ART REVIEWS : ‘Body Politics’ Exhibition Breaks the Mold at LACE

“Body Politics” stands out as an important exhibition not because its artists make outstanding work, but because it takes place at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). For each of the past seven years, the exhibitions committee of this nonprofit institution has invited an out-of-town curator to organize a show of up-and-coming L.A.-based artists. For almost as long, nearly every exhibition at LACE has sacrificed art to political correctness.

The overall results have been boring shows in which morality and earnestness are supposed to compensate for artistic incompetence. In a refreshing change of pace that may signal the long-overdue rebirth of this moribund alternative space, “Body Politics” brings artistry back to the fore.

Selected by Bruce Kurtz, the Phoenix Art Museum’s curator of 20th-Century art, the five artists and one collaborative team in this year’s installment of “The Annuale” refrain from spelling out direct, activist messages. Instead, they allow the political implications of their work to unfold more slowly, with ambiguity and the active involvement of the viewer’s imagination and intelligence.

Falling Leaf’s gorgeous photographs of lips, genitals, tongues and other unidentifiable erogenous zones exemplify the show’s tendency to put beauty and bodily experience before political affiliations. Enlarged to approximately 3-by-4 feet, his sensuous images transform the human body into a gravity-defying landscape of exquisite physical sensation.

Part of the power of Falling Leaf’s photographs derives from their mysteriousness. When you’re looking at his richly toned pictures you’re not immediately certain what part of the human anatomy you see. Even when you realize, in “Tulips,” for example, that the shadowy gulf between two wrinkled masses is a mouth, you’re still fascinated by how unfamiliar such a common part of the body can be. Other images clearly depict parts of two people, but their boundaries are deliciously blurred.

In Falling Leaf’s best photographs, race, sex and sexual-orientation are of secondary importance, if not totally irrelevant. His tightly cropped, black-and-white pictures of the sensitive tissues we all share deftly bypass the pet issues of political correctness. Nevertheless, they maintain a profound connection to current debates about an individual’s place in the body politic.

Anna-Maria Sircello’s anthropomorphic sculptures made from women’s underwear are also engaging because of their ambivalence about pleasure and pain. Sircello has pinned lace panties, nylons, gloves and a sock to the gallery’s walls, in the same way an insect collector might display his precious specimens. She has inserted the circular wooden frames used for embroidery into some undergarments or has tightened these frames around others.

These tools of domestic handicraft give substance and form to Sircello’s otherwise weightless fabrics. Her carefully composed works tell us less about the distortion and bondage of the male-dominated fashion industry than about her willingness to use the accouterments of femininity to create fascinating mutations, ones whose primary effect is aesthetic.

David Greene’s “Freeway Fetishes” traffic with similar ideas but aren’t as effective because they lack the formal discipline and material resonance of Sircello’s abstract compositions. Greene uses such automotive accessories as leather-like “nose bras,” rubber straps, metal hooks and synthetic nets to fabricate pieces that speak of a typically male obsession with dressing up one’s car. His glib works fall flat because their components look better outside the gallery.

Larry Mantello’s hallucinatory collages of greeting cards and Monica Majoli’s small paintings of sexual activities also sidestep politics yet fail to achieve much aesthetic significance. It is as if Majoli chooses sexy, forbidden subjects to compensate for her inability to render the human body convincingly. Likewise, Mantello’s cut-up get-well cards suggest that if you repeat a stupid phrase often enough you might begin to sound intelligent, if only to yourself.

The largest piece in the exhibition, by the collective Powers of Desire, tries most earnestly to fuse aesthetics and politics. It also fails most egregiously because its politics are juvenile and its aesthetics are aimed at pure decoration.

Designer Molotov cocktails adorn a grid of 30 marble slabs elegantly riveted to a handsome wooden frame. Sandblasted with the name of someone who has died of AIDS, filled with faux gasoline and stuffed with a linen handkerchief, each bottle is meant to express collective rage about an intolerable situation made worse by government neglect and incompetence.

The installation doesn’t invite us actually to send a cocktail to the addresses of various government agencies listed beneath each column of bottles. Wholly symbolic, the piece is meant to be cathartic. In contrast to the best art in “Body Politics,” this well-meaning work would use the memories of the people it names to shore up its aesthetic irrelevance. If it weren’t so well crafted, it could be mistaken for the politically correct work that has dominated the exhibition schedule at LACE.

* Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1804 Industrial St., (213) 624-5650, through Sept. 30. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Artistic Breakthrough: Nancy Evans’ second solo show at Sue Spaid Fine Art represents a giant leap from the abstract paintings she exhibited here last year. It’s as if the 43-year-old, L.A.-based artist’s steady progression over the past five years has exploded into a number of distinct, original styles.

A year ago, Evans’ paintings were based on mutant paisley patterns and the quasi-organic cartography of early Surrealism. They were competent and dense, yet somehow static and forgettable. They seemed poised on the brink of something significant but unable to reach beyond the safe horizon of a standard Modernist dialogue about picture planes, shallow space and deep illusions.

Evans’ latest paintings shun any suggestion of illusionistic space. They are breakthroughs for two reasons: because many of their paisley fragments visually jump off of their surfaces, and because Evans has finally begun to paint with confidence and aplomb.

Their energy, breadth and depth compel one to believe that she’s discovered a technique whose immense potential has not yet been tapped. They also suggest that she has stumbled, almost accidentally, into this heady territory. Their hand-crafted feel gives them a sort of “aw shucks” humility that augments, rather than diminishes, their strong visual allure.

Evans’ poured acrylic has the presence of thick, synthetic skin. Where she has peeled off masked-out patterns, each layer feels like it belongs to a completely different painting. Liquid puddles and drips coagulate into marbleized swirls and semi-translucent veils. Evans has embedded small chunks of undissolved pigment in them. Some of these blemishes glow with a delicate fluorescence. Others have a tasteless matte quality that contrasts perversely with hot pinks, peacock blues and wet, fiery oranges. Incompatible components are held together in an exciting balance.

* Sue Spaid Fine Art, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 935-6153, through Sept. 27. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.