ART REVIEW : Andre Kertesz: Polemicist for the Postmodern Era

One of the most remarkable things about this exhibition of vintage and modern photographs by Andre Kertesz is the extent to which the consummate modernist proves himself an oddly premonitory polemicist for the postmodern.

Along with contemporaries Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai, Kertesz has long been celebrated as a master of the “decisive moment”--that split-second when a particular confluence of forms reaches its most evocative state.

“Satiric Dancer” (1926) is an extraordinary image of a woman metamorphosing into a sea creature--reclining on a chaise lounge, her limbs as strangely and softly pointed as the rays of a starfish. Viewed from above while covered by an obscuring blanket of snow, “Washington Square at Night” (1956) devolves into an abstract composition of attenuated white lines.

“The Concierge’s Dog” (1926) juxtaposes a bird safely caught in an elaborate, wrought-iron bird-cage with a dog nearly scrambling over a balcony’s ornamental railing.

This exhibition, however, insists upon the extent to which such “decisive moments” are not quasi-mystical freaks of nature, accidentally beheld by a fortunate photographer-as-witness, but skillfully wrought fabrications, representations of a reality that exists only in and through the artist’s well-trained eye.

A beautiful but rather prosaic view of the city from above--tall buildings, narrow spires, flat rooftops--is quite literally shattered by a crack in the photographic plate in one startling work from 1929.

The image is thus revealed not as the canonical (if broken) “window onto the world,” not as a transparent truth, but as an opaque construction marked, in this case, by an incriminating black hole.

Even more startling is “My Desk Still Life” (1959), which depicts a newspaper clipping, an old letter addressed to Kertesz, and a triangular pane of glass. Here, the photographer counter-poses three warring orders of representation--the photograph, the painting and the ever-elusive “real.”

For his own photograph is expressly designed to mimic the trompe l’oeil painting, which itself aspires to a photographically-derived transcription of the “real.”

With their uncanny sensitivity to what would later become the tropes of postmodern theory, Kertesz’ photographs lend credence to the notion that postmodernism is not an end-game strategy, but a tendency built into the seemingly unassailable structure of Modernism itself.

* G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 910 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-5558. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through Nov. 26.