ART REVIEWS : Jack Butler: Uncovering Hidden Social Issues

Advertising is the comfortable refuge of any number of stereotypes and generalizations but--unoriginal as it is--it sure knows how to load up an image. Just how loaded those pictures are with subliminal messages occupys the work of artist Jack Butler. Subverting advertising’s gloss and hype has been a fertile field for contemporary artists like Mitchell Syrop and Barbara Kruger. Butler shares their unerring eye for identifying social issues buried beneath ad campaigns’ idealizations.

Butler began using text and media photographs back in the early ‘70s to ask questions about the media presentation of social norms. Later, his painted photo collages concentrated on the media and advertising’s exploitation of the female. This latest body of work lines up models taken from advertisements of the ‘50s and ‘60s. On the surface they have that white-bread, bland purity that we were all raised on. But Butler’s texts, innocuous in themselves, pry open that tightly sealed, Tupperware world. What he wants to uncover are the threads of socially supported physical and psychological violence within the American family.

Violence runs the gamut in these pieces from children ignored by their hedonistic parents in “A Child in Exile” to straight-out abuse in “A Clash of Appetites.” Where the invocations of physical abuse are most clear the work is perhaps easiest to understand. But it is in the more subtle pieces, such as the shaping of a macho man in “Unspoken Emotions of an Ex-Boy,” or the social fashioning of idealized felinity in “Frozen in the Pain of Girlhood,” that the work speaks most thoughtfully of the insidiousness of peer and social pressure.

Also on view are James Balog’s stunning dye-transfer animal portrait photographs from his “Survivors” series. These images of some of the world’s nearly extinct animals are different because Balog doesn’t give us the usual calendar, animal-roaming-proudly-in-the-wild look to these vanishing beasts. Instead, he positions them up in front of photo backdrop paper and shoots away. Occasionally, he includes enough of the real surroundings to further stress the artificiality of his setup.

The confrontation between these creatures and the camera becomes a troubling metaphor for the battle between animal and man. The startled confusion on the face of the “Florida Panther” is alarming even if it is amusing. The tiny black-and-white panda sitting on the photo set in the middle of a huge Western-styled Chinese assembly hall looks vulnerable and insignificant. Balog’s wild animals have a profound dignity. It’s a document of grandeur that will be the only trace many of the species soon leave behind.

Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., to Feb. 23.

Bible Rehash: Michael Hickman has always had a predilection for parable and psychological narrative. But the earlier ambiguous mix of myth and reality that gave many of his paintings their edge has given way to an almost straight rehash of stories from the Bible. There are hints that Hickman intends these paintings to be contemporary metaphors; the forest burning behind the nude figures in “Expulsion,” suggests the fires in the rain forests. But there aren’t enough of these kind of suggestions to make that connection more than rudimentary.

If it wasn’t for the sooty blackness enshrouding each crudely painted image, these scenes of naked figures petting endangered wild animals or talking to snakes in a forest would be too superficial to even contemplate. The deliberate darkness wraps up the banality in a thick tar that in “The Painters,” one of the few clearly modern pieces, seems to be reaching for a prophetic connection between the murk and environmental contamination. Unfortunately, the connection is too tenuous to cling to.

Orlando Gallery, 14553 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, to Feb. 22.

Pulling Together: There is less animation and more contemplation in Max DeMoss’ latest bronze sculptures. The figures seem to have quite literally pulled themselves together. Forgoing the leaping exuberance that energized the work a few years ago, these favor a more solid, musing presence. Missing is the peeling open of the thick bronze skins of earlier works: They pried open the figures and recalled the casting process. Suggestions of this can still be found in the clean, deep slices at joints and neck. But the incisions now read more like decomposition than creation. These are figures musing on their own demise and making peace with it. Most are small. But they are not at all the purist studies of perfected figure such as Robert Graham’s nudes. For all their careful proportioning they reach for more romantic notions. That romance sometimes get maudlin or trite, as in the paunchy, trench-coated man with wings, “Sentinel.” That’s the difficulty with figurative interpretations of emotion and psychology--they can quickly degenerate into schmaltzy illustrations. Yet the artist’s efforts to whip ephemeral emotion from the cold strictness of bronze and stone are welcome within the cool intellectual climate surrounding contemporary figurative sculpture.

Wenger Gallery, 828 N. La Brea Ave., to March 13.