Goicolea’s fashion video

The strange and subversive half-hour film “The Septembrists,” by Anthony Goicolea, is like something Thomas Eakins might have made had he lived in the age of Abercrombie & Fitch. It’s no wonder New York designer Thom Browne, whose eccentric clothing almost rises to the level of a full-fledged character in Goicolea’s evocative tale, last year showed the film in lieu of a runway show of new designs.

Transferred to video, the 2006 film is being shown in a roomy storage locker in the parking lot behind Sandroni.Rey. (The young New York artist exhibited drawings at the gallery last year.) This funny setup puts a whimsical twist on the fashion-designer tradition of a trunk show.

With a bevy of post-adolescent men sporting chic haircuts and fashion-forward clothing, the film wears its homoeroticism on its carefully tailored, white-cotton sleeve. An indeterminate narrative of male ritual, fey and atmospheric, proposes a world composed entirely of masculine beauty. The climactic visit to a bucolic river’s edge transforms the watery recollection of an already cinematic painting such as Eakins’ famous “The Swimming Hole,” with its nod to ancient Greek ideals, into something haunted and praetorian.

The narrative goes something like this: On a rustic, elegant rural commune, a sizable group of young men gather wool and cotton, harvest squid for dye and cut and assemble clothing. They don it for a dusky procession to the water, where ritual events merge baptism and death.

Color is tamped down to mostly neutral tones. Luminous black-and-white is to vivid color film what sepia is to black-and-white -- a self-conscious ingredient that yields an antique look, valorizing the handmade over the machined. Browne’s clothing designs, all short pants and tiny neckties and rounded collars, meld New England prep school with old children’s book illustration in the manner of Eleanor Campbell and Keith Ward. “Fun With Dick and Jane” meets “Dead Poets Society,” and you half-expect Tucker Carlson to turn up as narrator.

Surely the secret Order of Skull and Bones, once known as the Brotherhood of Death, began this way -- as a means to sort out refinements of hierarchy and assert false strength in a world of easy, suffocating privilege. An almost sorrowful shroud of exquisite psychic pain engulfs the pantomimed scenes.

As a metaphor for making art in a fashion-obsessed world, “The Septembrists” deftly threads the needle. But as the film’s title also suggests -- referring as it does to the patriotic frenzy of 1792, when pent-up Parisian mobs massacred imprisoned French royalists -- Goicolea’s disturbing, melancholic pageant speaks with a dissident voice. This artist knows where the world capital of fashion lies, as surely as he understands the disturbing political realities of 21st century America.

Sandroni.Rey, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 280-0111; though Oct. 13. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.sandronirey.com.

Follow the dots of mass consumption

Mountains of cellphones, a sea of plastic bottles, teetering stacks of paper grocery bags, thousands of crisscrossing jet trails -- in “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait,” Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan fuses pictures of common objects with facts and figures about mass consumption too large to easily grasp. This recent series of large-scale photographs, some with dimensions as big as 10 feet, might be called “Still Lifes on Steroids.”

For his third show at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Jordan presents ink-jet prints that at first appear to be abstractions. Mottled dots of color or repetitions of line register first.

Go in for a closer look, however, and the dots snap into focus as individual aluminum soda cans or plastic bottles, while the lines are the serrated edges of paper bags. Against a sky-blue ground, 11,000 tiny silver jets trailing white wisps of smoke -- or, perhaps, one jet repeated 11,000 times -- look like wallpaper for an aeronautically minded child’s bedroom.

On the end wall, the Pointillist specks of color in a reproduction of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte -- 1884” turn out to be containers of Pepsi, Coke, Mountain Dew and other soft drinks, lined up in countless rows. It’s as if you’re perusing the world’s biggest grocery shelf. Seurat’s late 19th century image of bourgeois leisure becomes Jordan’s early 21st century picture of hyper-consumption.

All of this has a plainly ecological cast. And the statistic that about 426,000 cellphones are retired around the world each day does look nominally more startling in a large photograph than it does on a page of text.

Still, what’s most intriguing about Jordan’s photographs is not their simple conversion of numbers into pictures but their implications for belief and faith in the modern world. You can look at the staggering array of junked cellphones spread out in the photograph before you and be amazed; yet you must trust the number Jordan cites as being not just a statistic but accurately represented in his art.

Is it? Try counting the cellphones for yourself and you quickly lose your way in the avalanche of visual information. The experience of these sleek works implies a social bond between artist and audience that is at once presumptive and fragile. A judgment that we’re all in this together is nimbly asserted.

Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles (323) 937-0765, through Oct. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.paulkopeikingallery.com.

Public property as private art

Tatzu Nishi performs a simple gesture in his work, relocating objects encountered in the public sphere to a private realm. As his L.A. debut exhibition at Blum and Poe Gallery demonstrates, that simple gesture can require herculean effort.

“Use Your Head” is a chandelier composed of five galvanized-steel streetlights bundled together, turned upside down and suspended in the gallery through a skylight. The bases of the lamps protrude through the roof and are visible from the street -- their erstwhile home.

Nishi, born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1960 but schooled and long a resident in Germany, channels artists such as Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden to render an eccentric variation on Light and Space art. Battling the Southern California sun, the sickly yellow light of the street lamp chandelier doesn’t do much for the room. But the gallery is inventively used as an unusual intersection between public and private space -- between communal character and personal identity.

The point is likewise made in a group of giant wall clocks that smash together Big Ben and a tourist souvenir . Nishi embeds large clock-mechanisms inside the gallery walls, then paints the faces as murals. (In one case, the painting is executed on a canvas hanging on the wall.) The best of these shows L.A. City Hall in the center, with landmarks such as the Hollywood sign decorating the 12 numerals, all painted in a bright, brushy, almost childlike style. A bathing suit nailed to the wall adds to the fun, as do pink Japanese characters framing the piece.

The pursuit of cultural tourism is now a middle-class phenomenon, unlike the aristocratic Grand Tour of old.

Nishi’s witty wall clocks keep excellent time.

Blum and Poe Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 836-2062, through Oct. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.blumandpoe.com.

Drawings of Houdini fall flat

Whitney Bedford’s life-size drawings of Harry Houdini are conceptually compelling but visually inert. Based on well-known photographs, the ink and oil renderings let the source material do too much of the work.

Houdini functions here as a symbol for potentially deadly, self-inflicted danger. That motif is plenty resonant, but the drawings feel less ambitious than the events depicted.

Bedford renders the photographs as imperfect sketches, sometimes letting ink drip or adding painted pools of flat background color. In most cases, the escape artist’s shackled hands have been obscured with brushy pigment, as if to suggest a cartoon-sign for movement while describing a hidden struggle. In one instance, a blood-red “shadow” inexplicably jumps from behind the figure to cover Houdini’s right arm in the foreground. This painterly abstraction seems arbitrary.

Such abstraction is more gripping in a strange two-panel painting tucked into a rear gallery. A mighty ship is seen on one panel in full sail, while a similar ship is strangely smudged and skittering on the other, as if foundering on the rocks (and the gallery corner) that separate the two scenes. With its purple sky and bilious green sea, Bedford creates a potent, cracked-mirror image that puts adventure and risk on an equal footing.

Cherry and Martin Gallery, 12611 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 398-7404, through Oct. 27. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.cherryandmartin.com.

christopher.knight @latimes.com