NJ Arts Monmouth Museum Show

A half-century ago, the portable clamshell record player was a thing of magic. It was a rare means by which an enterprising child could move music from one place to another. The design of turntables played on this wizardry: They were brightly colored, glitter-spangled, made of plastic and adorned with superhuman characters. The images on the record player were meant to enhance the fantastic experience of listening to pop, and the mind-blowing conjuring of a world of sound from the simple act of slipping a needle into a vinyl groove.

These days, we don’t tend to listen to music like that. Most cheap turntables are stuck in landfills somewhere. But a select few have met a guardian angel.

New Jersey painter and sculptor Paul Leibow was young when the clamshell record player was young, and as “33 1/3 (Long Playing)” — his too-brief solo exhibition that closes at The Monmouth Museum in Lincroft on Sept. 8 — demonstrates, his recollections of those days are as sharp as the ink lines on a Marvel Comics page.

In this Saturday morning cartoon of a show, Leibow sprinkles space dust on vintage record players, paints them, modifies them, and transforms them into receivers of pop culture fantasies. You can’t play a record on them, but they sing of the ’70s and ’80s anyway.

Sometimes, if you’ll pardon the pun, that means amplifying the imagery that is already on the clamshell. A Winnie the Pooh disco dance party is enlivened by a mirror ball that is cut in half, placed where the record should be, and set spinning. A stark black box with speaker holes like big pixels becomes the backdrop for a yellow record with a wedge cut out of it; this vinyl Pac-Man tips its chin upward to gobble the Pac-Man dots thoughtfully arrayed on the phonograph arm. (As Leibow is not the sort to discriminate on the basis of gender, Ms. Pac-Man makes an appearance in this show, too.)

A pendulum-waving Kreskin presides over a circle painted with a starburst of hypnotic stripes. The red-nosed patient from the “Operation” board game howls from a circle affixed to a crimson General Electric turntable.

Leibow seizes on the similarity between clamshell record players and lunchboxes, centering Goofy, Alfred E. Neuman, Spidey, Popeye, and other members of the middle school lunchroom pantheon in his works. In one piece, Mighty Mouse soars from the bottom of one clamshell record player, while a white-eyed and grinning Mickey hovers upside-down on the top.

All of this is done with deep affection for classic characters, old vinyl and childhood. Leibow may handle his characters roughly (this is not a dainty show), but he does love his comic book heroes, and “33 1/3” is good-natured throughout. Even a corner filled with mildly sacrilegious turntables — including one that juxtaposes John the Baptist with battling robots — is more likely to get a wry laugh from the curate than a condemnation.

If you were ever the type of kid who loved to pit action figures against toy trucks and figurines of dubious origin on your bedroom rug, it is virtually certain that something in this show will elicit a smile of recognition. But “33 1/3” isn’t merely an exercise in nostalgia. There are powerful indications here that the thread connecting Leibow to his past is more frayed than he’d like it to be. A record is, among other things, a physical manifestation of memory: in tiny undulations of vinyl, it preserves something that happened. When a record is smashed, that memory is irretrievable — and this show is full of shattered platters.

Jagged, knifelike pieces of black vinyl rest mutely on many of Leibow’s turntables. For “Untitled (Blue 45. Biscuits),” he slashes grooves in the sides of a score of singles and fits them together in a latticework of plastic. In a series of unsettling sculptures, a bull head appears to be charging through the center of an album.

In “Untitled (Broken Record),” my favorite piece in a consistently appealing show, it is the machine itself that is falling apart. Concentric arcs of rubber and vinyl spill toward the edge of the turntable. To show off the fissures between the pieces, Leibow has painted the vintage record player bright white.

Those who have followed Leibow’s work know that while his embrace of pop cultural detritus is absolutely sincere, he is ambivalent about the meaning of the things he is obsessing over. He has often teased out the provocative implications of cartoon designs and called into question what we think we know about famous characters.

At a mindbender of a show in Jersey City, Leibow turned Felix the Cat into an apparition that resembled a pair of hovering butt cheeks. His “Feel Licks” character turns up in “33 1/3,” peeking out from the bottom of an old Motown record and sharing a clamshell RCA Victor with a silkscreened image of William Burroughs. But mostly Feel Licks behaves himself. Leibow is interested in a different kind of mischief: a collision between his record collection and his toy cars.

He has mounted 45s and long players on the flatbed of Tonka trucks and let the crane arm of his rusted models act as a needle. These clever pieces manage to monumentalize the record albums and make them appear as big as a construction site. This is pop presented at a scale that all true music fans understand: huge, enveloping, spectrum-saturating, putting the spin in the turntable and the motor in the motor vehicle, driving the world in a dizzy circle.

Because Leibow loves to push things as far as he can, he extends this logic to a life-sized model of chopper with a great vinyl disk where the propeller should be. He has parked it right in the middle of the gallery.

No, you can’t sit in the seat. That is the one concession to museum propriety this arrested adolescent has made. You will just have to use your imagination and dream of the kind of music this flying machine might make.

Surrounded by a reverie this complete, coherent and evocative, that shouldn’t be difficult.