ART REVIEWS : Feats of Feminist Anger

An average woman walking on high heels exerts more than two tons of weight per square inch on her heel with every step. Gaza Bowen’s high heels, however, aren’t meant to be worn; they are, after all, made of dish mops, plastic scrubbies, miniature clothespins, detergent bottles, kitchen sponges and rubber gloves.

What Bowen’s impeccably designed, painstakingly crafted wardrobe of slippers, sandals, mules and pumps at Couturier Gallery are meant to do instead is symbolize the position of women under patriarchy, trapped between sex-kittenhood and household drudgery; and, to insist upon that position as an impossible fit, much like the shoes of 88% of the women surveyed by the New York Times: at least one size too small.

“Shoes for the Angry Little Woman” is the most vociferous work in the show. Constructed from pieces of red and silver leather, jeweled potato-peelers, turkey lacers and kitchen stiletto “heels,” these ankle-strap “shoes” rest on a white doily sweetly embroidered with butcher knives, inside a “house” made of shish-kebob skewers interlaced with thorny vines. As objects, they are exquisite. As statements, they are chilling, exposing woman’s complicity in femininity’s great masquerade and encapsulating the often self-directed rage that unsurprisingly results.

Less successful is “Caste Off,” in which found metal objects--rusted pull-tabs, discarded beer tops, etc.--are molded into an exceedingly unglamorous ankle boot. In this context, such a one-shot comment about the legions of women (and men) living in poverty on the street comes off as dangerously flippant.

Bowen’s “Shoe Show” indeed flirts with flippancy--the “Shoes for the Natural Little Woman” feature wooden clothespins and raffia scrub brushes; the “American Dream Shoes” are decorated with “buckles” of miniature detergent boxes. Yet, the work is far from trifling, disrupting the hierarchy that subjugates crafts to fine art and the ideology that has served to relegate women to a lesser status within the realm of cultural production.

The real difficulty of “The Shoe Show” is that it cannot escape its own place within the voracious logic of the commodity. Bowen’s shoes are, in the end, remarkably similar to those manufactured by Ferragamo or Florsheim. Like department store inventory, they play to a particular psychopathology--insecurity coupled with narcissism. The difference is that, as art objects, they are infinitely more expensive.

This is, nevertheless, important work. Bowen’s custom-designed stilettos still cut right down to the quick.

Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-5557, through May 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Antic Meditations: The rigorous, no-nonsense systems at the heart of Conceptual art are twisted inside-out, upside-down and right-side up again in M.H.Smith’s seemingly elastic and often fantastic work, on view at Jan Baum Gallery.

An old folk adage--”Red on Black, Friend of Jack/Red on Yellow, Kill a Fellow”--provides the nonsensical point of departure for these paintings and photo-constructions. Rhymed couplets are written out in the appropriate colors and framed; are stamped onto a wooden frame surrounding a noose spattered with red, yellow and black paint; and, are spelled out with Scrabble tiles and hidden behind a thick screen of mesh.

A playing-card genealogy is traced out on a field of black velvet. A red, yellow and black spiral winds across a square of Astroturf propped up on truncated red, yellow and black legs. And, an army of cookie-cutters dipped in red, yellow and black paint are arranged in stacked rows.

Smith traffics in recombined colors, rotated images, permutated forms and mutated puns. What they add up to is not merely a demonstration of the inexhaustibility of the well-conceived system, but an allegory about the indefatigability of the artist. Yet, what ends does such a body of work, such a demonstration, such an allegory serve--besides its own?

Artists too visibly intoxicated by their own inventiveness take serious risks. Instead of dazzling, they can bewilder; instead of challenging, they can annoy. Smith manages to do neither. He teeters on the brink of solipsism, but two things save him: an acute self-consciousness about his own project, and his position in a historical continuum that still prizes the Promethean genius above all else.

Shot through this antic meditation on artistic creativity are references to the Promethean “heroes” of Abstract Expressionism: drips and veils of multicolored paint that recall Jackson Pollock, and wide bands of primary colors that conjure Barnett Newman. Suddenly, the inescapable couplet “Red on Black . . .” becomes less a child’s rhyme than an adult story of anxiety, influence, competition and jealousy, the unspoken subtext of the creative process and the history of art.

In this story, Smith plays the dual role of eager acolyte, ready to embrace invention at all costs, and trenchant critic, well aware of the problems thereof. Undoubtedly, there will be more to come.

Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through May 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A Multiplicity of Moods: Ironic, elegiac, glib, confrontational and completely silly--not necessarily in that order, and certainly not all at once, but by turns--Zizi Raymond’s mediation of the politics of the feminine is marked by a profoundly nervous energy.

In one corner of the Dorothy Goldeen Gallery is a cheerleader with pom-poms overhead, cast in silver and mounted on a red cross--a tongue-in-cheek martyr to the stasis of suburban sex roles. In another corner is a photo-mural of a forest in autumn, a young girl’s white dress latticed into the photographic paper, winding in and out of the fallen leaves--a haunting metaphor for the girl-child’s vulnerability.

The rapid and repeated shifts in mood record the immense difficulties of negotiating an artistic identity, especially for a female artist. But Raymond’s jittery assemblages come a little too close to enacting the myth of the hysterical woman--not intentionally, in order to pull it apart from within, but by default.

This work is frustrating, and never more so than when Raymond gets it absolutely right. In “Pipe Dreams,” she restages a well-known painting by Magritte. Subtitled with the words, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”), a picture of a pipe is replaced with an actual pipe and, wafting up out of it, a woman’s white lace nightgown, as diaphanous as billowing puffs of smoke.

What Raymond seems to be interrogating is Freud’s notion that the artist creates in order to gain “honor, power and the love of women.” More broadly, the work elucidates the degree to which patriarchal language--the language of art included--is overlayed with and inextricable from a certain fantasy of woman.

Unlike the other work exhibited here, “Pipe Dreams” can be described neither in a single adjective nor reduced to a single mood. It solicits multiple readings. Despite this open-endedness, it feels deliberate rather than hurried. In this, it provides Raymond with a model for future work.

Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 1547 9th St., Santa Monica, (310) 273-0603, through May 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Grist for Camera Lens: Since l957, Bernd and Hilla Becher have been taking black-and-white photographs of industrial structures--cooling towers, blast furnaces, coal bunkers, water towers--pitting individual against type and nostalgia against impassivity. Unlike American photographers Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, whose finely rendered images implicitly hailed the glories of the machine age, the German-born Bechers are uninterested in praise. If their coolly analytical, insistently frontal photographs at Daniel Weinberg Gallery celebrate anything, it is the wonder of the surface, the shimmering beauty of the photographic image disengaged from the information it contains.

Obsessive in execution and conceptual in orientation, this on-going series suppresses the anecdotal facts typical of documentary photography: backgrounds, figures, interactions and so on. At the same time that it resists the photograph’s perhaps inevitable rootedness in a particular time and place, the series’ attention to such formal structures as the unlikely geometries of cylindrical towers, metal pipes, riveted trusses and wooden planks never comes at the cost of the photograph’s iconic presence. This work embodies the tensions between realism and abstraction, the uneasy nexus into which photography was born.

However literal, the works open themselves up to metaphor. The top-heavy water towers conjure mausoleums, mushroom clouds, space ships and the visionary architecture of Neo-Classical France and even Nazi Germany. The split between the utopian and the dystopian underlines the Bechers’ ambiguity about technology’s promise and society’s failure. Both are grist for the photographers’ relentlessly cataloguing eye.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0180, through May 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays.