ART REVIEWS : Skewering Institutional Myths

If the target of much of the deconstructive art and criticism of the last 15 years has been the (male) Artist-Genius, sanctified creator of the original masterpiece, it has likewise been the institutional apparatus that supports and perpetuates this troubling myth.

Like an octopus, that apparatus encompasses the gallery, the collector, the art historian, and the critics. The attempts to assail it have been varied. Peter Nagy photocopies maps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stamping each wing with the logos of the corporations who have sponsored exhibitions there, shattering the notion of the museum as an ideologically neutral zone. Louise Lawler takes photographs of artworks displayed in collectors’ homes, stressing their preeminent role as signifiers of class (upper) and taste (cultivated).

Stephen Prina has long been at the forefront of such a critical practice. It is no accident that he chose the color green for the series, “Monochrome Painting” (1988-89), on exhibition at Luhring, Augustine Hetzler; green, after all, is the color of money, and money is what art in the late 20th Century has been all about.

Prina uses this conceit to examine the way in which the work of art is presented to and received by its audience. To this end, the catalogue, the announcement card, and the advertising poster--all designed in the same shade of green as the 14 paintings in the series-- are crucial; when art is a commodity, packaging is an art.

In “Exquisite Corpse” (1989), Prina uses the catalogue raisonee, the “complete” record of the artist’s ouevre, to undermine our conviction in the scientific nature of the art historical project, our faith in the stability and objectivity of those systems that represent the artist to and for us; Prina reminds us that all the art historian does, after all, is pick over corpses in various states of decay.

In his latest work, “Galerie Max Hetzler,” Prina takes on the gallery, the ahistorical “white cube” designed to magically fade away in the presence of the resplendent, transcendent art object. Max Hetzler’s 17-year history is documented with nine architectural models (referring to its various locations); 163 black and white photographs (shots of each exhibition the gallery has mounted); and stenciled on the wall, the sentence: “We Represent Ourselves to the World.”

This sentence, however, is difficult to read for the letters are splintered. What Prina means to suggest here, as in “Exquisite Corpse,” is the impossibility of unbroken history. That history is invariably riddled with lacunae is emphasized in the many gray-washed images interspersed with the installation shots; they represent those exhibitions that the gallery never recorded, those events that are lost to history.

The work is, as always, smart and rigorous. But it is successful only up to a point. For in transferring the exhibition from its original location in Germany (in the very space it was designed to interrogate) to Max Hetzler’s Santa Monica branch, the critique sacrifices its site-specificity, losing much of its bite in the process.

The nature of that “bite,” in any case, must continually be reassessed. How far apart is criticism from complicity? Is it possible to deconstruct a system in which one is wholly enmeshed? Is there any hope for escape? Any desire? This work wisely does not attempt to answer these largely rhetorical questions; but it makes certain that they are always at issue. Herein lies its unmistakable importance.

Stephen Prina at Luhring, Augustine Hetzler, 1330 4th St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-3964. Closed Sunday and Monday. Through Feb. 29.

Expressive Colors: Until 1976, when William Eggleston showed a portfolio of dye-transfer prints at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, color photography was considered the untouchable province of Kodak-wielding amateurs. Color was superfluous to the image’s structural integrity, “serious” photographers argued; it was too decorative, too distracting.

Buoyed by the trend toward realism in painting and sculpture, however, and the recognition that color could serve as a powerful element not merely of description but of expression, color photography began to come into its own in the mid-1970s. With the 30 images on display at Turner/Krull, dating from 1971 to the present, Eggleston reveals why he continues to rank as one of its most skilled practitioners.

A bouffant-haired woman in a navy-blue dress sits on a yellow curb, a row of suburban houses lined up behind her. Staring directly at the viewer, she begins to raise her left arm, threatening to upset the pile of papers stacked carefully in her lap. In a garish, neo-Baroque interior, a small boy sits in a fancy wingback chair. His hands are clasped theatrically over his head; a woman’s disembodied hands clutch a 5 p.m. cocktail. The scene is shrouded in a phenomenal shade of green.

In these images, Eggleston frames abstruse allegories in undiluted primary colors. In others, he exploits the vicissitudes of natural light to reveal the extraordinary nature of ordinary forms--a ceiling fan, a gravel path, a white wall against the deep blue sky.

Eggleston occasionally lapses into the sentimental, which is not surprising considering the beauty he has the capacity to so casually conjure. In one dye-transfer print from 1971, an old blue truck is parked in a driveway, partially concealed by a lacy scrim of lavender wisteria; the image is gorgeous, but vapid. In another photo of the same year, Eggleston offers a basket of blue flowers affixed to a gray door. As a study of tonalities it is brilliant; as a photograph it is limp. But these are, in the end, small quibbles. At a time in art’s historywhen solicitations to the mind are more abundant than appeals to the eye, Eggleston’s work is indeed welcome.

William Eggleston at Turner/Krull, 9006 Melrose Ave., (213) 271-1536. Closed Sunday and Monday. Through Feb. 1.

Fire Sale: For shopaholics, January is the best month of the year because everything goes on sale. And why should art be any different? That’s the question posed by James Trivers, whose work is on display at Newspace--at drastically reduced prices.

This is not the first time Trivers has offered two paintings for the price of one. With each of the images in “The History of Art in 3D” (“Monet/Manet in 3D,” “Delacroix/David in 3D,” and so on), Trivers offered an oddly configured composition and, once the handy celluloid glasses were in place, a perfectly resolved 3D collage of key images from the annals of Western art--a canny critique of the way mass culture appropriates, revitalizes and ultimately homogenizes those images.

The new work is structured neither around the double art object nor the third dimension, but the notion of the sale. Price lists with dangling red tags are posted at the front of the gallery. So, too, is a pair of attention-getting red towels emblazoned with the words “January Sale.” But the elaborate conceit hangs there like a frame surrounding the wrong picture; the individual works that follow don’t offer the conceptual payoff for which we have been primed.

These paintings on plywood--striped to resemble wood paneling--depict mallards, a brick fireplace, a big fish, madras plaid and White Label Scotch. Trivers seems to want to link the sale, the middle-class leisure activity par excellence, to these other bourgeois accouterments. But the connection remains tenuous. In any case, the work misfires because the shoppers to which it is directed--even at its new “bargain” prices--are hardly middle-income. “January Sale” ends up an unhappily elitist endeavor.

Accompanying the paintings is a suite of 16 collages Trivers calls “Barbie’s Politically Correct Slumber Party.” The title is a great tease, but it is ultimately baffling. What is politically correct about photocopying and then arranging cut-up images from a Barbie coloring book? Is it simply the act of packing up a problematic representation of the feminine ideal? It’s a fun piece, to be sure, but like the rest of the show, bogged down by an overwrought and underutilized title.

James Trivers at Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-1120. Closed Sunday and Monday. Through Feb. 15.

Banal, Profound and Absurd: Like a Gideon Bible tucked into a drawer in a sleazy motel room, Raymond Pettibon’s pen and ink drawings at Robert Berman Gallery mix up the banal, the profound and the absurd. A red heart hovers disconsolately on the page, like a diagram in a science manual--”Which for translation pants,” pleads the handwritten text. Two people look into each other’s eyes, a cross between Goya and the illustrations in 1930s pulps--”I shall retain not your name, but your story,” says one to the enraptured other.

As an allegory of the artist as cannibal, the latter image is stunningly self-conscious. For in forging his own idiom--by turns hysteric, poetic, cryptic and divine--Pettibon digests and reinvents the heterogenous languages of film noir , Freudian psychoanalysis, dime-store novellas, adult comic books, Shakespeare and Joyce.

If Pettibon is a voracious consumer, he is also an astoundingly prolific producer. His drawings cover the gallery’s four walls in incoherent splendor. Yet Pettibon is coy. “The perfect waves in my head fall with a flatness on the paper,” reads one image, illustrated with a watery spill of blue ink. “It’s a pity it aches so because I want to write,” reads another. If there’s anything Pettibon can do, it is write and draw, drawing us into his seductive if desultory world.

Raymond Pettibon at Robert Berman, 2044 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-9195. Closed Sunday and Monday. Through Feb. 29.