Memories of Prina’s Past Benefit Present Installation

In Stephen Prina’s work, the love affair that drives artistic practice comes off as distinctly one-sided. A new installation at Margo Leavin Gallery that riffs on the artist’s old installations acknowledges the extent to which narcissism can be productive.

A makeshift architectural structure at first seems to bar entry to the main gallery space. It forces a viewer up close to the lushly colored photographs that circle the walls--so close, in fact, that it is difficult to make out the sentence spelled across their surfaces.

This sentence, like the photographic images and the architectural barrier, refers to several things: a phrase derived from an earlier Prina exhibition; a scene from a film by Robert Bresson; the subtitles that flashed across the screen during that scene; a signing of a limited-edition book by Prina at a hotel room in Cologne; the film Prina showed during that signing; the floor plan of his gallery in New York and more.

That this battalion of customized memory-triggers is packaged so elegantly and so modishly is by no means incidental. It confirms the artist’s sense that only form endures. Content--destined to be done in by interpretive sadism or time itself--is necessarily a losing cause.

This idea was already present in Prina’s important 1988 project, “Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet,” three elements of which also are on view. Prina is repainting Edouard Manet’s entire oeuvre as a series of bland, beige washes, distilling the French artist’s original works into a sign.

Likewise, the new work continues to fetishize the evacuated presences that constitute the stuff of art’s history. And yet, about this process of inflation, depletion and representation Prina evinces no regrets, even though this time it’s personal. He knows, after all, that absence just makes the heart grow fonder.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Feb. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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‘Excerpted Portrait’: As Hollywood figured out a long time ago, Mary, Queen of Scots, is a perfect romantic heroine, her tragedy encompassing miscarriages, betrayals and a 25-year imprisonment. Of course, the coup de grace is that after she was beheaded in 1587, Mary’s organs were removed from her body and secretly buried in Fotheringhay Castle, near London.

“Mary Stuart’s Ravishment Descending Time,” a new installation at Side Street Projects, is, according to artist Barbara McCarren, “an excerpted portrait” of this eviscerated woman. That the portrait sidesteps cinema’s predilection for the spectacular is laudable. Yet as art it fails, paradigmatic of the inefficacy of a certain kind of historicist feminism.

The installation is seen in dim light. One wall, painted a pale purple, is studded with embroidery hoops, three of which bear anagrams of Mary’s name. Another wall, painted a deep blue, features Mary’s lineage in the form of the constellation Gemini, a reference to her dead twin fetuses. A third is decorated with wax effigies of Mary’s various wounds, symptoms and maladies.

Aside from the uterus-shaped lamp hanging from the ceiling, “Mary Stuart’s Ravishment Descending Time” is restrained, even sober. It is concerned with presenting a series of facts. And yet these facts feel irrelevant, and the choice of Mary as subject totally random.

Uncovering history’s forgotten or misunderstood women was both an emotional necessity and a political strategy for first-generation feminists. Twenty-five years later, it has become an academic exercise, its urgency diminished and its expediency dubious.

McCarren might have done many things, among them interrogating the psychic, linguistic, genetic or social structures that bore upon Mary’s fate. Instead, she rewrites femininity as it has always been written: as the site of beauty, disease and captivity.

* Side Street Projects, 1629 18th St., Santa Monica, (310) 829-0779, through March 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Their Own World: As the millennium approaches, the culture’s susceptibilities are moving in two directions: toward the radical outside, where UFOs and other paraphenomena reside, and toward the pathological interior, where obsession reigns.

The latter marks the occasion of a stunning group exhibition at Kohn/Turner Gallery. Anti-intuitively called “The Rational World,” this show features art by Bruce Conner, Yayoi Kusama and others, which by no stretch of the imagination appears reasonable, normal or discreet.

With the notable exceptions of Joyce Lightbody’s tiny oil, ink and stamp collages and Kusama’s mosaic-like paintings, “The Rational World” is composed of small black-and-white drawings. This is what accounts for the initial impression of modesty.

It’s hard, however, to make the case that Jacob El Hanani’s ink drawings of thousands of tiny circles, pressed so close together that they map out texture rather than form, are self-effacing. The same holds true for Conner’s tightly clotted surfaces, where the bits of paper that have escaped the artist’s relentlessly circling pen read as stars in the night sky and sighs of relief.

Patrick Nickell’s feathery doodles are both refined and anarchic, their pleasure a function of their contrariness. Marc Sheinkman’s biomorphic imagery is softer, but no less tormented. Like the ghostly photograms they mimic, his works seek after non-referentiality, but can’t seem to give up the real.

The poignancy of the work is that the artist knows he knows better. That reality can’t be located outside the parameters of imagination is the theory behind “The Rational World’s” unabashedly irrational spectacle.

* Kohn/Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose, (310) 271-4453, through Feb. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Zen Strokes: At PaceWildenstein Gallery, a much-anticipated show of Agnes Martin’s recent work is disappointing, despite the fact that it intimates the peace of mind that is the logical fulfillment of Martin’s lifelong quest for order.

For close to 40 years, she has been making paintings so elegant and spare that description seems inadequate to them--too clumsy, imprecise, even wanton. Martin’s format is familiar: canvases that are 6 feet square and painted in acrylic, covered in horizontal lines and drawn in graphite. The backgrounds are generally monochromatic, although sometimes the tremulous lines (produced with the help of a string or ruler) demarcate zones of color, diluted until they seem more like memories than facts, as translucent as watercolor.

The thrill of this work has always been its marriage of sensuousness and rigor, stability and the vertigo engendered by perfection. But here Martin privileges a bland prettiness: The paintings consist of bands of pale blue and soft pink, which are less vulnerable than ineffectual.

If the colors are prosaic and the facture lacks the textural variety we expect from Martin, the consistency of the work is mollifying. Its gentle repetitions are affirmative, and move us toward the emptying out that is the end-point of all such Zen-inspired endeavors.

* PaceWildenstein, 9650 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 205-5522, through Feb. 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.