Farewell to an art, to an era

In the time it takes to log on to some computers and get running, Judy Fiskin takes visitors on a bittersweet trip down memory lane. “The End of Photography” is a 2 1/2-minute movie that, like all great works of art, tells more than one story.

On one level, the Super-8 film transferred to DVD and shown in a curtained-off alcove at Angles Gallery is a profoundly moving eulogy to darkrooms, those cramped, adapted labs that have been disappearing from basements, art departments and photo-processing stores as traditional photography is replaced by digital imagery and electronic printing.

At another level, Fiskin’s little movie is an eloquent adios to a way of life in which patience, ingenuity and eccentricity are virtues, as long as they are accompanied by optimism, humility and graciousness.

“The End of Photography” is simply structured. Each scene features a shrub, tree or architectural detail of a modest building Fiskin shot from the street or sidewalk. People never appear and she holds the camera still. The only movement occurs when a car goes by or palm fronds stir in the wind.

The narration consists of a woman’s measured voice reading a list of the things in Fiskin’s darkroom. The inventory is generic. The tone and tempo are equally anonymous. But the unsentimental tenor evokes a lifetime of memories -- of fond and frustrating moments spent in charged darkness, hoping for magic as images swim into focus amid chemical vapors and giddy excitement.

Fiskin’s list of unadorned nouns has its own poetry. Like a pedestrian Proust, she conjures a lover’s relationship to otherwise unremarkable things: beaker, tray, developer, stool, radio, drying rack. The sense of loss intensifies as it becomes clear that Fiskin is not bidding farewell to mere objects but to the ethos, character and sensibility the daily use of these things engendered, sustained, rewarded. With little fanfare, her melancholic movie makes you wonder how digital technology will change the way the world looks and, more importantly, the people doing the looking.

Outside the alcove hang 22 of Fiskin’s photos. Each measures about 2 inches on a side. These idiosyncratic pictures of stucco bungalows, asymmetrical duplexes, small apartment buildings and elaborate graves acknowledge the standardization at the root of Jeffersonian America. They celebrate the misfits, oddballs and eccentrics who inhabit its idealized grid.

Some of the photos are from the 1970s. Others were shot in the 1980s and printed last year. Next to the movie, all seem to belong to a vanishing world.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through May 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.anglesgallery.com

It’s time for lots of close-ups

John Baldessari’s new inkjet prints of enlarged and altered B-movie stills are among the most concise -- but not the simplest -- of his long and distinguished career as the classiest clown of California Conceptualism. Unlike its New York counterpart, the California school of “idea art” never let solemnity get in the way of dumb fun, which turns out to be a lot smarter than it seems.

Baldessari’s 15 pieces at Margo Leavin Gallery feature the faces of anonymous actors, most in close-up and most blown up to larger-than-life proportions. A few appear individually, their tightly cropped profiles occupying nearly all of the picture. Most come in pairs or groups of up to eight actors, all staring into one another’s eyes. A handful of the images include other elements to suggest such settings as a zoo, doctor’s office, bodybuilding competition and formal ball.

In the past, Baldessari has cropped, juxtaposed and altered the colors of images, sometimes blocking out faces with solid discs of color and limiting his image-doctoring to the spaces around the figures. In his new pieces, he goes to work on the actors’ faces, becoming the visual equivalent of a nose-job doctor.

Using common computer software, Baldessari flips noses upside-down. He does the same with ears, sometimes turning them backward. He highlights some noses and ears with pastel tints and leaves others to merge seamlessly with their surroundings.

Described in words, Baldessari’s alterations sound too stupid to take seriously. But visually they work. And the curiously engaging results sustain second, third and fourth looks. Something uncanny is afoot, even though it is impossible to believe without seeing it for yourself.

Think of a face as a movie. Generally speaking, the eyes and mouth are the stars who carry the story by expressing emotions. The ears and nose, while useful for sensing things, are far less expressive, more like background details or the supporting cast.

Baldessari zeroes in on these differences. Like any great comedian, he takes them beyond the comfort zone, but not so far that his characters become freakish or unsympathetic. On the contrary, their expressions are so convincing that their upside-down noses and backward ears can almost be overlooked. Empathy is all the stronger for being unexpected.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through May 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Words hide their meaning

When Monique Prieto began exhibiting her work in 1994, just about the dorkiest thing an artist could do was make abstract paintings. Times have changed.

Abstraction is no longer as uncool as it used to be. And Prieto, ever the free-thinking maverick, has abandoned the comforting familiarity of her crisp acrylics on raw canvas for works even dorkier and more out of step than before: messy pictures of blocky letters that spell out phrases from the nine-volume diary of 17th century Englishman Samuel Pepys.

At ACME Gallery, Prieto’s oils on canvas bring image-and-text Conceptualism front and center by turning its conventions inside-out. Rather than using words as explanatory captions, she uses brushes, blotters, palette knives and rollers to paint phrases that are as satisfying to look at as they are to read. The meanings that emerge require viewer participation, ample imagination and the give-and-take of real conversations, particularly those that include confusion, opacity and contentious argumentation.

One of the best things about Prieto’s paintings is that each seems to be out of sync -- or out of step -- with itself. In contrast to her earlier works, in which every element cooperated with its companions to form harmonious wholes, her new ones remain unresolved and unsettled. Dissonance is their goal and modus operandi. Prieto builds this complexity into raw, Stone-Age-style pictures. The first time you see one, reading its blocky text is difficult. You are forced to sound out syllables like a school kid.

But once you read the words, the painting’s illegibility disappears. And it is impossible to recapture. Remembering it becomes an element of each subsequent viewing, which increasingly focuses on the visual play between positive and negative space, accident and intention, structure and its undoing.

It’s heartening to see an artist embrace meanings too slippery, various and filled with potential to be part of sound-bite message-mongering.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Saturday. www.acmelosangeles.com

Landscapes of flowing tin

The harsh beauty of the desert takes explosive shape in Tony Berlant’s cut-metal collages. Still constructed of industrially painted sheets of tin the artist snips into strange shapes and hammers onto wood panels with thousands of tiny nails, the 15 abstract landscapes at L.A. Louver Gallery are looser and more fluid than anything he has made since he invented his signature technique more than 40 years ago.

Berlant’s intensely colored, graphically crisp and densely textured images are also bolder and more confidently composed. Their fragments are left to drift freely in the pictorial spaces he creates.

At 3 feet by 8 feet, “No Holds Barred #64” is the show’s largest work. From close up it is chaos, a riot of crystalline shards, molten lumps, flickering flames, frothy splashes, blossoming buds and horizon-spanning bands of silver, white, aqua and lavender.

From a distance, the bits of tin and the image-fragments painted on them settle into something far more fascinating than the sum of their parts.

An organic strand of Surrealism runs through Berlant’s images. Silhouettes resemble worldly things, or at least evoke them in the mind’s eye. “Out of Bounds #54” and “A Perfect Moment #3” are as vivid and mysterious as hallucinations, as fractured as Cezanne’s landscapes and filled with so much sunlight that they make Impressionism look as if it took place indoors.

Other works are denser, their surfaces seemingly made of six or seven jigsaw puzzles whose pieces have been mixed and wedged together. The original imagery cannot be identified but still haunts the new, multilayered configuration with its ghostly presence. Berlant’s works include so many worlds within worlds that there is room for anyone -- and anything.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through May 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com