipe surrounding a block of white meat from which pink blood flows; it is a funky but hauntingly succinct image of vulnerability. "I'm a maze of information about reflections mirrored in opposites," begins the caption to his punningly titled Wizdumb Bridge, 1969, and the declaration fits the imagery, which manages to be both specific and curiously vague. The cracked concrete is Wiley's studio floor, the tipped-over paint tin that spreads its river beneath the "bridge" is an everyday accident. But the sum effect is a crazy quilt of potentially familiar objects, a mosaic of recollection that is suggested but eludes the viewer. In this way, Wiley manages to endow something as banal as a wooden stump with a tantalizing load of implied memory. The strategy is as old as surrealism. So are the verbal games, with their free association and childish puns. But in Wiley's hands it all acquires a special density.

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