ART REVIEWS : Representative Work From Dunning

There is a photograph of a young woman with long, dark hair. She concentrates on something in the distance, but not too intensely; she is attractive, but not unusually so. This portrait is a conventional image (large color print, three-quarter view) of a rather conventional-looking woman. Until one approaches it more closely, that is. Then--and there--one is confronted by an unexpected sight: a series of long, dark hairs sprouting matter-of-factly from the woman’s chin and cheeks, falling softly upon her seemingly oblivious face.

The photograph may be cruel; it is certainly unrelenting. But as in the rest of the work in Jeanne Dunning’s startling exhibition at Roy Boyd Gallery, things are not so simple. This image works not merely to confirm fears about the body--our hesitation, even panic, in the face of its imperfections--but more profoundly, to question the very idea of the body.

Dunning shoves signifiers of defect, decay and death in (and sometimes on) our collective face. Photographs depict a disembodied arm holding up a pulpy, red, form (a kidney? a liver? a piece of undifferentiated tissue?). Flesh-tinted sheets of neoprene latex are neatly laid out on white podiums, each sheet marked with a minor flaw: a dark black “mole”; a cluster of faint, spidery “veins”; a just-ready-to-burst “blemish.”

Most unnerving is a trio of photographs--the “Untitled Holes.” Here, Dunning depicts three raw, purplish, striated surfaces, each with a small opening at its center. Simultaneously beautiful and horrible, the images seem to reference the anal orifice. In this, they make explicit a subtext of this work as a whole: the AIDS epidemic, and the image of body it has engendered--fragmented, brutalized and intensely vulnerable.

That these photographs do not, in fact, represent body parts, but rather close-ups of plums whose stems have been pulled out--leaving behind deep, dark cavities--complicates the matter of interpretation. On one level, this switch-trick recasts the series as a parody of the manner in which we tend to read sexual imagery into all manner of flora and fauna.

On a deeper level, this masquerade conjures the larger question of artifice, a question that resonates throughout this body of work. For like the “Untitled Holes,” the hairs on the woman’s face are a fiction; they have clearly been affixed with adhesive, just as the “moles,” “blemishes” and “veins” have been fabricated out of colored rubber.

What we are dealing with, then, are representations that have been explicitly coded as representations. Unlike Diane Arbus and her twisted heir, Joel-Peter Witkin, who seek out and exploit nature’s “grotesques,” Dunning creates her own. Like Cindy Sherman, whose horrific self-portraits work to denaturalize the notion of a “feminine” identity, Dunning wants to insist that the body is not a seamless, flawless, unmistakable unity. It is--much like the “feminine” and the “masculine”--a construct, fashioned out of spare parts, misrecognition, fears and fantasy.

Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-1210, ends June 6. Closed Sundays-Mondays.

Trapped Behind Bars: Entering into “Big Confusing Ideas,” Richard Jackson’s current installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, feels like nothing so much as stepping into a universal pricing bar code.

As everyone but our President seems to be aware, these ubiquitous black-and-white striped configurations--printed on supermarket inventory ranging from toilet paper to baby food--epitomize the cheerful efficiency and mind-numbing dehumanization endemic to late capitalism. What Jackson has created is a massive black-and-white striped environment that mimics the bar codes’ mechanized order, an environment keyed to a language wherein meaning is hidden, truth is taken on faith, and machines control our every move.

With black-and-white striped walls, concentric steel-barred corridors wrapping around the perimeter of the room and, in the center, 22 black-and-white striped figures rotating on their horizontal and vertical axes, “Big Confusing Ideas” crosses the cage with the maze, the circus with the asylum, and the trap with the lure. As one moves in and through the installation, what sets in is a nearly overwhelming sense of panic.

In this, it offers a perfect follow-up to Jackson’s “Big Time Ideas,” shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent “Helter Skelter.” A small, dark room filled with 1,000 stenciled clocks whose mechanisms were buried deep within the walls, furiously shaken every 60 seconds as 1,000 minute hands reached their predetermined destinations in concert, “Big Time Ideas” evoked terrors both visual and visceral.

In “Big Confusing Ideas,” the viewer becomes that automated minute hand, tracing the increasingly dizzying circumference of the room, stuck somewhere inside its inexorable machinery. Art, however, is all about make-believe, and as such we always have the option to escape. The power of this installation--and Jackson’s work in general--is that it forces us to see that in “real” life, the way out is far less clearly marked.

Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., (310) 399-0433, ends June 28. Closed Mondays-Tuesdays.