ART REVIEWS : Graciela Iturbide Photographs Keep a Respectful Distance

The most striking of Graciela Iturbide’s photographs are the oddball ones, in which peculiar details of dress or stylized gestures take center stage, enveloped by the rich blacks of the silver gelatin print.

Like the shot of child from Juchitan, Oaxaca, with a comb casually stuck on the back of her long wet hair like a festive ornament. Or the image of a stately man in a long flowered dress who holds a small mirror reflecting the other side of his sexually ambivalent face. Or the tight closeup of impassive young women from East Los Angeles in their skimpy white tops who demonstrate the sign language of their gang.

Yet a survey at the Cal State Long Beach Art Museum of Iturbide’s work from the past 17 years (to June 1) ultimately displays the photographer’s old-fashioned decorum and aesthetic sensibility. Born into an upper-middle-class home in Mexico City in 1942, Iturbide ventures into the worlds of her subjects with a pilgrim’s devout fascination and an aesthete’s concern for niceties of composition and lighting.

Her lens doesn’t pry; it ennobles and sympathizes. Even the curious or outlandish sitter is viewed from a respectful distance and set within a carefully stage-managed composition alive with subtle gradations of blacks and grays. A former student and assistant of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Iturbide comes honestly by her interest in the ritual aspects of everyday life in rural Mexico and her penchant for isolating single figures against swaths of empty sky or cracked and splattered old walls.

Death and festivity appear to be the two constants of Iturbide’s sitters, mostly small town folk from various regions. The proud, fleshy middle-aged women who sell food, swig beer or clasp each other in friendship wither into crones and anguished mourners. Even the children have a memento mori aura about them. Unsmiling, often seen in fiesta costume as virgins or angels, these little girls are reminiscent of the grave fancy-dress subjects of literary-minded Victorian photographers.

Typically, Iturbide stands at a respectful remove to photograph a Juchitec teen-aged bride-to-be lying under a sheet with scattered flowers and splattered chicken blood after a ritual sexual assault by her fiance. Darkness seeps in on all sides, isolating the girl in a victim’s cage of fear and loneliness. In select images like this one, tact, sympathy and finely calibrated lighting give a “documentary” scene a symbolic charge and quietly feminist perspective.

Gormley’s Vision: British artist Antony Gormley is best known for life-sized, lead-covered plaster figures that stand, sit or recline alone or in coolly conjoined pairs. Seams demarcate these smoothly generalized bodies into strictly symmetrical portions, calling attention to the “piece of work” that is man--the rational, twinned nature of body parts as well as the human duality of spirit and matter. Although the “skins” of these figures are mapped territories, their interior lives remain aloof and unknowable.

The 12 ink drawings in Gormley’s “Bearing Light” series represent an extreme reduction and condensation of his sculptural concerns, including his recent treatment of man-as-architecture in a concrete “room” with tiny orifices sited on the Australian desert and the hooded heads of pairs of figures commissioned for the political battleground of Londonderry in Northern Ireland.

In the drawings, simple black silhouettes evoke various sights: the bulk of a head, shoulders and upper torso; a slim, tall archway; narrowed eyes; a head on its side with oddly truncated ears. An infant on its stomach, like a specimen frog, is a study in doubles: curled fists, ears, knees, halved rump. A post-and-lintel arrangement can be read as a the lower half of a human figure. Intersecting black discs suggest the monocular vision of someone peering down a gun sight.

Seen as a group, the images--which also include an irregular, slightly chewed-looking cross--might be an elliptical shorthand for the watchers and the watched, the victims and the perpetrators in Britain’s long-standing civil war. Yet Gormley’s overriding vision extends beyond any specific state of events to the underlying dichotomies and betrayals of mind and body.

Burnett Miller Gallery, 969 N. La Brea Ave., to May 12 .

Jiri Goes to Sea: During the past decade, Czech-born Jiri Georg Dokoupil has moved from one international capital to another while picking up and discarding various approaches to art. He made flashily dislocated Neo-Expressionist paintings, assembled a goofy series of sculptures out of the names of corporate entities, turned out faux-naive, antic drawings of children.

His latest enterprise, “Marina,” offers a deadpan twist on traditional seascapes and Impressionist harbor images. His models are banal images cut out of boating magazines and projected on a screen. Suspending a gessoed canvas horizontally from the ceiling, he copies the image with soot from a burning candle. The soft black rings create a kind of exaggerated pointillist effect. Ocean liners, yachts, tiny human figures, churning water, humps of land--all are reduced to the same insubstantial, loopy black script.

Reducing images of the world to black smudges on a white ground has its parallels in photography (and its precursors in blurry, photo-like paintings by Gerhard Richter). But Dokoupil takes the idea a step further. His process translates the notion of the painter’s personal “touch” into a mere will-o’-the-wisp--or a soiled byproduct of the light of reason--that is ready to be blown off the canvas by the next strong wind of a new art movement.

In fact, a fixative is applied to these canvas in deference to potential buyers’ worries about permanence. So much for the purity of an idea. Dokoupil has used the soot technique before, in a series of media-derived images of gilt-edged art auctions. His dust-to-dust look at art production ultimately seems better suited to events that equate art with monstrous sums of money.

Stuart Regen Gallery, 619 N. Almont, to May 26 .

Art as Product: “Frontier Tales” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (to May 20) is steeped in the wishful belief that somewhere, somehow, there are artists creating interesting stuff in ultra-commercial, unschooled or ultra-private formats. It isn’t too surprising to discover that the “finds” on view are pretty lame. The commercial product (Clive Barker’s “Pinhead” doll, film poster, etc.) seems undistinguishable from than zillions of other such cult-consumer items. The rag-tag homemade work is longwinded and tedious at worst, cute at best (Russell Crotty’s wall of tiny surfer images that read as a huge abstract design from afar.)

And yet a deliciously batty portion of an installation by Joan Mahony does make a case for art that’s part window-dressing, part scavenger hunt.