ART REVIEWS : Fresh Look at Egypt’s Overphotographed Monuments

Lynn Davis’ large sepia- and selenium-toned photographs of ancient Egyptian monuments are blatantly obvious and profoundly mysterious. Made in 1989 on a sightseeing tour of Egypt’s most famous pyramids and colossi, her 16 seemingly straight-forward images at the Lannan Foundation steal a stunning sense of undiminished beauty from these well-known and overphotographed attractions.

Although the New York-based photographer is often credited for re-investing these crumbling, daunting monuments with their original dignity and sense of sublimity, her highly manipulated images are as artful and artificial as any of the more celebrated photo-based works that have dominated Postmodernism’s recent dissection of the natural world.

Stripped to their essentials, the subjects of Davis’ pictures are carefully cropped and elegantly composed to emphasize the formal play of light and shadow across abstract arrangements of solids and voids, contours and fields. Davis achieves the softly nuanced grays, tans and burnished red-browns of her distinctive photographs in collaboration with Minneapolis-based printer Steve Rifkin. Together, they process her prints in the conventional manner, then bleach them to erase every trace of an image before saturating the blank sheets with a custom mix of chemicals.

The resulting prints are gorgeous hybrids of a romantic, 19th-Century technique, an early 20th-Century Modernist aesthetic, and an absolutely contemporary approach to scale and recycled imagery.

Davis’ intelligent and exquisitely sensual photographs are original because they do not assume that culture’s intrinsically artificial nature automatically precludes the possibility that its fabricated forms might elicit an authentic experience of sublimity. Her art is unparalleled in its capacity to embody dizzying shifts of scale, from monumental grandeur to miniaturized insignificance. In this mysterious netherworld between created and discovered forms, verifiable facts and incomprehensible intuitions, the ruins of lost cultures become perfect vehicles for Davis’ endeavor: She wrests the sublime out of what we have come to accept as ordinary, even banal.

* Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave., (310) 306-1004. Through Sept. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A Father’s Hopes and Fears: Like a Dr. Seuss story for fathers, Mike Glier’s “Alphabet of Lili” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art combines the dark side of fantasy with the simple lessons found in books for preschoolers. Unlike those colorfully instructive stories, filled with grimly realistic twists and happy endings, his 26 paintings do not arrive at such comforting resolutions.

The ambiguity and incompleteness of Glier’s unsentimental yet touching suite of images have nothing to do with fashionable refusals of narrative order, but evolve naturally out of their subject: the hopes and fears the artist harbors for his 4-year-old daughter.

In his masterfully rendered depictions, Lili usually appears as a plump pair of little legs. Just above her knees, her fleshy body begins to dissolve so that her hips are barely discernible beneath indistinct swirls of pigment. Where her torso, arms and head should be, Glier has painted, sketched and drawn common objects whose names begin with each letter of the alphabet.

In “B,” for example, a baby’s bottom in a bathtub floats amid an army of ominous, larger-than-life-size bugs. “N” consists of a diverse array of disembodied noses hovering among almost illegible numbers in hastily scrawled mathematical equations. And “L” depicts Lili’s lower legs standing in a field of light bulbs, whose illusionistic solidity makes the unformed child’s existence seem all the more fragile and tentative.

Glier’s skills as a draftsman transform the realistic components of his images into powerful metaphors for control and its loss. His paintings on translucent fiberglass and aluminum panels are poetic evocations of a father’s acceptance of uncertainty--of his struggle to protect his child from a threatening world, without stifling her development as an autonomous person.

Questions of sexuality and power lurk just beneath the surfaces of Glier’s hauntingly personal yet wide-ranging meditations on the father-daughter relationship. If Freud pointedly described men’s tendency to equate their sex with their strength, Glier begins to flesh out an alternative vision, one in which relinquishing this socially defined identity might be frightening, but is nevertheless inevitable.

The uprooted trees, unanswerable questions and animal skulls that consistently spring up in his alternately dreamy and nightmarish paintings suggest that a father may appear indomitable to his daughter, but is, in a vast and often uncontrollable world, as helpless as his child. Glier’s serious, sometimes dark images never brood or grow morbid about this fact. They do not mask male weakness behind a facade of inflexible power, but are buoyed by the hope that giving up control will engender a sort of strength that is neither defensive nor authoritarian.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-0433. Through Aug. 23. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Reading His Riddles: A variety of cages, game boards, cabinets, drawers, stairways, shutters, mirrors, curtains, grills, balconies, pagodas and doors, among other things, appear in Giuseppe de Piero’s elaborate, 3-D collages at Sherry Frumkin Gallery. From the Renaissance until the end of the 19th Century, the window served as the primary model for looking at painting. But De Piero’s everyday objects propose that no single approach to art adequately captures its potential to make meaning.

Titled “An Hour Beyond Midnight,” De Piero’s 12 assemblages constitute a rich, dense, literary poem in which chess is a metaphor for the crisscrossing references that accumulate with nearly incomprehensible complexity. Motifs and symbols recur throughout the exhibition, suggesting the presence of a specific, multileveled story. But visitors are left puzzled about whether or not the exacting craftsmanship in De Piero’s meticulous arrangements of found and altered objects matches with any deliberate meaning, or is just meant to evoke vague associations.

An exhaustingly thorough catalogue maps the artist’s personal inventory of symbols derived from medieval, Renaissance and modern philosophy, as well as European art history, literature, science and metaphysics. After using this guide, you are still frustrated for having failed to crack the code that would clarify the meaning of his strangely hermetic works.

De Piero has orchestrated a maddening balance between nonsense and logic. His diagrammatic art, along with its supporting documentation, promises to reveal precise significance, but withholds this information. You are left wanting more and knowing you won’t get it.

Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre, especially his openly hermetic “Large Glass” and the “Green Box”--with its obfuscatory clues to the larger work’s meaning--is the obvious source upon which De Piero draws. It is as if the young, L.A.-based artist had filtered Duchamp’s obsession with unsolvable puzzles through Joseph Cornell’s hauntingly sentimental assemblages and H.C. Westermann’s perversely well-made sculptural riddles. “An Hour Beyond Midnight” fuses the veneer of logical rigor with the desire to evoke, but never disclose, a deep nostalgia for visual poetry.

* Sherry Frumkin Gallery, 1440 Ninth St., Santa Monica, (310) 393-1853. Through July 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

The Message Is Meaning: Cliff Benjamin’s neon sculptures, ink drawings and altered objects at Burnett Miller Gallery explore the ways we assign meaning to natural facts. His seductive, sometimes repellent works pivot between fate and what we make of its machinations.

In contrast to the art that dominated the ‘80s by insisting that all meaning is made up by us, Benjamin’s most recent body of work intimates that some kind of material ground underlies--and is not contained by--every interpretation.

Although he never suggests that we can know the essence of this substratum in itself, his formally elegant pieces initiate a compelling tug-of-war between nature and our often unstable place in it.

The most powerful piece in the exhibition is simple and direct, yet resoundingly ambiguous. In the unlit back gallery, two glowing red rectangles of randomly arranged neon X’s and Y’s lie side by side on the floor. Like cemetery plots or seed beds for future gardens, “Generation” collides the fiery heat of its color with the cold fragility of glass. Its literal presentation of the chromosomes that distinguish the sexes calls to mind our culture’s tendency to construct elaborate--and hierarchical--distinctions based on this simple difference.

Benjamin’s sculpture haunts because it suggests that after death, gender differences no longer make any difference. It troubles because it quietly demonstrates that our understanding of this fact too often comes too late.

Three almost 8-by-6-foot, cross-shaped drawings in the main gallery echo “Generation’s” intersection of meaning and flesh. Spelling out the words harbinger , carrier and messenger , Benjamin’s drawings make physical the fact that our bodies are simultaneous grounds upon which society inscribes its meanings and biological entities that resist this manipulation, never escaping its mark, but never wholly succumbing to its authority.

* Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 874-4757. Through July 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Added Attraction: “Art by numbers” at Angles Gallery is a captivating, coherent exhibition that accounts for itself in terms of mathematical calculation. Only woman is among its 20 international artists.

Although its title suggests a completed whole will emerge from a step-by-step progression, the show demonstrates that numerical sequences yield results as random and chaotic as any other kind of abstraction.

The promise of objectivity, precision and consistency that comes with numbers intensifies the aesthetic effects of the best works here.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Perfect Lovers” evokes the pleasures and difficulties of relationships by juxtaposing two battery-operated office clocks whose imperfect mechanisms cause them to tell increasingly different times.

Tatsuo Miyajima’s strip of 32 rapidly changing L.E.D. numbers provide so much information so quickly that its accumulative progression circles back upon itself. The unified display fragments into subsets, creating a technical abstraction whose rhythms hypnotize.

Roman Opalka’s endless list of consecutive numbers jotted in clean lines in his neat hand, and On Kawara’s gray-and-white paintings of every day’s date, respectively, record one artist’s obsession with filling in time by writing down incremental differences, and another’s fascination with the impossibility of capturing the present in two dimensions. These works use exact calculation to emphasize the inconsistencies built into any complex system.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019 . Through Aug. 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.