La Cienega Area

Like Josef Beuys and his piles of felt, Georg Herold has power that comes from the ability to decode and then recode the meanings of common things--bricks, bits of clothing, pellets of caviar--into a personal iconography that says a lot by refusing to say anything. This is not double talk; this is the strategy of an art that has decided that language and everything that flows from it is in such contextual flux that it must be sidestepped altogether. If anything, the work proves that this is not possible.

Take the woman’s nylon stocking, stretched and meticulously stitched onto a small wire armature. The piece is strangely menacing, erotic, whimsical, political and ultimately off-putting because it skirts our grasp and asserts itself as a weird presentation that is read as cogent art. A woman’s bikini underwear is cut up and similarly mounted and in “Desatres de la democracia” (Disasters of Democracy), bits of real caviar coalesce into the vague numbered map or a combat plan. This piece and “Russian Cocaine”--expensive Beluga caviar shellacked into black, shiny abstract art--address geopolitical intrigue, the hypocrisy of Communist bureaucracies or the abstract reasoning that lets a symbol (in this case a numbered dot made from old fish eggs) successfully stand in for the complex concepts communication requires. Two handsome paintings that have bricks jutting out of their smoldering rust surfaces are the closest to pure formal finery. This is excellent but nihilistic work, intellectual and narcissistic in the extreme, seeing things so clearly that it finally concludes that all values, all ideologies, all signifiers are equally ineffective. This gives the work an annoying equivocation that only drives its point. (Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 625 N. Almont Drive, to June 17.)