ART REVIEWS : The Labyrinthine Mind of Illusionist Fred Fehlau

Fred Fehlau’s latest body of work gets things backward, sideways, upside-down and inside-out. His cylindrical paintings, wall-works that flip-flop from one side to the other, and unstretched canvas that literally can be entered from two sides make these “mistakes” with a devilish sense of purpose. The 33-year-old artist’s exhibition at Burnett Miller Gallery shows him to be making some of the best work of his career.

Over the last five years, Fehlau has managed to merge aspects of Minimalism and Conceptualism in disorienting works that share elements of both but cannot be reduced to either. His pristine pieces are minimal in their insistence that everything essential to art be experienced in the here-and-now of its physical presence. They are conceptual in their contention that nothing escapes the logic of deferral and displacement, in which experiences and things are never wholly present to their viewers.

“No It Can,” Fehlau’s double-hinged door that extends 10 feet from the gallery wall at eye level, physically illustrates the mechanics at work in his highly analytical art. Like a label for a painting that has not only taken over the wall but also has usurped the viewer’s space, this gravity-defying panel aggressively engages the body as well as the mind. Across both sides of its galvanized steel surface, Fehlau has spelled out a phrase that is clear but extremely difficult to read. Its letters are printed as if they are to be read from the other side--as if the metal was a window. Swinging the door-like object back and forth only complicates matters: From this position it becomes impossible to determine where one word ends and the next begins.

Fehlau forces you to stand back, walk around his oversized label and compare its two sides, on each of which is written: “No it can assess an action.” The phrase reads the same backward and forward, creating a palindrome that describes exactly what you have been doing. As if Fehlau’s perversely self-reflexive piece is talking to itself, it refers to the viewer by the pronoun “it,” as if you were nothing but an interesting specimen being tested for comprehension skills.

This shift is cleverly played out in Fehlau’s other works. His meticulous yet mysterious body-prints on the insides of wooden cylinders literally fold a surface back upon itself until it becomes an endless and empty container for the artist’s missing body. His walk-in painting, made from unprimed linen hanging from the ceiling, locates the viewer in the center of an absent picture. Like a mini-labyrinth whose only secret is that every view is partial, it requires assessment from at least three perspectives at once.

Located between a present moment that is constantly slipping away and an anticipated time that never quite arrives, Fehlau’s works make physical the ambiguity at the root of illusionism. In doing this, they replace one kind of deception with another: Relationships once internal to art get played out in the actual space between these objects and their viewers.

The cost of this displacement, in Fehlau’s case, is a tendency toward academic stiffness. Although his installation effectively activates the viewer’s body, the sense that everything has been figured out beforehand and painstakingly executed according to an unyielding program sometimes takes precedence over the actual interactions elicited by his objects. Fehlau’s best works elude this tendency to merely illustrate ideas; they give way to more flexible illusions and wider-ranging allusions.

Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 874-4757, through June 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Sturges Under Siege: If the FBI had not illegally searched San Francisco-based photographer Jock Sturges’ studio and seized its contents on April 25, 1990, political controversy probably would not surround “The Last Days of Summer,” his exhibition of softly lit silver prints at G. Ray Hawkins Gallery. As it is, Sturges’ idyllic, often nude portraits of children, teen-agers and their mothers will not be seen for what they are--forthright portrayals of girls becoming women--but as another episode in a battle over escalating governmental control in the arts.

Despite the fact that Sturges has not been charged with any crime, and that a grand jury has determined that no evidence exists to support federal suspicion of child pornography, the important issues raised by the legal proceedings have almost completely taken the place of an assessment of his art. Questions of law are usually resolved with yes or no answers. But, when this kind of thinking is applied to art it fails to account for ambiguity, nuance and the subjective nature of the experiences art elicits.

Sturges’ exhibition consists of 44 photographs made between 1978 and 1991, most on the Atlantic coast of France at a resort where families of naturalists perennially spend their summer vacations. Formally, the pictures are uninventive. Standard compositions and established lighting techniques are competently employed by the 45-year-old photographer, who has returned to the same beaches and photographed the same people every summer for more than 10 years.

His photographs are remarkable in their capacity to convey a profound sense of unself-conscious ease or relaxed familiarity unimpaired by shame, defensiveness or prudishness. Part of the honesty and innocence of the pictures owes to the evident rapport that exists between Sturges and his subjects. No amount of trickery or posing could account for the openness and off-handedness of his portraits of individual adolescents, daughters paired with their mothers, and groups of children passing seemingly endless afternoons in the sun-drenched surf and sand.

The real strength of the photographs, however, owes to the beauty of their subjects and Sturges’ insistence that they were born with this attribute, that whatever culture adds only takes away from their initial perfection. The backgrounds of his black-and-white images typically dissolve into the mist not only to focus our attention on the girls and women depicted, but to block out our culture’s attempt to claim that it--and not Nature--singlehandedly constructs and defines what we think of as beautiful.

Sturges’ photographs undeniably play into dominant and naive fantasies of an idealized and carefree childhood. That their subjects are healthy, well-off children of extremely liberal parents, however, is their least interesting characteristic. These photographs could only be threatening to a culture based on the repression and denial of the beauty and pleasure inherited at birth.

G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 394-5558, through June 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Invitation to a Hanging: Like good students who want to be bad but are afraid to risk paying the consequences, the artists in “Inheritance” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions try to break the rules by following them to the point of absurdity. What results is not a radical transformation of the powers-that-be, or even a partial alteration of their structure, but a dutiful recapitulation of stereotypes and cliches.

This powerfully consistent exhibition, curated by Roberto Bedoya and Jody Zellen, features the types of display usually used in museums of ethnology and natural history. Its attempt to short-circuit the authority of cultural institutions is itself short-circuited by an overzealous acceptance of the form of the stories museums tell.

In the handsome catalogue, the curators claim that museums propagate lies, that what they present to their viewers are watered-down interpretations of the truth, partial versions predicated on the exclusion of voices that would fill out a vital and multi-sided picture of culture. The six faux museum exhibits simply invert an outdated idea of how these institutions function.

Fred Wilson takes African masks supposedly borrowed from the British Museum, and blindfolds and gags them with handkerchief duplications of French and British flags. Brian Tucker puts “Beatles” memorabilia in vitrines and labels the paraphernalia of packaged youth culture with adulatory descriptions. And Melissa Goldstein presents close-up photographs of Freud’s collection of classical artifacts along with souvenir spoons commemorating some of the psychoanalytic concepts he invented.

Sylvia Bowyer mimics Malevich’s Suprematist compositions with petri dish surrogates of the hides of endangered animals from the African Plains. Danny Tisdale revisits the ‘60s and ‘70s with accessories for straightening or cultivating the kink in the hair of African-Americans, depending upon what was in fashion. And Renee Green collages the accounts of minor colonialists onto her own fragmented fantasies of what it might have been like to meet up with these people.

Rather than undermining the dominant structure of museum presentation, these works fetishize its form. Their version of formalism is based on the belief that forms are empty containers that can be filled with almost any content. “Inheritance” pretends that what is in a vitrine is what counts, but then acts as if the vitrine itself is all that matters.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1804 Industrial St., (213) 624-5650, through June 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.