ART REVIEWS : Grouping of Lauras Shows Arbitrary but Witty Choices

The first thing to ponder in “The Laura Show” is its premise--an exhibition of work by six emerging artists, all of whom are named “Laura.”

Coy? Trivializing? Arbitrary? Perhaps. But probably no more so than the gallerist’s penchant for grouping artists under any number of impressively strained “themes”--”French sculptors under 25 working with synthetic fibers”; “Mid-career photo-documentarians based outside New York City”; “Second-generation conceptualists exploring bio-ethics”; and so on.

What’s different about “The Laura Show” at the TRI Gallery is that it is, in fact, far less coy than the average group show, openly acknowledging the arbitrary nature of the curatorial process. What “The Laura Show” proclaims is that it is not the imperatives of value that determine who will be recognized and who will remain obscure; it is, more often than not, the vagaries of fate--being named “Laura,” for example, rather than the equally mellifluous “Lauren.”

The Lauras share a conceptual bent and a practiced wit. Laura Whipple sets up a metaphorical hall of mirrors in which a single vision of “gracious” living reverberates across increasingly abstracted levels of reality--Martha Stewart meets M. C. Escher. Here, a framed watercolor of a luxuriant garden, complete with inviting tables and shady paths, is laid on top of a white, wrought-iron stand that mimics the style of the chairs depicted in the image. Placed on the flat surface of the image are doll-sized pieces of similar wrought-iron furniture, the whole arranged so as to assert the mind-boggling elasticity of certain hard-sell fantasies.

Laura London displays six black-and-white photomurals of women wearing different half-slips, each image cropped between the ribs and the knees. The “Synthetic Slip Series” mocks the high drama of serially based Minimal art while exposing the low comedy that plays around women and clothes. If these mass-produced undergarments reflect the range of feminine “selves,” that range--London wryly asserts--is obviously and impossibly restrictive.

Laura Cooper likewise uses clothing as an index of feminine identity; her work, however, is far less flippant. In “Tether,” a billowing, white cotton nightgown floats up to the ceiling, fastened--with nine pieces of red thread--to nine lead weights arranged on the floor. Where the thread is sewn to the gown, tiny spots of dried blood have materialized; that blood suggests the contrast between the fantasy of flight and the recalcitrant materiality of the female body.

Laura Stein’s startling “Four Eyes”--two antelope “busts” mounted on the wall--depicts a pair of reluctant trophies. Constructed of Styrofoam overlaid with strips of clear wax that resemble layers of bandages, these antlerless animals are vulnerable. Yet they resist their subjugation; they are still, but eerily animated--necks craned, brown eyes flashing.

The sense of loss implicit in “Four Eyes” becomes explicit in “Home/Suite,” an installation by Laura Parker. A framed photograph of a Simplicity pattern for toddlers is juxtaposed with a table upon which faces are drawn in sand, and under which is placed a vase filled with dead flowers. Here, sentimental excess and romantic longing are pushed to the nth degree; the only difficulty is determining to what extent Parker buys into their seductions, and to what extent she remains critical.

Though it stands somewhat apart from the rest of the work in this exhibition, Laura Howe’s installation is emblematic. Like the pieces she recently showed at Burnett Miller Gallery, “October 24, 1991--August 29, 1992” maps out the parameters of a woman’s history, while struggling to define the artist’s own position within such a tentative structure.

Three immense blueprint enlargements--a portrait of a German revolutionary, Olga Benario Prestes, who was captured and killed during World War II; an image of Olga riding in the cavalry regiment of the Red Army; and a photograph of two female miners at the end of the Victorian period--are surrounded by 24 sheets of ditto paper, each bearing a traced image of Howe’s own hand.

Here, we are brought tantalizing close to Howe; we feel we know her through her art. But as with the title of the show--which betokens intimacy, putting us on a first-name basis with artists we have never met--that intimacy is a ruse. The only “Laura Howe” we really know is a prop designed to shore up a historical edifice still under construction.

A film still from Otto Preminger’s 1944 “Laura” hangs in the entry hall of the gallery. It’s more than a one-shot joke. In the classic film noir, a detective falls in love with a portrait of the (supposedly dead) heroine, only to have her walk through the door, shattering his illusions. So “The Laura Show,” and Howe’s work in particular, undermines those fantasies--of knowledge, intimacy and truth--promised but seldom granted by the work of art.

* TRI Gallery, 1140 S. Hayworth, (213) 936-8255, closed Tuesday-Thursday. Through Sept. 21.

Focusing on Christo: A decidedly odd exhibition of the photographs of Wolfgang Volz, Christo’s longtime “collaborator,” is currently on view at the Gallery of Contemporary Photography.

Dominated by a series of large dye transfer prints of Christo’s most recent endeavor, last summer’s joint Japan-U.S. “Umbrellas” project, the show also features photographs of the earlier “Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado” (1970-72); “Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties” (1972-76); “Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris” (1975-1985); “Wrapped Walk Ways, Kansas City, Missouri” (1977-78); and “Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Florida” (1980-83).

For those already familiar with these projects, the photographs work primarily as mnemonic triggers--records of Christo’s ambitious, ephemeral works of art. For those who are less familiar with his multimillion-dollar wrap jobs, the photographs are more difficult to read.

With their vertiginous angles, dramatic cropping, incandescent palette and worm’s-eye views, Volz’s photographs seem altogether reluctant to function as anything so self-effacing as documentation. What they want to be are art objects; and so they are self-consciously “artistic.” But how do you draw the line between Volz’s images and Christo’s imagination? To whom does this “artistry” belong?

Both Christo and Volz profit from these photographs--the former in terms of notoriety; the latter in terms of dollars. And in acknowledging the commodity status of these images, Christo/Volz demonstrate greater sophistication than the Conceptualists of the ‘60s, who insisted that they could evade the gallery system by producing only photographs and typewritten records of their ideas--documents that, of course, wound up being fetish-ized as works of art.

Yet the show leaves one with a bad feeling; its complicity with the system is less ironic than unquestioning. Volz emerges as an up-market version of the vendors who gathered in the Tejon Pass last summer, selling T-shirts under the shade of Christo’s big, yellow umbrellas. That’s certainly not a crime; but neither is it much cause for celebration.

* Gallery of Contemporary Photography, 2431 B Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-4282. Through Sept. 13.

Excess of Refinement: Nature’s crackling fury and culture’s grim determination struggle against one another in the new work of John Virtue at L.A. Louver Gallery. In stereotypical British fashion, however, it’s all very subtle. Here, the war is one of innuendo, where careful understatement and deliberate inflection are wrapped up in an excess of refinement.

For Virtue, elegance is paramount. At first look, these large images appear as all-over abstractions--patches of black and white rising and falling in rhythmic succession. Actually, these are grids of up to 60 individual drawings (of houses, bridges and towers), overlaid with Pollockesque puddles of white gouache and streaks of black ink.

Knowing that Virtue worked as a mailman in his native Lancashire from 1978-1985 makes it difficult to read these images other than as metaphors for nature’s cruel disregard for the grinding sameness of duty. Beyond this, however, Virtue challenges the grid’s art historical claim to order and mastery (one thinks here of Minimalism) by muddying it up with the tropes of human subjectivity and elemental abandon.

The work of two other British artists is also on view. David Nash’s sculptures are carved out of fallen timber and live trees. In contrast to Martin Puryear’s masterful craftsmanship and pristine surfaces currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, these sculptures are emphatically raw, alternating between the deeply spiritual and the playfully ironic. “Deadlock,” a massive painting by Therese Oulton, is difficult to compare to anything else. Dense but ethereal, suffocating yet mesmerizing, abstract but powerfully allusive, it is magnificent--and alone worth the trip.

* L.A. Louver, 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 822-4955, closed Sunday and Monday. Through Sept. 19.