ART REVIEWS : ‘Censorship’ Explores History of Repression

Art has become big business, commanding high prices and speaking the slippery language of investment potential. But the world of economics is the front yard of politics. So art, with its once-independent criteria for excellence, has suddenly found itself on the scrimmage line in a political football game with whistles to the left and right directing the play.

Just how prone to social whim the rules of that game can be is the point made by the current exhibition “Censorship.” This is a small gathering of historic paintings and photographs that have been at some point censored or labeled obscene, plus a few current images that would, given the current climate, undoubtedly be hit with the same tag.

Composed mainly of erotic or homoerotic art, the exhibition deftly sidesteps the titillation factor inherent in this kind of imagery by focusing on issues of politics and repression. In the company of the boldly erotic 19th-Century Japanese Shunga woodblock prints and the sensuous but tame abstract etchings of Matta, Hans Burkhardt’s “Crucifixion”--labeled “communist” in 1949 for its modernist abstraction--makes it clear that, more than any kind of moral imperative, it is simple fear of the unknown that feeds censorship.

It is the strength of that argument that draws this very disparate work together. It’s an understanding that unites Margaret Lazzari’s powerfully explicit painting of a castrated white male figure with the puerile sexuality of an underground comic book on incest without equating the two as art. It adds tension to John C. Hesketh’s gentle Cibachrome photo play of sex-in-the-suburbs to place it alongside Robert Mapplethorpe’s leather-covered male model in light of the howls of protest his photographs have brought. The implication is that what goes around will come around--to dictate definitions of art and sexuality.

Given the different directions the artists follow here, the issue of obscenity emerges as a large one. Indeed, it remains a personal one, as this exhibition presents both innocuous images and others that undoubtedly push beyond what many individuals consider even faintly erotic. What the historic works and their attendant histories make clear is that obscene is too vague and inconsistent an adjective to be used for anything more than name-calling. And censorship, too, is revealed by time to be a hidebound reaction of insecurity.

Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 18.

Power of the Mark: Laurence Dreiband’s bold charcoal studies of clusters of black eucalyptus leaves are pure, powerful drawings. The subject may be mundane, but the power of the line and the way the artist spreads the forms like unpremeditated spills across the page are fresh. Indeed, the spontaneity and effortlessness of these compositions recall the Taoist principles of 17th-Century Chinese painting.

Dreiband’s drawings celebrate the power of the mark: the cutting sharpness of a clean linear form, the delicate softness of finger smudges and erased edges. Most drawings are like works in progress, revealing the tender process of building up solid mass from dry pigment while trailing bits of unfinished drawing, dust and change across the once-pristine whiteness of the page. This appreciation for the exposed process of drawing gives each work an honest vigor.

In the next gallery are Christopher Georgesco’s long vertical columns of reinforced concrete and stainless steel. Ostensibly drawing their form from the space left by four circles meeting, these pieces have an odd finality about them. Like truncated and stretched modernist obelisks, they stand on odd, often problematic bases looking taut yet abruptly severed at top and bottom.

Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., to Aug. 11.

Madness From Within: The paintings Diane Gamboa puts together for this exhibition are their own kind of angular hell. Imbued with the Chicana artist’s familiar love of busy pattern, careening line and bright color, this round of work has a jagged, disturbing energy. The pictorial spaces are tightly packed interiors where contrasting colors and pattern run riot over tilting spaces. Objects jockey to suggest three dimensions in what is blatantly a two-dimensional world.

Gamboa’s somewhat cartoony scenarios implying violence and upheaval are curiously open-ended for all the aggression they suggest. Indeed, her characters appear as unrepentant moral monsters along the lines of Leon Golub’s tormentors or the “No Exit” denizens of Gronk’s “Grand Hotel.” By picturing this world from the inside, the artist and audience are made part of the depravity.

Williams Lamb Gallery, 102 West 3rd St., Long Beach, to Aug. 31.