ART REVIEWS : The Push and Pull of Kapoor’s Metaphors

I can’t say too much about Anish Kapoor’s recent sculpture at Stuart Regen Gallery. Yet it is difficult not to say too much about this stunning body of work by the British sculptor. For it is so fluent, so spare and so self-contained that, at least on one level, any comment at all seems excessive.

Kapoor is not, to borrow from Susan Sontag, “against interpretation.” His work celebrates surfaces: the rough surface of Portland stone, the slightly gritty surface of pigmented fiberglass, the smooth surface of the gallery wall. But it also moves in and out of depths. For all its formal austerity, Kapoor’s art is metaphorically dense.

Density, along with convexity, extroversion, plenitude and fecundity, is at issue here, especially in relation to a succession of opposites: concavity, depletion, hesitation, withdrawal. All this is expressed in just four pieces, three shapes, two movements and one color--red.

The first thing you see is an image on the wall. A set of branches? An exquisitely formed crack? A ventricle of the heart?

Up close, it becomes obvious that the image has not been painted onto, but carved into the wall. The five-inch deep channels are colored blood red. The experience is electrifying. It’s as if you’ve been invited beneath the skin of the gallery, or have cut into the lifeblood of art.

Across the way, a large red disk hovers in space, like a planetary orb cut loose from its solar system. Moving close--as you must with all of Kapoor’s work--the disk reveals itself as the concave front end of a cone projecting from the wall. This strangely deceptive form reaches out only to suck you back into its orbit. Such is the greedy nature of the art object.

But art’s nature is multifarious. It offers retreat, as well as seduction. It is hermetic, as well as engaging. And so, Kapoor gives us a thick slab of Portland stone with a square cut into its surface, which opens onto a hollowed-out interior. The artist makes literal the womb-like quality of art, its capacity to shelter and nurture the weary spirit.

Yet he is ambivalent. At what cost does this protection come? Who shall take responsibility for that which cuts people off from the world and from one another? The final piece in the show, housed in its own room, recasts all this from the artist’s perspective.

At first, it appears that the room is empty--merely four, blank walls. Once the eyes adjust to the unrelieved whiteness, however, a single, large bulge becomes visible under the “skin” of one of the walls. Incredibly, it’s as if that wall were pregnant.

“When I Am Pregnant” is a tour de force, suggesting the artist’s diffidence (this piece indeed seems to hide), as well as elation at his own energy, creativity and power. It comes as a coda to the narrative cycle embedded beneath the surface of the work.

Stuart Regen Gallery, 619 N. Almost Drive, (310) 276-7430, through Oct. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Not Perverse Enough: A somewhat obscure figure who spent the 1920s working in Hollywood as a set designer, mask-maker and photographer to the stars, William Mortensen was a perverse fellow. As this show of his vintage photographs at Fahey/Klein Gallery suggests, however, probably not perverse enough.

More Cecil B. DeMille than Marquis de Sade, Mortensen’s narrative images read as campy, not erotic; nostalgic, not sinister. The first photograph in the show is telling: A female hand sporting a thick slave bracelet jams two fingers into a man’s eyes. The blunt but hyper-dramatic title of this 1932 silver gelatin print? “Human Relations.”

Elsewhere in the show, humans relate in similarly retrograde fashion. Bloodthirsty pirates are pitted against damsels in distress; cross-wielding monks against women clad in nothing but flowing hair; martyrs in loincloths against huge, wheel-driven torture devices.

One wants to abhor these pictures, but it’s impossible. The scenarios are staged with such attention to balance, gesture and form that they are almost touching: one man’s (hackneyed) fantasies transformed into “art.”

Mortensen aligned himself with the Pictorialists, who favored altering the photographic image with whatever chemical, optical or manufactured means was necessary to express a personal vision. What is remarkable about these images, however, is not Mortensen’s hokum, but the subtle pictorial effects he achieved: the brushed quality of the surface, the softness of the image, the intensity of the colors.

These techniques work particularly well in the cheerfully exploitative images of the late-1940s and ‘50s. Looking more like etchings or drawings than photographs, they depict such subjects as a girl holding a jug, her peasant dress slipping casually off her breasts; a maid chatting on the telephone, her arms raised over her head to better display her breasts; a doe-eyed girl seductively fanning her breasts.

Interestingly enough, this is the look and the era pop star Madonna has appropriated for her latest incarnation as soft-core sex goddess. I suppose that makes this show a must-see for recreational voyeurs and other pop culture aficionados.

Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250, through Oct. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Identity Crisis: Puppets, dolls, mannequins and dummies offer particularly rich territory for artists interested in exploring questions of identity. Who is pulling the strings? Who is speaking? Is gender a well-rehearsed masquerade? Is the self a hollow fantasy?

Since the mid-1980s, New York-based photographer Laurie Simmons has laid claim to this territory, if not these questions, which resonate through much Postmodern art. Simmons is probably best known for her dramatically lit images of “talking objects” (purses, ukuleles, etc.) anthropomorphized into puppets; and “walking objects” (cameras, magnifying glasses and so on) animated by real women with the requisite long, sinuous legs.

These photographs only looked silly. In fact, they performed a biting critique of femininity--of woman both as mass-produced object and as consuming subject of mass production. In new work at Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Simmons has shifted her focus from feminine identity to masculine subjectivity.

Six ventriloquist’s dummies are seated in little wooden chairs pinned to the wall. With their unblinking eyes, molded brown hair and vintage Jerry Mahoney-style garb, these perpetually smiling neuters wait to be manipulated into the proper (or improper) masculine behavior.

The problem is this: Like the dummies, this work lacks animation. It feels tapped out. In transferring the same set of strategies onto a different object of study, all Simmons has done is find a way to make new work look old. She relies heavily upon the visual impact of the dummies, and they do present a startling sight. But she leaves the work suspended on that level, offering no further direction.

Fellow image scavenger Cindy Sherman has figured out how to reinvent her subject matter without repeating herself or allowing shock value to do more than a fair share of the work. Simmons might do well to pay closer attention.

Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 2032 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0180, through Oct. 10 . Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Scorcher: Roger Ackling makes art out of pieces of driftwood--cast-off boxes, bits of planks and irregular spikes--seasoned by the water and bleached by the sun. He doesn’t romanticize them by conjuring other uses, other lives. Neither does he manipulate them into fantastic or anthropomorphic configurations. What he does is hold these pieces of found wood up to the sunlight and, with the aid of a magnifying glass, he scorches neat, orderly lines into them--marking and possessing them while barely touching them at all.

At Angles Gallery these objects have a startling presence, despite the fact that most are small enough to hold in your hand or carry in your pocket. They are intimate, but they eschew the personal gesture or the calligraphic trace. They celebrate transformation, yet they respect the fissures, splits and rusted nails that mark their surfaces. As variations upon the ubiquitous stripe painting, they look contemporary; as fetishes, talismans or charms, they look ancient.

All of the pieces in this show are titled “Weybourne,” the name of the beach where the objects were found. Adrift on the vast, white walls of the gallery, however, their origins are obscured. Manufactured objects, first splintered by nature into refuse, are reborn as aesthetic objects. As ritualized by Ackling, this process is not what is crucial here. It is, in the end, the object: dark, compulsive and quite insistently a thing-in-itself.

Angles Gallery, 2230 and 2222 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Oct. 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

‘What Happened’ in L.A.: “Civil Disturbance: L.A. 1992” is the first major exhibition to address what happened in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Rodney G. King verdicts. Although the title frames the violence, fires, looting and protests triggered by the acquittal of four LAPD officers in Simi Valley as a “civil disturbance,” one can only refer to these events as “what happened.”

It remains unclear whether L.A. was shaken by riots, a rebellion, sheer rage or, as Mike Davis has described it, “just the beginning...a thousand points of light.”

The show at Louis Stern Galleries, one-half of whose proceeds will benefit efforts to rebuild L.A., features work by nearly 30 photographers, ranging from the self-effacedly journalistic to the self-consciously artistic. It is the latter that is problematic. While art can no doubt be therapeutic, there is something inappropriate, even shocking, about manipulating the incendiary imagery into overtly aestheticized form--at least this soon.

Levon Parian mounts on a heavily patinated sheet of copper an image of a man with his arms raised over his head in anguish--a romanticized paeon to the beauty of suffering. Janine Coover transforms an African-American youth and some graffiti into vertical elements in a tightly geometrized composition--a formal exercise with an incidental urban gloss.

These works, however, are the exceptions in what is largely an exhibition of documentary photographs. Not that the best of these images are, or even attempt to be, “neutral.” They are, by contrast, passionately engaged. This doesn’t mean, however, that they take sides in what has become a moral litmus test. It means that if they are ambiguous, they are ironic about it; and if they are ironic, they are cruelly, not coolly so. Jose Ivey’s “King”--an image of a gun-toting figure standing guard above a Burger King sign--is exemplary, conjuring not only Rodney King and Martin Luther King, but the merciless reign of consumerism; the fuel that fed L.A.’s endless fires.

Roland Charles’ “Going to the Dogs” is the most powerful image in the show. A large color photograph of a slack-jawed German shepherd crossing a trash-filled street, fires blazing behind him, headlights blaring in front of him, the image offers a startling vision of an urban apocalypse. Here, guilt is not assigned, but diffused into the very atmosphere; actions taken and backs turned bear equal responsibility for crimes committed. This photograph encapsulates a moment of profound loss. Like “what happened,” it won’t--and mustn’t--be easy to forget.

Louis Stern Galleries, 9528 Brighton Way, Beverly Hills, (310) 276 - 0147 , through Oct . 9. Closed Sunday and Monday .