ART REVIEWS : Visions of Seduction, Repulsion

At Christopher Grimes Gallery, Lisa Yuskavage is showing paintings of doe-eyed females who are less pulchritudinous than pathetic. Here are Vargas girls minus the sex appeal, Barbies minus the soignee proportions, post-adolescent Kewpie dolls minus the pedophiliac charm.

Like Hostess Twinkies, these girl-creatures consecrate themselves to the task of seduction, yet are only able to master repulsion. They are obscenely sweet, absurdly bloated and leave a distinctly chemical aftertaste.

Yuskavage preps us for a series of soft-core mise en scenes , dressing her figures in costumes that suggest choreographed sexual encounters (the bellhop, the ballerina, the suburban housewife), or dressing them in next to nothing (a polka-dotted diaper or a strategically placed cup of tea). With no narrative context, just color-coordinated backdrops of leaf green, lemon-yellow or tangerine, only the imagination limits the fantasy.

Yet, with their massive thighs and narrow shoulders, knocked knees and pointy breasts, the would-be pinups wholly elude the reach of the pornographic. Yuskavage exaggerates their proportions such that they become less failures than mutants.

This sense is redoubled as you study the images: a squatting blonde has only one foot; another has breasts at cross purposes with one another, one shown in profile, the other head-on, so eager to please they wind up shattering the illusion.

To a large extent, all this comes out of formal concerns. First impressions aside, Yuskavage is very much a Minimalist, struggling to portray the figure in the most efficient manner, even if that means tossing out body parts and limiting her palette so that each element is knit into an overall ensemble.

Yet the subject matter is deliberate, and as far as feminism goes, difficult. These paintings depict the flip-side of painter Nicole Eisenman’s Amazon warriors, who whoop it up with their booty of lopped-off penises. There is nothing empowering about these vulnerable if overstuffed waifs.

Yuskavage is not interested in role models or role reversals. She works in a much more complex way, cajoling us into acknowledging our dread power as viewers, and into experiencing the shame we provoke in those things and people upon whom we habitually and relentlessly gaze.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Sleight of Hand: It is difficult to imagine the work of either Brian Moss or Warren Neidich, juxtaposed in a witty two-person exhibition at the Annex at Jan Kesner Gallery, without the example of Sherrie Levine.

Levine’s project, which involved rephotographing images by well-known male photographers only to present them as her own, has come to figure the highly theoretical practice that dominated in the 1980s. Into Levine’s critique of the intertwined pieties of originality and authorship, Moss and Neidich insinuate a bit of computer-generated sleight of hand.

The result is work that is technically and conceptually slick, though rather more flippant than its forerunner. If Levine hints at what critic Harold Bloom has called the exhaustion of being a “latecomer”--one who arrives on the scene once everything seems to have been said and done--Neidich makes this exhaustion explicit.

A group of archival photographs of Surrealists, Italian Futurists, Andy Warhol and the Factory retinue are presented salon-style. One dark-haired mustachioed fellow pops up in every picture, transcending time, space and, presumably, artistic style. This figure is the very slippery, very determined Neidich.

Assisted by a simple computer program, he gleefully deletes Richard Pousette-Dart from Nina Leen’s 1951 photograph of “The Irascibles” and substitutes himself. He erases an unidentified member of the Bauhaus so he can hang out with Walter Gropius and Paul Klee. With tongue-in-cheek precision (and a serious debt to Woody Allen’s Zelig), Neidich enacts the romance of trespass. He enters the sacred realm of creativity, while paying only cut-rate dues.

Moss moves in the opposite direction, taking familiar images from the history of photography and removing certain elements entirely. This is not so much to rob the images of their meanings, but to reveal meanings that have long been obscured. What makes this endeavor resonant is that Moss begins with images whose veracity is already questionable.

The protagonist is eliminated from a 1936 Robert Capa photograph, “Death of Loyalist Soldier,” leaving behind nothing but a barren landscape. According to the story, Capa asked the soldier if he could take his picture, only to record the latter being shot by a sniper while posing.

An abandoned gun is the centerpiece of an altered version of Alexander Gardner’s 1863 “Sharpshooter’s Last Sleep, Gettysburg.” Moss has removed the figure, thereby mimicking Gardner, who is said to have moved the dead body to a more picturesque spot expressly for the purpose of the photograph.

Like Neidich, Moss plays a re-styled game of hide-and-seek. In both bodies of work, this game becomes the mechanism by which to suggest that the dialectic of presence and absence is the only “truth” a photograph ever promulgates.

* The Annex at Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea, (213) 938-6834, through July 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Trashing Books: A young woman sits at a makeshift table in a makeshift room that has been slipped inside the gallery space as neatly as the lining of a glove.

Oblivious to those who watch her--and then, when bored, abandon her--she concentrates upon the task at hand: cutting strips of text from a book and winding those strips into small, medium and large balls. Language is dispatched like so much trash. More precisely, it is transformed through labor into something visual--something, it is implied, of value.

Ann Hamilton’s new installation, “lineament,” now on view at Ruth Bloom Gallery, recapitulates the logic of her installation “tropos,” seen this past winter at New York’s Dia Center for the Arts. In the earlier work, Hamilton’s inevitable woman-at-a-table busied herself with singeing line after line of printed matter. The meticulous nature of her work was announced, for those who weren’t already listening, by the rug that covered the floor, an elaborate concoction of woven horsehair.

With a gargantuan nod to Joseph Beuys, Hamilton continues to make a fetish of absorption over reflection, ritual over critique and, above all, action over words. While there is certainly something seductive about concentrated silence, especially in the sunset years of post-Conceptualist verbosity, there is a retrogressive quality to Hamilton’s particular take on it.

She rejects cognition, here represented by the endless words that fill endless books, in order to privilege mind-numbing repetition. Though this repetition serves the ostensibly greater cause of sensual fulfillment, what’s troubling is its explicit association with the feminine.

“Your highest female grace is silence,” Ben Jonson once wrote. Indeed, if we could watch Hamilton singe or snip this very line, “lineament” might have been more a more important, and certainly more political, work.

* Ruth Bloom Gallery, 2036 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through July 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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A Piercing Look: Catherine Opie’s luminous photographs at Regen Projects depict lesbians in the process of turning themselves into men, drag queens strutting their stuff, men whose bodies are swathed in exquisite tattoos up to their thigh-high, lace-up boots, and more pierced ears, nipples, eyebrows, lips and tongues than have filled a Westside gallery in recent memory.

Opie makes not only visible, but mesmerizing, those whose invisibility has long upheld the mythology of what is supposedly natural. In her portraits, gender barely registers. It is portrayed as a well-calibrated performance, a matter of costuming, a question of attitude and something always up for grabs.

What is most interesting is not the political thrust of the work, nor even its insistent aesthetics. It is the way in which the images, seen en masse, reveal that the passage from subcultural resistance to the subcultural generic is occurring, with lightning-quick speed.

Take a few variables--white undershirt, blue jeans, silver hoop earrings, tribal tattoos--and you can come up with infinite permutations, each a minute variation on that which preceded it. Ironically, Opie’s would-be rogues’ gallery looks much like artist Mitchell Syrop’s constellation of nearly identical high school yearbook photos: a vision of the institutionalization of style.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont, (310) 276-5424, through July 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.