ART REVIEWS : Poetry and Mystery From Uelsmann’s Darkroom

Enamored of strange hybrids, impossible scenarios, mystical reveries and romantic fantasies, Jerry Uelsmann is little inclined to tell the truth--at least, not the sort of truth in which photographs generally traffic. Photographs are supposed to reveal what’s there. Uelsmann’s composite photographs insist that nothing is there except what the mind puts there. No truth counterposes itself to a lie, no real excludes the surreal, no inside sets itself apart from outside, no nature distinguishes itself from culture.

In Uelsmann’s wondrous universe, abandoned houses sprout from thickly knotted roots, Neoclassical libraries sit in leaf-strewn grottoes, rocks bear women’s faces, and disembodied hands struggle to tear through cloud-filled skies. Seamless and pristine, Uelsmann’s photographs at the Fahey-Klein Gallery appear to stand aloof from the complex techniques from which they result. No wonder, since those techniques of multiple negatives and extensive darkroom manipulations have long been controversial within photographic history, going back to the much-derided, 19th-Century combination prints of Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Rejlander.

Along with such peers as Robert Heinecken, Ray Metzger and John Wood, Uelsmann has been producing photomontages since the mid-1960s, subverting the “self-evident” rules of so-called straight photography. In one image from 1969, Uelsmann usurps the imagery (mountain range, clouds, trees) and the techniques (gelatin silver print, crystalline clarity) of Ansel Adams, the master of straight photography. In Uelsmann’s “nature” photograph, things are decidedly different: The clouds float beneath the mountain range and the tree drifts across the center of the image, dangling roots and all.

What is remarkable is the extent to which the eye adjusts to the fantastic sight and recasts it as natural and eternal. Uelsmann reminds us that eternity--for Ansel Adams, as well as for himself--is merely a look.

In these images, eternity is conjured with rocks, trees, sunlight and water, as well as with the body of a naked woman. Timeless and changeless, she hovers in the sky and floats on the waves, glides across the water and strides down an empty hallway. She is an apparition, a memory, a fantasy--but one need scarcely ask whose memory and whose fantasy she represents.

If anything jars here, it is Uelsmann’s use of the female body as all-purpose device. It isn’t that the nudity is exploitative or even particularly gratuitous. Rather, it feels tired, ultimately weighing down images that badly want to transcend their material confines. In some cases, Uelsmann’s photographs come very close to doing just that. There is poetry here, and there is mystery and intelligence; about photography, about art, it is difficult to say much more.

* Fahey-Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250, through Sept . 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Bodily Responses: With a well-calibrated prick of his well-developed wit, Carl Ostendarp deflates painting’s bloated histrionics and absurd theatrics. The trick is to fight fire with fire--or, more accurately, to fight fire with something that looks a lot like fire, but is actually a clever simulation. Then, nobody knows what you’re up to until it’s too late.

His show at Daniel Weinberg Gallery opens with a painting that resembles a cartoon. The small canvas is covered with a grid of black dots, down which a trickle of black paint travels, splashing back up with exaggerated abandon once it hits bottom. Like Roy Lichtenstein, who parodied the swashbuckling heroics of Abstract Expressionism with unimpassioned, Ben Day dots, Ostendarp offers a self-conscious representation of a splat of paint that is ludicrously flat, grotesquely stylized, unavoidably vacant. Authenticity gives way to expediency, the spontaneous is translated into the mechanical and high drama segues into low comedy.

No sentimentalist, the artist evinces marked glee. With Ostendarp, however, comic relief is never just metaphorical. The rest of the show consists of paintings featuring large, circular forms in high relief. Made of urethane foam, each is painted a single noxious color and is set against a ground of contrasting color, sometimes with framing colors around the edges.

In other paintings, the urethane foam oozes down from over the top, rather than sitting there in the middle of the canvas with nothing to do. It’s like lava, only less romantic; like melting ice cream, only far less sweet.

These paintings are absurdly physical. But, their physicality is designed neither to repel the seductions of illusionism nor to affirm painting’s “objecthood.” These are the brave and lonely travails of a Modernist like Frank Stella, and just the kind of visionary quests that Ostendarp wryly mocks.

Yet, there is more at stake here than Postmodern critique. Ostendarp isn’t interested in a wholesale dismissal of the power of painting. Instead, he relocates that power in the way painting works on the viewer’s body, rather than on the disembodied eye or mind. More than lava or ice cream, the dripping, flowing blobs of paint function as metaphors for bodily responses to aesthetic perceptions: anticipatory sweat, oozing dread, nervous laughter, even physical collapse.

In breaking through to the third dimension, Ostendarp doesn’t invite us to experience art-as-object, but our own bodies in the house of art. If we find ourselves doing or feeling things that are less than dignified--well, perhaps it’s time to shake off our “higher” instincts and allow ourselves, at last, to have some serious fun.

* Daniel Weinberg, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0180, through Aug. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Everything Old Is New Again: “Old Work” is the title of Kent Young’s mixed-media exhibition at the Richard Green Gallery. If anything, however, this work feels new: eager, playful, still very tentative, still very much work-in-progress.

The old in the title makes tongue-in-cheek reference to the oldest trick in the Postmodern book: image scavenging. And why not? It’s a fabulous trick, designed to comment on the languishing of “originality,” the evacuation of “meaning” and the collapse of various other modernist myths.

The images Young scavenges are 19th-Century architectural prints, which he reproduces on squares of white vinyl in flock--that sheared, napped stuff that forms velvety patterns on cloth or paper. A double dose of ersatz, the work seems to have something to do with taste. Vinyl masquerades as leather, pulverized fabric as velvet; images of cities, docks, bridges and town squares connote refinement without risk, elegance without imagination. Young’s own taste runs to the spare, and these works are appealing on that level. But, conceptually, things are rather more muddled. Where Young stands in relation to the tyranny of “good taste” is unclear.

Other appropriated images are re-presented in silkscreen and flock on the undersides of large, wooden tables. Two, emblazoned with images of athletes, are pinned to the gallery wall, their legs sticking straight out. Another table stands in the middle of the room, so that you have to crawl under it to view the image: a “table” of contents, taken from an old philosophy text. Here, Young surrenders to the lure of a cheap pun, while his larger interest in how we seek out and process visual information remains underexplored.

There are lots of interesting ideas, both on and under the surface. But, interesting ideas come with no guarantees. If he wants to offer more than mild provocation Young must figure out how to cut and how to focus.

* Richard Green Gallery, 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 828-6666, through Aug. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Boxed In: The premise of “Touch My Box,” a group exhibition at Robert Berman Gallery, is that a number of what curator Susan Wiggins calls “intermedia” artists--those who fall messily between established genres--are making work that revolves around the box as object and/or metaphor.

While the term “intermedia” is troublesome (isn’t Postmodernism all about the intermingling of genres and media?), as is the notion of the box as a unifying trope (only two of the artists, Andrew Watanabe and Larissa Wilson, engage it in any kind of non-coincidental way), “Touch My Box” works. The reason is that the quality of the art, whatever it’s about, is uniformly high.

Both Watanabe and Wilson approach the box as a psychological space, a container for frustrations, fears and presumptions. Watana-be’s “Ellipsis Painting Cabinets” each house up to 10 paintings, which can be removed or rearranged, while the cabinets themselves can be rolled over to any position. They wreak havoc on our desire to process information, by refusing to lock it away in neat compartments or hierarchies. Wilson’s elaborate wooden and canvas “boxes,” tailored to the proportions of her own body, are designed to ward off death; wonderfully paranoiac, they wind up soliciting it instead.

For Graydon Moffat and Jeff Kaisershot, the box is but a formal device that bears only superficially on complex work. In “Beast in My Belly,” Moffat positions a tiny video screen displaying pornographic imagery within a larger pin-up photo of herself, riddled with holes. What is generally lamented as the exploitation of passive women is contrasted with her own power as an artist to exploit our curiosity--and then to frustrate our voyeurism. In “Photon Cube” and “Hand of Man,” Kaisershot uses wooden boxes as multiple surfaces to be embellished with his “sunlight” images, which are burned into the wood with a remarkably well-controlled magnifying glass.

Had this show been billed as something else--perhaps a salon-style exhibition of emerging artists--each would have been better served. As it is, their fine work is dogged by expectations that, through no fault of their own, they cannot possibly be expected to meet.

* Robert Berman Gallery, 2044 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-9195, through Aug. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.