Penelope Krebs: A Surfeit of Surfaces

How is one to speak of Penelope Krebs’ formalist abstractions? What are the satisfactions provided by these opaque surfaces, by their thick vertical stripes laid side to side, edges sharply defined, tart colors carefully orchestrated?

Certainly not the cerebral satisfactions offered by an artist-polemicist like Sherrie Levine, whose well-known re-creations of generic Modernist abstractions are uncannily similar to Krebs’ own post-Postmodern paintings. While Levine takes a critical position toward modernism, pointing out the irony of its seasonal glorification of the latest (male) artist-genius, Krebs moves backward with grim determination, acting out the entire litany of hackneyed formalist tropes--but doing so with blinders on.

Here, figure is indistinguishable from ground, as the back-to-back stripes (Krebs prefers to call them bands , thus insisting upon their non-referentiality) extend from edge to canvas edge. And here, surface triumphs resolutely over depth, the images aggressively frontal, their sides left deliberately unpainted so as to deny painting’s objecthood. With each of these well-rehearsed moves, Krebs slips deeper into the master’s mantle. But how far can one go in borrowed clothes? Under what circumstances is such a retreat possible? And, most crucially, what are the stakes?

To watch Krebs’ admittedly skilled performance, one would think that there are none. But of course there are, and they are far greater than she is willing to allow.

Krebs’ work begs the question of what art is supposed to do, only to argue that art need only be. But if art claims a Modernist patrimony, then what it need be, necessarily, is different. Strangely oblivious to Modernism’s allegiance to--indeed predication upon--the notion of originality, Krebs is caught in a double bind of her own devising. The only satisfaction her work finally offers, then, is that of familiarity; and in this context, for this viewer, familiarity, though it doesn’t quite breed contempt, generates serious disappointment.

Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave.;(213) 655-2482. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through Dec. 21.

A Dogged Dynasty: William Wegman’s latest batch of glossy Polaroids at Linda Cathcart Gallery look suspiciously like Ralph Lauren advertisements. Ah, the high-ticket joys of country living--rustic cabins in the Maine woods, lazy afternoons spent bicycling down verdant paths or canoeing on the ice-blue lake, evenings gathered around the stone hearth, fire blazing, contentment oozing.

Only instead of long-limbed, fine-boned blondes enacting the bucolic fantasy, Wegman offers his long-limbed Weimaraner, Fay Ray, accompanied by a convoy of her equally attractive relatives--daughters Battina and Crookie, cousin Chundo, and so on down the doggy dynasty.

Their patriarchal predecessor, the magnificent Man Ray, collaborated with Wegman on a variety of videos, sequential black-and-white photos and Polaroids from 1970 until his death in 1982. No mere animal, Man Ray could metamorphose from a Virgin of the Annunciation, cloaked in flour and beatitude, to a John Chamberlain galvanized steel sculpture, wrapped in a plastic garbage bag. In years past, Fay Ray has upheld the family tradition, posing her svelte brown body in front of a red backdrop to mimic a Mark Rothko painting, curling into a ball as twisted and near-abstract as one of Edward Weston’s anthropomorphic peppers, or simply modeling--with show-stopping pride--one of Oscar de la Renta’s latest creations.

Sometimes the work fails, evoking laughter as canned as that elicited by Miss Piggy calendar-style pastiches. On other occasions, Wegman has produced highly sophisticated work that interrogates the philosophically inscribed antipathy between nature and culture, as well as the peculiarly sadomasochistic alliance--long a constant in both art and advertising--between artist and model.

In the 24 photographs on exhibit, Wegman goes one step further, erasing the perceived distance between art and advertising by exposing both as well-tuned machines selling not things, but desire. Fay may look silly in her red-checkered dress; but she is no more an oddity in her country chic garb and setting than are Ralph Lauren’s ruddy-cheeked models.

Last year, it was doggy Dada; this year, it’s the American (pooch’s) dream. Though each time it’s packaged differently, the product is always the same--and ever out of reach. In laying bare this truth, Wegman’s pastoral images--soft-focus and all--are surprisingly, if emphatically, unsentimental.

Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica; (310) 451-1121. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through Dec. 31.

Teen Trauma: The last time we caught up with Billy, a kid growing up in the Midwest in the 1960s and the star of Jim Shaw’s encyclopedic saga of teen-age torment, “My Mirage,” he had experienced the carefree pleasures of pre-pubescence, the first pangs of adolescent desire, endless hours analyzing the crusted surfaces of a zit-studded face, drug-induced stupors in which he contemplated the fustian lyrics of acid-rock songs, life in a cult and, finally, the born-again Christian’s self-satisfied state of grace.

Now on view at Linda Cathcart Gallery are the final nine images from Shaw’s capacious mixed-media work, in which we find our (anti)hero taking to the pulpit as Rev. Billy, reaching out to legions of addle-headed youth (“Jimi Hendrix never learned from his experience. He burned the midnite candle like Jim Morrison, who asked us to light his fire . . .”) who have lamentably strayed from the fold.

Here, Shaw is as catholic as ever, borrowing with gleeful abandon from the “low” vernacular of Mad magazine-style illustrations, psychedelic album covers and superhero comic books, as well as the “high” styles of Blake, Magritte and Dali--while confounding the codified distinctions between them in the process.

It’s all part of a grand-slam leveling operation that refuses to privilege youth as a liminal state of wise innocence, nor adulthood as a sober period of hard-won rationality. If Archie, Betty, Veronica and Reggie can enact the epic struggle between good and evil, then what makes Christian revelation any more viable? This deliberate--and not incidentally cynical--erasure of difference is in many ways the great strength of the anti-romantic “My Mirage.” But it is also its most nagging weakness; for if nothing has the power to save us, then why do we need art?

Linda Cathcart Gallery . Through Dec. 31.

What’s News?: What’s black and white and re(a)d all over? Certainly not the newspapers--the San Francisco Chronicle, to be precise--that dominate Dawn Fryling’s minimal assemblages at Christopher Grimes Gallery. Rolled into discrete tubes, folded neatly into quarters, or stacked into knee-high piles, the newspapers are adroitly maneuvered into steel shelves to conceal their reams of text. No longer suppliers of information--their original function utterly confounded--these babbling, ink-stained pages are recast as the mute stuff of art.

Well, not exactly. If the newspapers are not meant to be read, neither are they meant to function as silently incidental objects, expedient purely for their formal qualities. The daily newspaper, in any case, does not derive its ideological weight from what it says; its power lies in its omnipresence, its oppressive inevitability. When Fryling manipulates the newspaper physically, she mimics the way the media play off this inevitability to manipulate us psychically, the way its insidious ubiquity convinces us to equate this week’s party line with the gospel truth. But she doesn’t carry the critique far enough, leaving too many important questions unanswered.

Why the San Francisco Chronicle? Why the choice of particular dates? Why the resistance to revealing selective bits of text in order to facilitate the work’s political agenda?

On at least one occasion, Fryling hints at what such a strategy might accomplish. Here, she juxtaposes one shelf containing a rolled-up length of fence with another piled high with folded newspapers, a map delineating Yugoslavia’s borders barely visible along the papers’ rough edges. The piece suggests the way that the media, like a nation’s border, are in the business of limits, containment and crowd control.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 1644 17th, Santa Monica, (310) 450-5962. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through Dec. 28.