ART REVIEWS : WWII Posters: The Poetry of Our Epoch

In 1912, Guillaume Apollinaire proclaimed that “Catalogues, posters and advertisements. . . contain the poetry of our epoch.” What the Dadaist poet was getting at was the ethos of Modernism: Only in the artifacts of our newly industrialized, commercialized and technologized cities could the truth and beauty of the age be sited.

“American Posters of the 1940s,” a provocative exhibition at Steve Turner Gallery, suggests that in the United States, poetry has always served the cause of pragmatism, and modernity has long marched in lock step with militarism.

“Keep ‘Em Shooting,” “Keep ‘Em Rolling,” “Keep ‘Em Coming”--these are the terse lyrics of World War II. “Buy a Share in America,” “Don’t Let Him Down,” “Defeat? Not Us”--this is the poetic language of state-sponsored propaganda, designed to further the war effort both at home and abroad.

Crammed with such slogans, the posters in this exhibition function first on the level of nostalgia, reminding us of a time when patriotism was yet unbesmirched by irony. But with their sophisticated typography, expanses of primary colors, cropped forms, photomontaged imagery and fractured space, they also highlight the indebtedness of American graphic design to European avant-garde experimentation. Indeed, most of the posters shown here are by designers who emigrated to the United States from Europe in the ‘30s and ‘40s--Leo Lionni from Italy, Alexey Brodovitch from France, Herbert Matter from Switzerland--and transformed our indigenous graphic idiom through the introduction of Cubist, Futurist and Constructivist ideas.

What is at stake here is the myth of American productivity, inexhaustibility and boundlessness--war shortages notwithstanding. Poster after poster renders this myth in immediately accessible, visual terms. In Weimer Persell’s “Keep ‘Em Coming and Coming Right” (1942), sponsored by the Ordnance Department of the U.S. Army, three blond soldiers--the first in a line that seems to stretch back into infinity--stride boldly forward, each cradling a golden missile in his arms. Elsewhere it is a convoy of tanks or a battalion of planes receding into the far distance. To keep the officers and enlisted men happy, Otis Shepard’s “Chewing Helps You on the Job” (c. 1941), offers what seems to be an endless array of Wrigley’s spearmint gum. This poster, like the show as a whole, is both amusing and instructive. One hopes for a follow-up exhibition so as to consider, among other issues, the further aesthetic and ideological shifts occasioned by the postwar collapse.

* Steve Turner Gallery, 7220 Beverly Blvd., (213) 931-1185, through Aug . 22. Closed Sunday s -Tuesday s .

Images of ‘Choice’: In the steadily escalating war on and over women’s reproductive rights, images are highly manipulable commodities.

Take Annie Leibovitz’s now-epochal Vanity Fair cover photo of actress Demi Moore, nude and seven months’ pregnant, which oscillates between feminist ideology (“Yes, we can have it all”) and anti-abortion propaganda (“The sexiest woman is the woman with child”).

Or Kathee Christie’s painting of a fetus in a womb, pierced by dozens of swords. The image proselytizes on behalf of choice--an allegory of the tragedy of the unwanted child. But couldn’t it function elsewhere to promote an anti-abortion agenda--a vision of the barbarism of the “murderous” mother?

Christie’s work is one of 170 paintings, drawings, photographs, collages and mixed-media installations featured in “Issues of Choice,” an open, salon-style exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, which announces the artist’s stake in the abortion wars--a bitterly contested site wherein the power of the image is infinite, though “truth” is seldom seen other than in unmodulated black and white.

Opening a few days after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, the Pennsylvania case that may lay the groundwork for the disintegration of the reproductive freedoms guaranteed under the 1973 Roe vs. Wade landmark, “Issues of Choice” couldn’t be more timely. It comes at a moment that is not only politically opportune, but one in which an increasing number of feminist artists are thinking about abortion--both as a sociopolitical issue and as a way to separate the feminine from the maternal.

The artists represented in “Issues of Choice,” however, are largely unconcerned with theoretical niceties and deconstructive strategies. If any idiom predominates here it is a grass-roots eclecticism, the work ranging from unabashedly emotional to ironic, from rawly confrontational to parodic, from sophisticated to naive.

Brutally twisted coat hangers and nude women nailed to crosses swap pictorial space with caricatures of Clarence Thomas and George Bush. Confessional poems framed by expressionistic brushwork alternate with computer-generated, mock-Disney fables about the (oddly familiar) kingdom of “Father, May I.”

The work comes down overwhelmingly on the side of choice--not surprising, Vice President Quayle might remark, given the so-called “liberal” bias of the so-called “cultural elite.” But what is interesting here is not only the urgency and the passion of these emphatically embodied “elites,” but the way in which the exhibition rejects the whole notion of an artistic “elite.” The avant-garde , with its stifling aesthetic orthodoxies and sharply circumscribed “isms,” is replaced by a broader notion of “choice” and a more inclusive vision of art.

“Issues of Choice” decries the state’s assault on a woman’s right to control her own body. Simultaneously, it celebrates the rich diversity of visual practice--the cathartic, and perhaps even revolutionary power of the image once freed from the narrow constraints of “high” art. At LACE, mourning becomes electric, and resistance--at last--seems truly possible.

* LACE, 1804 Industrial St., (213) 624-5650, through Aug . 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Sculpted Out of Color: Hard-edged surfaces, expanses of smoothly applied color, cool, geometric forms--when Kenneth Noland first hit upon these tropes in the late ‘50s and early 60s, they were not yet the cliches of formalist painting. Since then, they have emerged much as a prescriptive formula. Few, however, have put the formula to work as tirelessly, and by and large as inventively, as Noland has--from the early “target” and “chevron” paintings to the later “stripe” and “plaid” images.

In his new work at Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, Noland’s trademark bands, stripes or zones have been freed from their locked position on the canvas and transmuted into independent forms. With these forms, the artist constructs multipart paintings that, as he phrases it, have been “sculpted” out of color.

Stacked horizontally or vertically, with narrow strips of plexiglass running along their sides, these “pieces” of color--acrylic on canvas over curved planks of wood--are designed to exploit the habitual tensions between part and whole. The languorous forms brush up against one another, but fall just short of embracing. Between them lurk uneasy voids.

As with a tottering stack of saucers, a precarious pile of books or a space between two front teeth, one yearns to close the gap. Yet this anxiety, which the pictorial structure would seen to warrant, is blunted by Noland’s California sunshine hues and neon surfboard brights: banana yellow and sky blue, hot pink and metallic purple. Instead of sculpting with color, one feels as though the artist has begun to decorate with it. Instead of provocation, he settles too readily for gratification.

Ironically, the image that works best is the one that all but eschews color--three vertical sweeps of black bounded by narrow strips of blue, red and orange plexiglass. Here, the pictorial tension is sustained, not overwhelmed, by a controlled use of color. Now transparent, now opaque, the tinted plexiglass winds down and along the sides of the blackened planks, subtly complicating the image both in spatial and optical terms. Playing color against its absence, and fleeting presence against the void, Noland demonstrates his own resurgent skills, and the stubborn malleability of formalist painting.

* Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, 456 Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 879-6606, through July 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Read These Lips: There is no soundtrack to Patrizia Giambi’s smart and sexy installation at Shoshana Wayne Gallery. If there were, one imagines it would alternate between bouts of laughter and low-pitched whispers.

Giambi is interested in the language of women, the elusive but highly elastic tongues in which women speak to one another in the absence of men. This is a loaded subject, to be sure--of near-mystical pleasure for women and, one suspects, near-paranoic fascination for men. Giambi handles it with aplomb.

Wrapping around the perimeter of the gallery, much like the alphabet in a kindergarten classroom, is a strip of photographic paper imprinted with a succession of women’s lips--now pursed, now opened wide, now lopsided, now slightly ajar. This is, Giambi teases, the recondite code of the feminine. Decode it, and you will gain access to the world of swoons and secrets, gossip and intrigue. Crack it, and the world is yours.

In the center of the room, Giambi sets up an old-fashioned typewriter whose keys have been altered, each replaced with a pair of lips--some studded with Marilyn Monroe-style beauty marks, others model-perfect. Here, the writer Luce Irigaray’s notion of ecriture feminine, which insists on the interconnection between language and the body, is wryly literalized. But Giambi’s not interested, in the end, in illustrating the tenets of French feminism. If anything, what her very clever and elegant work seeks to illustrate are the inevitable discontinuities between word and image, fantasy and reality.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733, through Sept. 12. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Join the ‘Club’: The strange psycho- and sociopathologies that bind political radicalism to avant-garde art, and stitch both to American-style machismo, are deftly unraveled in Mike Kelley’s new installation at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, “The John Reed Club.”

Master of the faux-naive provocation, Kelley well knows how to make it all look very innocent. It begins with a childhood game--Kelley and his 12- or 13-year-old schoolmates creating parodies of Marvel comic books. Only one set of drawings, done by a friend named John Reed, survives; Kelley unearths them, and copies them--on 13-by-10-inch pieces of paper--three separate times.

The first set is faithful to Reed’s originals, which chronicle the mostly scatalogical misadventures of unlikely super-hero, “Bozo, the Stain Glass Window.” The second set repeats the same drawings, but substitutes for the child’s slap-happy balloon texts autobiographical material about American radical John Reed, author of “The Ten Days That Shook the World.”

“Bozo’s” movement in, through and around the toilet bowl is transformed into John Reed’s passage from sickly boyhood into wild-eyed manhood . As Reed opines in between clanging comic choruses of “POW!,” “BAM!,” “POP!” and “ZAM!,” being a man has mostly to do with “drinking, swearing and fighting!”

The third set again repeats the drawings, but this time, the narration bulldozes its way through radical thought in the United States from the early 20th Century through the 1940s. Here, Reed’s personal odyssey gives way to a stream of bombastic rhetoric about class war, revolutionary content versus aesthetic innovation, good taste versus direct action, the ignominy of art as “interior decoration,” and the heresy of “namby-pamby or fancy-pancy art.”

The alignment of artistic practice with traditional norms of masculinity has been standard fare for vanguard artists, from Robert Henri (“We’ve got to be men first of all”) to Jackson Pollock (he of the barroom antics). Kelley’s work has long railed against such masculine orthodoxies, embracing the so-called “feminine sphere” and its ever-proliferating artifacts--stuffed animals, patchwork quilts, knit blankets, etc.

In “The John Reed Club,” Kelley is both more insistent and more convincing about the impossibility of macho bravado in a world given over to domesticized consumerism. To that end, the triple suite of drawings--signifier of the masculine struggle for mystery--have been pushed to the perimeters of the gallery to make room for a massive machine-loomed afghan--signifier of (suburban) home and (department store) hearth. Smothering and ubiquitous, the afghan has been color-coded in luscious yellows and purples to coordinate with a calendar print of a volcano hanging on the opposite wall--another raging, smoking, and puffing emblem of power aestheticized (feminized?), and thaereby made suitable for mass consumption.

For Kelley, however, it is no great loss. He clearly identifies with the radical aspirations of vanguard art and politics. The ungendering of the avant-garde-- and the consequent scrambling of the categories of dominance and submission, public and private, high and low--is clearly a liberating prospect. Kelley’s work slyly demonstrates a basic, revolutionary axiom: Sabotage--even under the mask of faux naivete--is direct action.

* Rosamund Felsen, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (213) 652-9172, through July 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.