ART REVIEWS : ‘Rearwards’ an Irreverent Assault on Culture

An abundance of posteriors confronts the visitor to “Presenting Rearwards.” Just inside the Rosamund Felsen Gallery’s front door, the rear end of a life-size mechanical Holstein stands guard. One step past this Cyclops-like sentinel brings you into a nasty menagerie of backwardness.

A somewhat abstract plaster-slathered rump is splayed on a table in the gallery’s center. On the floor, three upended corduroy backrests reveal their stitched and puckered undersides. On the walls, large color photographs display the ketchup smeared behind of a performance artist, a wart-covered fake derriere made for the stage, and an anthropomorphized globe whose mannequin legs pose in an exaggerated position of feminine submission.

Candy-colored macrame dangles from a tattooed pink rubber bum, a gobbet of pure white plaster rests in the crevice of a similar mud-colored sculpture, and a pair of eyes stare beseechingly heavenward from the swollen buttocks of a caged baboon.

This raucous group show curated by Ralph Rugoff cultivates an excess of degradation and disgust. Rugoff’s selection of photographs, drawings and sculptures by 26 contemporary artists parades the backsides of beasts and people in an irreverent assault on good manners, sophisticated taste and high culture. His relentless exhibition is more than a juvenile send-up of pretense and refinement. It is an ambitious critique of a repressive society whose obsession with disciplined perfection denies some fundamental physical facts of the human body.

In the exhibition’s passionate catalogue essay, Rugoff argues that our media-saturated society has led us to forget that we inhabit bodies. For individuals, this results in self-loathing, egg-headedness, and couch potato alienation. For a culture, it means homophobia, corporate greed, and inhumane politics.

Rugoff’s intention is not to elevate the butt to the status of a highly valued icon, but to overthrow such hierarchies altogether, putting in their place more playful relations. His show proposes that to acknowledge, rather than to hide, one’s bottom and its functions is to accept the flesh’s vulnerability and to begin to cultivate its truly erotic possibilities.

Celebrating these hitherto devalued aspects of life requires the subversion of the traditional powers that govern our hypocritically moralistic culture. The transformed world Rugoff’s exhibition glimpses is an ongoing carnival-esque romp in which deviance no longer exists because every difference engenders an anarchistic moment of self-loss and discovery.

Paradoxically, the problem with “Presenting Rearwards” is its complacency, its straightforwardly reactive character. Although the best works in the exhibition incite complex responses in which attraction and repulsion freely intermingle, too many settle for attacking established forms in cliched, merely illustrative ways.

Photographs by Aura Rosenberg, Jeanne Dunning, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and a video by Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose compel because of their ambivalent treatment of pleasure and pain. They momentarily confound rationality or use beauty to lure their viewers out of entrenched patterns of behavior. Their approaches match the show’s overall ambition, its attempt not merely to replace “high art” with “low culture,” but to undermine this either/or logic altogether.

Drawings by Sue Williams, Raymond Pettibon, and Jim Shaw, and a cartoon painting by Mark Kroening, on the other hand, settle for mocking famous styles and artists, as if all of “high culture” was based on nothing more than the repression and denial of our true, base natures. In these works, as in the excessively strident sections of Rugoff’s essay, humor’s breadth and complexity degenerate into flat sarcasm.

The exhibition’s supposed embrace of vulnerability becomes, in these instances, an empty gesture. Aggression, vindictiveness, and revenge take over. The show loses its focus on bottoms as aesthetic prejudice rears its ugly head. Painting, especially abstraction, bears the brunt of this stereotypical behavior; written off as elitist, it is conspicuously absent from the exhibition.

When “Presenting Rearwards” does not get lost in cliches and stereotypes and one-dimensional inversions of existing problems, it takes its visitors on a provocative walk on the wild side of life, with no guarantee of their safe return.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (213) 652-9172, through Sept. 7 . Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A Small World: The Margo Leavin Gallery offers the biggest surprise of the summer season with a large exhibition of “Pygmy Drawings.” Made by the Mbuti People in the Ituri rain forests of Zaire, Africa, these curious artifacts hold up remarkably well in a contemporary art gallery.

Although they were created without any idea of being exhibited in this context, they share some similarities with current artworks, which, on first viewing, are also often arcane, indecipherable and decorative. Nevertheless, real differences prevent the natural pigment drawings on barkcloth from smoothly entering the world of contemporary art.

The roughly rectangular works are not drawings as we know them, but clothing, worn by the Mbuti during puberty and at initiation rites, funerals, marriages, and other village ceremonies. Infants are also wrapped in the fabric that feels like a blend of worn leather and thick, fibrous paper.

The 51 examples in the exhibition, usually measuring around 18x30 inches, were made between 10 and 30 years ago. Each piece is the result of a group effort that has not changed significantly for hundreds of years.

Men prepare the cloths and women decorate them. A small saw is used to peel pliable segments of bark from any of 12 species of trees, depending on availability, suppleness, durability, and receptiveness to dyes. The strips of bark are softened by being soaked in water or smoked over a fire before they are laid on a fallen tree trunk and pounded for hours with an ivory mallet.

To achieve a variety of colors, the finished barkcloths are buried in black or red mud, or bleached, or left in their natural state. Pigments made from mashed roots, leaves and fruits are mixed with mud and charcoal and applied with fingers, twigs, and pieces of string. Rich burgundies, brilliant rusts, subtle olives, and deep blues stand out from the drawings’ typical blacks, grays, and reds.

For the most part, the designs are discontinuous and irregular, consisting of interconnected lines, triangles, and dots interspersed with stars, crosses, and other marks that we want to read as symbols. But we cannot discern their meanings because we do not know their codes. Some cloths look like maps, with rudimentary huts, rivers, villages, and paths emerging out of otherwise foreign markings.

But mute artifacts, like contemporary artworks to the uninitiated, require research and learning before they will divulge their currently secret meanings.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson, (213) 273-0603, through Saturday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Being and Nothingness: Emptiness fills the gallery in which Linda Roush has installed “Blanc Wall,” her almost invisible work concerned with a quasi-sublime experience of nothingness. If this sounds contradictory, it is. But experiencing Roush’s work convinces us otherwise.

The gallery, lacking what we usually recognize as art, seems to be overflowing with an intangible something. Describing it as the glow of light doesn’t quite get it right. Accounting for it as some form of energy or object also fails to capture its peculiar intangibility. Whatever it is that the artist has made, it seems to be extremely concentrated yet thoroughly dispersed. Roush leaves us with an unnameable experience that defies conventional knowledge and cannot be explained away.

A few inches in front of the boxy room’s rear brick wall, a cascade of reflected light flickers and shimmers in weightless suspension. Roush has woven, from the floor to the ceiling and across the entire wall, hundreds of half-inch strips of embossed transparent vinyl--the kind usually used for shower curtains.

The vinyl’s cut-up and reconfigured flower pattern catches the soft blue light emitted from six bulbs mounted in the ceiling, fragmenting it into slivers of violets, silvers and greens. A more intense version of this dispersed blue occurs in a 2-inch-square piece of glass embedded in the opposite wall.

This tiny glass transparency depicts a carved marble screen from an Islamic mosque. Its elaborate pattern echoes that of Roush’s woven veil, whose imperfectly aligned petals match the scale of those in the photograph but somehow still do not add up to a coherent, graspable whole. Roush is not concerned with the identity of the mosque. “Blanc Wall” refuses to turn art into a branch of historiography, but instead engenders an experience that escapes logic by momentarily disrupting rationality’s control.

* Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 Ninth St., Santa Monica, (213)395-0222, through Saturday . Closed Mondays.