ART REVIEWS : Boadwee Puts Himself in the Picture

Andy Warhol once said that if he could be anything in the world, he’d be Elizabeth Taylor’s diamond ring. Keith Boadwee lives out a version of this fantasy in his exhibition, “Return to the Pageant of the Masters.” Each of his large color photographs at Parker/Zanic Gallery displays the artist as a decorative element in a famous painting.

Boadwee constructs life-size tableaux based on modern masterpieces. His simple materials--cardboard, papier-mache, acrylic paint and butcher paper--match his almost slapdash manner of working. Never fussy or obsessed with perfected craftsmanship, his staged paintings prefer the off-hand and ad hoc to the permanence of high seriousness.

The crudeness of the illusions Boadwee creates gives his art a school-kid simplicity, an integrity that greater skill only diminishes. Surprisingly, this lack of facility and awkward illusionism are deeply harmonious with the intentions of the art he “copies.”

Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and Kirchner, each in his own style, dispensed with sophistication and expertise in order to escape the emptiness of academic painting. Attacking its conventions in order to overthrow habits that prevented authentic expression, they intended not to enshrine art in some temple of purity, but to communicate with rawness and energy.

Boadwee upholds their irreverence toward tradition. His naked body appears, in all his pictures, painted to resemble flowers, trees or figures from the originals. Like a delighted tourist, the artist frolics and poses throughout art history’s cherished icons to seriousness.

His fake paintings humorously acknowledge that yesterday’s radical refusals of convention today hang in museums, embraced by the very culture they once contested. Boadwee’s art is original because it turns this ironic reversal back on itself.

His photographs put back, in images now encrusted with institutional authority and arrogance, some of the whim and individuality at the root of creativity. By allowing viewers to laugh out loud, his hilarious pictures strip away pretense and intimidation to recover impulses generally excluded from official culture.

* Parker/Zanic Gallery, 112 S . La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, ( 213 ) 926-9022, through Oct . 26 . Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Dream Dissector: Lawrence Gipe’s paintings also set history to work against itself, but with considerably less effectiveness. Titled “Futurama,” his dramatic depictions of skyscrapers, locomotives and tugboats are based on famous photographs of industrialism’s triumph. They return to an episode from America’s past--not to re-evaluate its achievements, but to clinically dissect its dreams.

Gipe’s art rings hollow because it concentrates on condemning an era rather than addressing its complex legacy for the present. In one painting, a streamlined Mercury Bullet-train bound for New York rushes out of the foreground. Cleveland’s Terminal Tower (a favorite subject in the ‘30s for photographer Margaret Bourke-White) stands in the background, almost wholly engulfed in smoke. Bright-red letters across the painting’s base sarcastically quote magazine writer Frank Norris: “Gigantic, vigorous, crude with the crudity of youth--infinite in its desire.”

Other works are even less subtle in their disdain for an age of American ascendancy in which commerce, technology, religion and sex came together to capture a nation’s dreams--but also to inspire its nightmares. In “Climax in Steel,” a spire of the partially erected Chrysler Building thrusts skyward through an opening in a metal slab. “The Free World” depicts Manhattan as a daunting oversized prison, choked with pollution.

Gipe’s schematic images ruthlessly assault some of industrialism’s contradictions. They tirelessly spell out the most glaring lies of the time, without confronting that era’s self-criticism.

Many of the images and words Gipe appropriates belong to bodies of work which bear an ambivalent relationship to the social forces they address. Too often, he flattens their complex reflections into one-dimensional celebrations of industry. He thus legitimates his own reductive approach to the past.

Gipe’s project flounders in academic timidity. He prefers the safety of a well-documented footnote to the risks of dealing with the present. The distance intrinsic to a historical viewpoint becomes, in his art, a means for denying the fact that the past continues to resonate in the present.

* Shea & Bornstein Gallery, 2114 Broadway, Santa Monica, (213) 452-4210, through Oct . 19 . Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Peculiar Pleasures: Dorit Cypis’ installation at Roy Boyd Gallery eschews aesthetic effects for therapeutic ones. “Odalisque (The Devil in Miss Jones)” consists of multiple-exposure photographs, confessional texts, and a turn-of-the-century couch whose pillow whispers secrets about a woman’s sexual identity.

This intentionally artless work uses psychoanalysis to wrestle the pleasures of women free from the control of men. If its elements seem barren, even bereft of sensuality, this is because Cypis insists that every viewer must discover her particular, often peculiar pleasures for herself.

“Odalisque” struggles to fashion an image or notion of feminine bliss that has not been totally prescribed by (male) society. At the same time, it refrains from espousing any sort of biological determinism. The pleasures it addresses are always culturally sanctioned.

Cypis’ whispering pillow concisely outlines her approach and goals. It recounts, with a breathless but determined voice, a litany of fantasies and fears projected upon women by men. By claiming these characteristics--ranging from angel to whore, from mother to slut--as her own, the artist turns subjugation into empowerment.

It’s the same strategy Madonna uses when she turns usually demeaning stereotypes around on those who once controlled them and aggressively grabs pleasure and power for herself.

The power of Cypis’ installation resides in its ordinariness. Never flashy or dramatic, it proposes that every woman is in the best position to determine her most important needs and desires. By disentangling enslavement from empowerment, but never unraveling them altogether, “Odalisque” shows that when sexual pleasure is at stake, nothing is permanently defined or free of its possible undoing.

* Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, (213) 394-1210, through Wednesday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Myth Modernized: Modern technology and eternal processes converge in Lewis deSoto’s installation, “Songs of Menil.” His high-tech devices at Christopher Grimes Gallery orchestrate a contemporary version of the creation myth of the Cahuilla people--the indigenous population of a semidesert region in Southern California.

In the darkened main gallery, a swiftly spinning fan serves as a circular screen for a projected image of the moon. A two-inch-square video monitor, on the end of a swinging pendulum, displays a tiny conflagration. Hidden audio equipment amplifies the fan’s whirl and the flame’s roar, suggesting unseen forces of destruction exponentially more powerful than what is perceived.

Two open dictionaries, onto which spill droplets of black ink, complete DeSoto’s chamber by intimating that the movement from darkness to light is both ongoing and reversible. Mute incomprehension fuses with the clarity of knowledge in his compelling meditation on immanence and the unnameable.

In the back gallery, lights brighten and dim in a cycle like that of day and night. A stack of somewhat crumpled geographical maps rest on a table in the room’s center. As the lights go out, the maps become unreadable for a moment until one’s eyes adjust and perceive a softer light emanating from their undersides.

This warm glow transforms an abstract symbol of the landscape into a sensuous object. Like DeSoto’s installation as a whole, it makes visible that which usually remains insubstantial. Concepts and institutions dovetail with physical reality in his mesmerizing manifestation of the intangible.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 1644 17th St., Santa Monica, (213) 450-5962, through Oct. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.