ART REVIEWS : The Frightening Precision of Hauptman’s Work

Freud’s notion of the uncanny--the strange dwelling within the familiar--wraps itself around Susan Hauptman’s drawings at Tatischeff Gallery like a fur coat lined with shards of crystal.

No pair of subjects could be more familiar to those schooled in the history of art than the still life and the female body--both long-standing inhabitants of the realm of mute objects.

Yet neither could anything be stranger than the chilly clarity of Hauptman’s forms, the frightening precision with which shadows, textures, highlights and proportions are rendered in charcoal and the faintest touches of pastel.

That precision becomes yet more frightening when one determines that the woman in the pictures is the artist herself. For that woman--erotic, but not openly sensual, a ritualized, but never obsessive presence--is not mute but powerful, deftly resisting the voyeurism underlying even the most passive acts of spectatorship.

The self-portrait depicts a figure that is twice-removed from the viewer--once through the mirror, twice in the image. Hauptman places herself at a third remove by undermining the viewer’s faith in the imperatives of gender. A woman must be soft, pliant and accessible; a woman must be feminine. Hauptman, however, continually reinvents herself--as feminine, as masculine, as somewhere outside the exigencies of both.

Posing in a big, white picture hat and a crisp white bow at her waist, Hauptman is a parody of the ideal woman. Yet the camouflage pattern crawling across her dress and the small statuette of horse and rider at her side simultaneously play off of the well-rehearsed tropes of masculinity.

Most disturbing is Hauptman’s head, finely drawn beneath the hat’s capacious shadows, neatly shorn of hair, unsmiling, unblinking, androgynous. Nothing is concealed here--the shine on the nose, the freckles, the fine lines, the large ears--yet everything remains hidden. The image reveals all but it gives up nothing.

The theatricality of the drawings further displaces the viewer’s desire. In one particularly jarring image, the artist is positioned under a heavy sweep of drapery, cloaked in a shapeless garment whose hood conjures--and just as quickly mocks--the woman’s archetypal, flowing locks. Hauptman’s hand is placed across her heart in an exaggerated gesture of humility; her carefully buffed nails, however, disrupt the monastic fantasy, ensuring that ambiguity triumphs over legibility.

The still-life drawings are equally coy, miring an allegorical subtext in an intensely realized vision of ordinary objects. These arrangements of flowers, vases, fruit and toppled columns, however, do not rail against the viciousness of time, as do more traditional, allegorical still lifes. No more do Hauptman’s self-portraits preach against the folly of vanity. What they do suggest, like this crystalline work as a whole, is that realism is no guarantor of truth--merely the most obfuscatory guise of all.

* Susan Hauptman at Tatischeff Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, (310) 395-8807, through Feb. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Talking Media: The conflicting emotions most artists and intellectuals experience in relation to the mass media--love, disdain, dependence, resentment, surrender--provide the ostensible subject of “Easy Chair, Electric Chair,” a collaborative installation by Anne Bray and Molly Cleator at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Two motorized wheelchairs, each outfitted with a television set mounted at head height, perform a conversational pas de deux. While videotaped images of the two women engage in a dialogue about the media-saturated social environment, the chairs bearing those images rove around the gallery--nearly colliding, moving in sync, spinning apart, doubling back.

The viewer is invited to sit in any of the 165 chairs lining the circumference of the room, thus taking up--and abandoning at will--any number of metaphorical positions in relation to the discussion. The two artist-surrogates are less flexible. Each emerges as the representative of a fixed, ideological pole--Cleator, as defender/devotee of television, movies, and the like; Bray, as an impassioned enemy.

As such, the artists both embody and spout a cavalcade of cliches. Cleator, visualized on a color monitor and “sitting” on a chair upholstered in plush green fabric, finds National Public Radio “pretentious,” and television, which she watches every night after work while eating her dinner, “restful.”

Bray, visualized in black-and-white, her chair made of emphatically unadorned metal, worries about television, the “big-barreled rectangular cathode ray gun projecting 30,000 volts of electricity,” and blames the medium for the disappearance of “family, leftism and integration.”

Such postures--bereft of irony, self-criticism or nuance--serve not to stimulate reflection, but to close it off entirely. Of course, most ordinary conversations between friends are no more subtle, incisive or self-aware than this one. Yet Cleator and Bray want to have it both ways, exploiting the non-spectacular qualities of cinema verite , but doing so within a patently artificial, technologically sophisticated and highly theatrical context. The mix feels awkward.

The need for some sort of intervention is palpable. Though “Easy Chair, Electric Chair” is clearly an ambitious effort, it is ultimately unsuccessful, for it fails to ask new questions or to offer new approaches to the old but still very troubling ones.

* Anne Bray and Molly Cleator at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 390-0433, through Feb. 23. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Girl Talk: Do women have to be naked to get into New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art?

When the Guerrilla Girls, self-proclaimed “conscience of the art world,” wallpapered Soho and TriBeCa with a four-color poster asking that very question a few years ago, the answer was a resounding yes: fewer than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art rooms were women, but 85% of the nudes were female.

Things have improved--at the Met and elsewhere--since 1985, the year the Guerrilla Girls began slinking around New York’s downtown art world by night, armed with glue pots and posters, wearing hairy gorilla masks and, more often than not, lace stockings, to wage war against the sexism and racism pervading the art Establishment.

But things haven’t improved much--lip service paid (scantily) to feminism and multiculturalism notwithstanding. Sure, Mary Boone now shows five women at her notoriously white, male New York gallery; but only four women and two nonwhite people have been included in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest blockbuster, “Helter-Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s.”

“Guerrilla Girls Talk Back,” an important retrospective at Loyola Marymount University of the New York group’s work from 1985-1990, insists upon the question of tactics: how best to promote awareness, and thereby, to effect change?

Much of the post-conceptual art of the last 10 years, which has taken on the institutional apparatus that perpetuates the myth of the great, white, male genius, has opted for a highly abstruse, theoretical approach. The Guerrilla Girls, like Gran Fury and other artist-activist coalitions, have adopted a more populist strategy, using the methods of advertising and the mass media, rather than the tenets of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, to play their message to a broader public.

The notion of a “proper” strategy, however, is as insidious as the complex of problems itself. The tyranny of so-called “political correctness,” in fact, is one of the prime targets of the masked women--thus, the insistence upon the word girls , the lace stockings and the coy poses.

There is, however, nothing coy or indirect about the woeful statistics their posters have provided us with--”No female black painter or sculptor has been in a Whitney Biennial since 1973”; “Women artists earn only one-third of what male artists do.” Until these names and numbers have changed significantly, the work of the Guerrilla Girls will be necessary. This show should be required viewing for all those with a professional (read: economic) stake in art--critics, curators, dealers, collectors--and all those who just like looking at it.

* Guerrilla Girls at Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Loyola Blvd. at W. 80th St., Westchester, (310) 338-2880, through Feb. 29. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays.

Freezing the Moment: A .30-caliber bullet traveling at 2,800 feet per second rips through a jack of diamonds, leaving an S-shaped slice--as finely ground as chalk dust--suspended between the two halves. A drop of milk splashes against a red background, forming a coronet as still and white as one carved of porcelain. A diver flips backward off a board, transmuting from an athlete at work into a multiple-exposure illustration of the ineluctable geometry of motion.

The remarkable photographs of Harold Edgerton, best-known as the inventor of the electronic flash, occupy the tendentious space where the imperatives of science meet those of art. Edgerton has vociferously denied that his work is art, insisting that he developed the stroboscope, the multi-flash and the microsecond image not to further an aesthetic agenda, but to freeze movement. The antecedents of such a project include Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotography and Eadweard Muybridge’s human and animal locomotion studies.

Yet Edgerton’s imagery, however reluctantly, resonates as powerfully with the experiments of Cubism and Futurism. This is, of course, no coincidence; Edgerton’s concerns, both in MIT’s electrical engineering laboratories and in his show at Paul Kopeikin Gallery, coincide with those of Modernism, whose perpetually revolving “isms” have long strived toward an impossible dream--the “new” vision that would provide miraculous access to truth.

Truth is elusive--even at an exposure of one-millionth of a second. But these photographs insist that beauty is not. A shadowgram captures a bullet piercing a piece of Plexiglas, the shock waves and hot gases made visible by the refraction of light around them. But what do most of us really see? The “truth” of motion laid bare, as Edgerton would have it? Or a finely wrought abstraction, juxtaposing lines and curves, light and shadow?

The latter is far more likely, especially in an art gallery, where we come primed for artistic revelation, and technophobia is more the rule than the exception. What Edgerton’s photographs demonstrate, in any case, is the difficulty of demystifying science, and even more so, the difficulty of demystifying art.

* Harold Edgerton at Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 876-7033, through Feb. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.