ART REVIEWS : Chilling Baby Dolls Eclipse the Real

Somewhere between the saccharine fields of the Cabbage Patch Kids and the murderous realm of Chucky (of “Child’s Play” fame), Lindsay Brice’s photographs of porcelain, molded plastic and wooden dolls can be found. Rosy-cheeked and freaky, Brice’s little creatures refuse to sit still. Instead, they peep through keyholes, snoop under lace-covered beds, cower in doorways, sprawl in poppy fields and reign like potentates. These images at Stephen Cohen Gallery offer “Babes in Toyland” as retold by Flannery O’Connor--chilling and uncomfortably funny.

As a symbol, the doll has had peculiar resonance within contemporary art. Mike Kelley uses worn-out rag dolls to evoke the pathos of our investment in inanimate lumps of cloth. Ellen Phelan makes self-consciously limpid watercolors of antique dolls, which get at the fictions of childhood “innocence.” Brice does something altogether different with her tiny color photographs. Here, the crystalline clarity and glowing hues characteristic of Cibachrome prints emphasize the hyper-real quality of dolls.

These dolls indeed look “real”--deadened eyes, seamed heads and painted-on hair notwithstanding. But that’s only because our vision of children is so false. Brice’s strange photographs insist that in our media-colonized imagination, it’s not dolls who are surrogate children, but children who are surrogate dolls.

“Godbaby” is, without a doubt, the oddest image of the lot. A baby doll is photographed up close, its blue eyes as icy as the rhinestone buttons on its frock, its heavy cheeks bulging over a soiled lace collar. If a plump baby confirms the unquenchable vitality of nature, this grotesquely plump baby doll, its plastic skull dominating the frame, confirms the extent to which nature has been denatured. This image makes literal the eclipse of “the real” and the triumph of simulation at the close of the 20th Century. Like the rest of the images in this fine exhibition, “Godbaby” is unblinking, unnerving and, most of all, uncompromising.

* Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7466 Beverly Blvd., (213) 937 - 5525. Closed Sunday and Monday, through Aug. 29.

Drawing Distinctions: At a time when so much art is conceptual in nature, drawing has emerged as a beleaguered medium. At its best, drawing appears in this context as an anachronism; at its worst, as a cop-out.

Drawing shows, then, tend to be strange affairs. They are almost always huge, as if to make up for some perceived deficiency in the medium. And, especially when they come at the end of the summer, they smell suspiciously like catchalls for whatever is left over.

At Christopher Grimes Gallery, the pleasure of “Prima Pensieri” is that it feels less like an overstuffed hodgepodge than a manifesto about drawing’s stubborn vitality. Featuring carefully selected work by Leonard Seagal, Claude Simard, Jon Tower, Jim Isermann, Steven Evans and Gretchen Faust, the show celebrates drawing not merely as a means of expression (although that’s here, too), but as a ritualized system, a Dadaist pun, a calligraphic exercise and a preparatory tool.

Seagal and Simard represent the more traditional modes of drawing. All variations on a single form--a modified fleur-de-lis--Seagal’s ink-wash drawings lay a Conceptual scrim over wonderfully decorative work.

Surrounded by heavy, formal frames, these elegant images announce themselves as autonomous works of art. Simard is more tentative, his delicately colored gouache, crayon and pencil drawings of faces, hands, legs and backs pinned directly to the wall, like working sketches. Quietly expressionistic, they’re among the most important in the show, for they question the very notion of the “working sketch.” The line between spontaneity and premeditation, the exploratory and the finished work of art is insistently, consistently blurred.

Tower and Faust up the conceptual ante. Tower offers an array of word problems and geometric functions scrawled onto pieces of graph paper, worked out and stamped with the notation “Jon E. Tower, Solved Problem .” These emphatically postmodern pieces parody the notion of the artist as omnipotent force. How powerful do you have to be, after all, to master high school mathematics?

Faust’s “Wall Tattoos” are more overtly ambitious. Studied, grandiloquent phrases are spelled out in neatly regimented thumbtack punctures on wall-sized expanses of Sheetrock. The parameters of drawing are expanded about as far as they can go, or else they’ve been collapsed into some illusory “essence.” Faust implies that there is little difference. In addition, she suggests that there is little difference between image and word. Both posit depths beneath their surfaces. Both struggle to reconcile individual expression with the limits imposed by generic structures.

What the “Wall Tattoos” suggest is that Conceptual renaissances, which seem to keep recurring, need not foreclose on drawing. In this, Faust’s own “drawings” emerge as the unlikely emblems of this interesting--if unexpected--group exhibition.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 1644 17th St., Santa Monica, (310) 450-5962. Closed Sunday and Monday, through Sept. 5.

Sculpting Sound: Robert Morris’ 1961 “Box With the Sound of Its Own Making”--a walnut box containing a tape recording of the sanding, sawing and hammering noises that accompanied its own construction--has long been recognized as a definitive work of Process art. Mineko Grimmer’s magnificent “North American Woods” series--sculptures with the sound of their own un making--suggest the resiliency and elasticity of that post-Minimal tradition.

The tableau Grimmer has arranged at Koplin Gallery is almost absurdly poetic. Six inverted pyramids of frozen pebbles are suspended over six wooden boxes. As the ice that holds the pebbles in place begins to melt, the pebbles rain down onto crisscrossed stalks of bamboo and guitar strings arranged inside Minimal structures. They generate random, exquisitely delicate patterns of sound.

A golden pebble strikes a hollowed-out piece of bamboo, then slips into a pool of water below. A rush of pebbles spills onto a guitar string. A plop, a drip, a ping. A series of short, percussive beats, a number of higher-pitched notes and then, eventually, nothing.

Between the beats and the notes, the pings and the plops, the spectator waits for the next sound, tense but strangely calm, suddenly aware of time as movement, space as presence and silence as energy. If modernist sculpture activates space, then Grimmer’s sculpture--like the music of the late John Cage--activates spaces between sounds.

The pauses marking the rhythmic division of a melody become palpable, audible and even visible. From moment to moment, the form of the pebbles is altered, until it completely dissolves. For Grimmer, however, process is bi-directional and decay is infinitely reversible. Once all the pebbles have fallen, they are gathered from a tray at the bottom of the music box, placed into a pyramidal mold filled with water, frozen and suspended over the box once again. The end is not the end, but merely an excuse to begin again.

Grimmer has fabricated an elaborate metaphor for nature’s resurgent cycles. They’re inevitable, though the courses within those cycles remain unfixed. Perhaps more importantly, her work demonstrates the power of ritual, which is never stronger than when it allows for openness, contingency and fortuity.

* Koplin Gallery, 1438 9th St., Santa Monica, (310) 319-9956. Closed Sunday and Monday, through Sept. 15.

Mirrors of Feminism: Who will write the history of women? How will our stories be told? Where will we position ourselves in relation to one another? Will we refuse to play the game?

These are the difficult questions Laura Howe broaches in a small exhibition of Conceptually based sculptures at Burnett Miller Gallery. Most arresting is “Chronocology,” a welded steel column studded with looking glasses of various sizes. The made-up title grafts chronology onto gynecology , and seems to allude to the reductionist manner in which men tell the stories of women. Men look at women through spectacles or through specula and construct them as pathological, sexual specimens. Howe frustrates this culturally conditioned response by covering the lenses of the looking glasses with images of “heroic” females: Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger and others.

In “Our Glass,” Howe makes more palpable the connections among these women as well as her own connection to a feminist continuum. In this makeshift, quadruple “hourglass,” sand flows through glasses inscribed with the names of Joan of Arc, Mother Jones, Margaret Sanger and Rebekah Maples (the artist’s mother), until it gathers in a glass marked with the name of the artist herself.

What is problematic is the way Howe’s work seems to confirm the Neo-Freudian notion that women are hopelessly caught up in narcissistic patterns of over-identification with their mothers and with each other. Howe’s tendency is to emphasize convergence at the expense of discrete identity: The shifting sands of “Our Glass” symbolize the merging of one woman into the next.

This work is not fully resolved, relying more than a little on artist Connie Hatch’s feminist-derived analysis of the codes of male-dominated historicism. But it also pushes in directions of its own. Laura Howe bears watching.

* Burnett Miller Gallery, 964 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 874-4757. Closed Sunday and Monday, through Aug. 30.