ART REVIEWS : History of Modern ‘Nude’ Photography

“Figure/Form: The Nude in 20th Century Photography” is a textbook-quality exhibition. That is, of course, a rather backhanded compliment. Impressive in scope, the exhibition at Jan Kesner Gallery features work by more than 40 photographers, ranging from the hazy romanticism of Edward Steichen’s early pictorialist endeavors to the matter-of-fact eroticism of Sally Mann’s 1990 shot of her nude daughter at play. But “Figure/Form” is ideologically waterlogged. What it celebrates is a history of modern photography written on the body of a naked woman.

There’s a picture of innocence (Arthur F. Kales), a picture of alienation (Bill Brandt), a surrealist-style distortion (Andre Kertesz), a solarization (Konrad Cramer), a network of fine lines (Harry Callahan), an apocalyptic mushroom cloud (Robert Heinecken) and so on. The female nude is metaphorized, rotated, reversed, permutated and, in the process, consecrated as the privileged site of avant-garde experimentation. Rather than questioning why women’s bodies have so cavalierly been transmuted into the stuff of art, this exhibition confers historical legitimacy on the phenomenon.

The gallery is clearly aware of the difficulties inherent in such a show. To that end, “Figure/Form” features several images of nude men. Some are classical anatomical studies; most trace a homoerotic lineage, which extends from George Platt Lynes to Bruce Bellas (“Bruce of Los Angeles”).

Neither is the work of women photographers entirely ignored. An allegorical image by pictorialist Anne Brigman (1908), a beautiful series of nudes in landscape settings by Imogen Cunningham (1916), a geometrized nude by Trude Fleischmann (l926) and a group of solarizations by Marta Hoepffner (1940) are among the works on display. A great service is done in redressing the consignment of women to art historical oblivion.

Yet, if the exhibition is indeed sensitive to the issues at stake, why showcase the particularly offensive images of William Mortenson, which embody the twin poles of women’s oppression? In “Morocco” (circa 1930s), Mortenson represents woman as exoticized spectacle; hiding behind the ostensibly neutral mask of the ethnographer, he offers us a dark-skinned pin-up in the guise of a natural history lesson.

In “Woman With Statue” (circa 1950), the eroticized spectacle is recast: A ridiculously nubile young woman, a cloth draped coyly over her lap, is paired with a headless nude statue, as if to insist that this brand of exploitation is little different from the greatest achievements of classical art. If the show means to highlight these images as kitschy curiosities, the wrong frame has been chosen. In this context, Mortenson’s work appears perfectly logical and consistent.

“Figure/Form” is noteworthy insofar as it gathers together some of the more interesting--and in many cases underexposed--photographs of this century. In its unequivocal embrace of the nude body as an appropriate subject for art, it stakes out an oppositional position in relation to the current epidemic of censorship. Yet the exhibition is blind to the psychological and sociopolitical reasons as to why the body that gets embraced is almost always female--and to the ramifications thereof.

These are the questions which need to be posed; for them, we must await another exhibition.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through April 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Hollywood’s Women: That which is repressed returns with an ear-splitting vengeance in Kathe Burkhart’s screechy, hysterical, defiant and utterly compelling paintings on view at Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

Selected from her “Liz Taylor” series, an ongoing project begun in 1983, these images take as their immediate subject the velvet-voiced, violet-eyed Movie Star, an MGM-manufactured icon and perennial survivor.

But their real subject is the nefarious way in which Hollywood encodes and then peddles the concept of the feminine. Hollywood teaches men to desire violet eyes, long lashes, wasp waists, white skin and red lips; Hollywood teaches women to identify with the object of male desire. Burkhart’s intentionally assaultive images--executed in garish colors, gold leaf, bits of contact paper and fake fur--chew up and spit out those lessons, angrily refusing such objectifications, nastily resisting their identifications.

The images are composed of two elements: repainted publicity or production stills culled from Taylor’s many films, with an eye toward the excessive and melodramatic and, layered over them, slang words or epithets, mostly scatalogical references to the female anatomy.

The result is a literally impossible marriage between the lady and the tramp, the victim and the rebel. Taylor is the perfect choice for such an intervention into the cultural representation of women because she already embodies contradiction: In her persona, the public is indistinguishable from the private, and the pendulum is perpetually swinging from goddess to grotesque.

The flip side of goddess may indeed be the loud-mouthed witch. But at least the latter can play the sadist as well as she plays the masochist. If femininity is indeed a masquerade, then these images suggest that it’s high time for women to seize control, to manipulate the masquerade to their own ends.

* Shoshana Wayne, Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, (310) 458-1290, through March 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.