‘Kingdom of Flora’ Blooms Again

As the part of the seed plant that bears the reproductive organs, flowers are sexy by design. For anyone un-hip to the reason for lush petals and showy stamens, Robert Mapplethorpe provided the last word.

At Shoshana Wayne Gallery, “The Kingdom of Flora” offers an extended postscript. This large group show of paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings and video installations is based on the premise that in the last decade, with the supposed death of Modernism and the rebirth of metaphor, flowers have reflowered as subject matter for art.

Moving backward (rather erratically) from there, “Kingdom of Flora” juxtaposes recent work, such as Anya Gallacio’s dying daisy chains, Polly Apfelbaum’s steel posies and Kiki Smith’s fragile blooms, with a 1938 Man Ray watercolor of a bird of paradise, a 1925 Imogen Cunningham photo of a magnolia and two images of tulips by Anthony Claez dating from the 1600s. This reverse teleology suggests that the flower has devolved from a symbol of fertility, a caution against vanity and a site of technical bravura into a token for the allure of a fatally acculturated nature.

So it’s no surprise to find fanciful colors performing black humor here, as in Tony Oursler’s videotape of an epithet-hurling individual projected onto a bouquet of silk flowers. Oursler is at pains to expose the cruelty of laughter and beauty’s mute complicity in the spectacle.

If this exercise seems didactic, the best works in the show are more ambiguous, like Lee Bontecou’s magnificent, dark-toned drawing of a flower whose stamen looks like a map of the cosmos; or Matt Collishaw’s trio of lilies--zebra-skin, tiger-skin and leopard-skin--a neat, anti-Darwinian expose.

There are other small surprises here, including a lovely photograph taken by Jiang Qing, a.k.a. Madame Mao Zedong, and Thomas Struth’s image of a purple cornflower, which remarks upon the mysticism of the real. These and other works more than compensate for “Kingdom of Flora’s” somewhat weak conception, in the way that beautiful things are wont to do.

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* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through March 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Real and Surreal: Susan Hauptman’s charcoal drawings at Tatistcheff/Rogers Gallery, most of them self-portraits, are extraordinarily unnerving. Executed with near-photographic precision, except for the real-life impossibility of this kind of cinematically lit grisaille, these images are so perfectly composed they threaten to implode with every glance.

Hauptman pictures herself as an icon: facing forward, with a stoic expression, her hands arranged in a series of well-rehearsed gestures. It is her costumes that startle, both by their eccentricity and by their aggressive impropriety, at least for a woman of middle age. These include a ballerina’s tutu, a gossamer cape and nothing but a pair of bunny ears.

In one image, Hauptman sports a demure polka-dotted dress. As if in rebellion, the polka dots leap off the fabric, like tiny champagne bubbles. This riotousness is offset by an unregenerate punctiliousness. A pair of blemishes are at least as riveting as a convoy of airborne polka dots. This is because in Hauptman’s work, there are no trivial details--except perhaps, the distinction between the real and the surreal.

* Tatistcheff/Rogers Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1240, through March 16. Closed Sunday and Monday.