ART REVIEWS : ‘Hollywood’: A Playful Look at Publicity

The slippery nature of truth and illusion takes fascinating shape in “Hollywood, Hollywood: Identity Under the Guise of Celebrity.” Curated by artist-writer Fred Fehlau, this engaging exhibition of 127 photo-based works by 73 commercial photographers and fine artists outlines the connections--and separations--between inner selves and outer appearances, authentic expressions and hollow poses.

Installed at the Art Center College of Design’s Williamson Gallery, Fehlau’s show is playful, intelligent and historically responsible. It offers a compelling revision of contemporary art history and provides a provocative model for future explorations.

Fehlau’s insightful exhibition examines portrait photography developed for, and inspired by, Hollywood motion picture publicity. It brings together three distinct yet related types of portraiture: archival images from the ‘20s to the ‘60s; commissioned pictures by more recent commercial photographers working in the same genre; and photo-based works by contemporary artists who intend to criticize, question, and reflect upon the meanings and manipulations of the first two groups.

The result is a labyrinthine, nuanced network of astonishing similarities, poignant collisions, remarkable resemblances, and resonant cross-purposes. Without the pretense of exhibitions that claim to reconnect art and life (such as the Museum of Modern Art’s “High/Low,” the Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Helter Skelter” and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Parallel Visions”), Fehlau’s show matter-of-factly locates art’s conventions and advertising’s manipulations on the same plane--as elaborate fabrications designed to create specific, yet uncontrollable effects.

“Hollywood, Hollywood” thus beats these high-profile exhibitions at their own game. Rather than calling upon popular media only to reinforce the dominance of high art, Fehlau’s show achieves a balance that enhances both spheres of culture. His open-ended collection of portraits tracks meaning in all realms of representation.

Fehlau’s curatorial approach follows a tendency initiated by many of the most recognized--and significant--artists of the 1980s. Among many others included in his show, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, Alexis Smith and Larry Johnson began to dissect the cliches and stereotypes served up by movies and advertising.

But influential, predominantly New York-based critics put an end to their hierarchy-threatening projects. They claimed that the work of these artists was original precisely because it demonstrated that originality was no longer possible. With a clever turn of phrase, art and life were once again divided.

Fehlau’s exhibition is powerful because it demonstrates that originality is not the issue. By tracing the connections between the media-oriented artists of the ‘80s and their previously unacknowledged sources, “Hollywood, Hollywood” reveals the overlooked complexity of these pictures. Far from rejecting human depth, its images hold what we think of as our most intimate selves together with what we believe to be inauthentic poses. They do this by drawing on the language of movies.

A pair of 1950 photographs by Hollywood photographer Philippe Halsman anticipates the bestphoto-appropriations of the 1980s. “Jean Simmons, Laughing” and “Jean Simmons, Crying” depict the actress proving, to potential casting directors, her capacity to convey a broad range of human emotions. With an ill-fitting wig, hands frozen in exaggerated positions, fake tears, and a quasi-idiotic gleefulness, her face looks more like a sarcastic send-up of B-movies than a meaningful attempt to feign sincerity.

But Halsman’s photographs do more than that. They expose the difficulties of finding one’s self in one’s image, and in believing that other people aren’t mere characters in the complex drama we call life. They also depict the emotional pain underlying the failures.

“Hollywood, Hollywood” extends the impulses at the root of ‘80s conceptual photography by demonstrating that life-defining issues are often enacted in media valued for entirely different reasons. Fehlau’s show expands traditional boundaries not to reduce art to the level of banality, but to articulate ideas about human identity with purpose, power and conviction.

* Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (818) 584-5052, through Dec. 20, closed Mondays.

What Little Girls Are Made Of: Kim Dingle’s large paintings of little girls in fluffy dresses and boxing gloves look like standard, feminist subversion of the rules that govern the male-dominated world. Her feminized fist-fighters at Kim Light Gallery take over the predominantly male space of painting to belt, clobber and knock each other senseless.

With grace, single-mindedness, and deadly seriousness, they play the brutal games of adult men without bothering to change their shiny leather shoes or frilly Sunday dresses. It is as if Dingle’s prematurely grown-up girls have to play two roles at once. Both feminine and forceful, dainty and aggressive, their schizophrenic presences anticipate the tight-rope women are forced to walk in contemporary society.

But something out of whack in Dingle’s paintings prevents them from being mere illustrations of simple political agendas. The laughs, giggles and smirks they steal from their viewers put a spin on their straight-forward articulation of any specific message. Their wry humor serves no definable purpose other than to flesh out Dingle’s irrepressible, eccentric wit.

Her carefully rendered and casually painted images represent the richly contradictory impulses at the root of her own creative development. The whimsical peculiarities of Dingle’s larger-than-life-size figures recall a painting she made last year, titled “Baby Cram Dingle as George Foreman.” In it, the artist paid homage to her grandmother as an infant’s resemblance to the ex-heavyweight boxing champion by depicting a cherubic baby girl dressed in her Sunday finest, with fists clenched, brow furrowed, and eyes crossed.

In her new body of work, this baby has grown, gloves have replaced bare fists, and an African-American girl has entered the picture. Endowed with a wide range of expressions, Dingle’s little girls embody a strong sense of individuality and psychological depth. More autobiographical and vulnerable than before, but just as committed to free-floating associations, her latest paintings maintain the gentle weirdness of her earlier work. They give voice to intimate stories by remaining open to other metaphors, divergent points of view, and endless twists and spins.

* Kim Light Gallery, 12 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-9816, through Nov. 21, closed Sundays and Mondays.