Beauty, Through the Eye of Its Beholder

Louise Lawler’s gorgeous new photographs at Richard Telles Fine Art invite viewers to reconsider the critically acclaimed works she has made over the past two decades. Celebrated for dissecting the false auras in which art is often enshrouded, her earlier pictures of artworks and their institutional contexts seemed to cast a scathingly critical eye toward ideas as mushy and mystifying as romance and beauty.

In contrast, Lawler’s first solo show in Los Angeles since 1987 consists of five exquisitely printed, impeccably mounted Cibachromes that begin by celebrating loveliness. Depicting other artists’ sculptures and drawings, they go on to treat mute objects as powerful worldly forces. Think of supermodels and superstar athletes and you’ll have an idea of the sexual allure and physical authority with which Lawler endows the inanimate sitters in her portraits of art.

In one, sculptures by Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama are bathed in sensuous pink and delicate yellow light as they stand with ancient dignity in a whitewashed home. In other pictures, Warhol’s silver pillows float overhead like metallic angels; a figurative sculpture by Giacometti casts a haunting shadow across a museum wall; and a tough, stenciled drawing by Lawrence Wiener is suffused with a pang of bittersweet nostalgia, as it hangs between two windows adorned with frilly curtains that share less with the unsentimental world of Conceptual art than with that of cozy bed-and-breakfasts.

As a group, Lawler’s stunning photographs compel viewers to reconsider that art functions primarily as a critique--whether of earlier styles, its institutional context or current social ills. A critique of nothing but ugliness, her captivating photographs begin to do their work by transforming a small part of the world into something that is beautiful to behold.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (323) 965-6678, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Charts and Graphs: Andrea Zittel’s installation looks a lot more complicated than it actually is. In contrast to some works of art, which initially look simple only to increase in complexity and resonance as you spend more time with them, her four pieces at Regen Projects get less interesting the more you get to know them.

The centerpiece of the show is a souped-up stripe painting. Made of 25 separately framed panels of birch plywood to which documentary photographs have been glued and textual notations added, “Free Running Rhythms and Patterns” covers three walls of the gallery. Its 24 sections, each 5 feet tall, are actually linear diagrams, which record what Zittel did each hour of every day for a week last fall. A smaller panel serves as an introduction to her diary-like experiment and as a key to its color-coded stripes.

From Oct. 31 to Nov. 6, the artist stayed in a soundproofed and windowless room from which she had removed all clocks and other devices that might have given her an idea of what time it was. Freeing herself from externally demarcated time, she sought to discover whether her body would settle into its own rhythms of labor, recreation and rest.

Scientifically, the experiment was a bust. Seven days proved to be too short a time for consistent patterns or cycles to develop.

Aesthetically, Zittel’s presentation of the time she spent sleeping, eating, painting, crocheting and using her computer is not even as visually interesting as a sheet of musical notation. Too many arbitrary decisions went into the design of these rigidly style-conscious panels.

The point of a chart or a graph is to translate a wide range of information into an easy-to-read format that allows viewers to draw conclusions from it. Zittel, however, appears to be less interested in summarizing facts into analyzable units than in dwelling on the one fact that she was the subject of her own experiment.

Although the tasteful colors she has used to fill in the various blocks of time spent drinking beer or coffee, talking on the phone or communicating via the Internet adequately convey this information, she presents the same data again with written notes describing when she did what. By also including black-and-white photographs printed from the surveillance video that recorded all her activities, she repeats herself a third time.

A pair of smaller paintings on plywood emphasizes the subjective, self-involved nature of her art. Painted in a style and palette that owes a lot to Casey Cook’s panels and advertisements for SilverTab jeans, Zittel’s captioned images present anecdotal incidents about how she exercised and played CDs to estimate how much time had passed.

In the center of the gallery, an elaborate model of a specially designed “Timeless Chamber” suggests that Zittel may be planning to repeat her experiment--hopefully with more rigor and focus. If she does, she may come up with a work that is more than a bit of diaristic autobiography dressed in the garb of mediocre social science.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Silhouettes: In Stephen Chambers’ 16 oils on canvas and panel at Flowers West Contemporary Art, a little of this and a little of that add up to wholes that are less than the sum of their parts.

Most of the British artist’s competent works depict solitary figures tipped at odd angles or staring straight out at viewers. Each element of each image is rendered in its own style. Backgrounds generally consist of solid fields of bright color. Bodies are mere silhouettes, filled in with snazzy fabric designs. Skin is often covered with neatly arranged polka-dots. Hair is represented by jagged lines that fly off in different directions, like fragmented bolts of energy.

What’s most remarkable about Chambers’ art is its capacity to neutralize such disparate modes of abstract and representational painting, transforming what otherwise would be cacophonous collisions of two- and three-dimensional space into bland compositions poised on the cusp of lifelessness.

Treating the human figure as if it were an element in a still-life or merely a paper-doll cutout, his images leave viewers with few points of entry. Stiff and off-putting, their formality is neither harmonious nor effectively pointed in its dissonance.

* Flowers West Contemporary Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-9200, through March 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.