ART REVIEWS : 30 Artists Take Aim at Masculinity

First comes the spectacularly festooned dressing table of drag queen Patina du Pray, overflowing with wigs, jewels, scarves, ribbons, keepsakes, shopping bags and, tucked coyly into a porcelain vase, a photo of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp as his female alter ego, Rrose Selavy.

Farther back is a pile of baby pink and daffodil-yellow pillows, their vinyl skins stuffed to bursting. In the next room is a painting called “Sugar Blossom,” made of glitter and baby powder on canvas. In the corridor is a trophy marked “World Class Loozer,” with a blue football stamped “Sissy” shoved unceremoniously inside.

Welcome to the sugar-coated, sometimes venom-laced world of “The Anti-Masculine.” At the Kim Light Gallery, 30 artists try to undo the masculine hierarchies of art history, which proclaim certain materials, themes, genders and postures to be more equal than others in the glorious march toward artistic greatness.

These artists have no interest in glory, marches or greatness. Male and female, straight and gay, they enjoy petulance, revel in indecision and wallow in sentiment. They delight in makeup, luxuriate in velvet and weep over stuffed animals.

Curator Bill Arning labels their art as “overlapping but not corresponding to the feminine,” in the convoluted terminology of this exhibition’s subtitle. What’s alarming is the extent to which it also overlaps--and, in fact, pretty well corresponds to--the infantile.

The feeble and the childlike, as in the infamous “Just Pathetic” show of two years ago at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, are here conflated with the homosexual and the feminine, and then repackaged as a critical trend. One question: Do such shows actually hail the “Anti-Masculine,” or simply reaffirm the “Anti-Feminine”?

The last time the masculine was said to crash and burn was with the eclipse of Minimalism, its hard and fast geometries collapsing into the soft, contingent forms of Process Art. “The Anti-Masculine” offers its own, belated response to Minimalism as the Modernist movement par excellence .

Instead of Carl Andre’s sleek grids of lead and steel, we get David Cabrera’s grid of purple hydrostone, its texture reminiscent of Maybelline eye shadow. Rather than Richard Serra’s death-defying, one-ton balancing acts, we get Alix Pearlstein’s suspended branch, held in placed by a trio of stuffed poodles.

A more recent incarnation of the masculine is also at issue. This is the so-called “bad boy” art of the 1980s, which celebrated the teen-age male’s grunge-laden fantasies of beer, heavy metal and ever-willing teen-age girls. It veered back and forth between the ironic and the embarrassingly autobiographical.

Arning claims a resistance to irony for the “girlie” art he champions, a willingness to bare emotions and, always, a vulnerability. Yet, how vulnerable is Cary Leibovitz (a.k.a. Candy Ass), the guy who wears his “Kick Me” sign all the way to the bank? What does it mean when sincerity is always already trapped within a masquerade?

There are important exceptions here. These are works that skirt neither the personal nor the political.

Janine Antoni’s “Chocolate Gnaw” is a huge mound of chocolate, scarred with hundreds of tiny bite-marks, which establishes a stunning meditation on desire, desperation and the impossibility of femininity in this culture. Katharine Kuharic’s trio of watercolors is very different: a jewel-like vision of a world of women, free not just of men, but of the gaze of men. Rendered with a kind of Pre-Raphaelite hyper-clarity, Kuharic’s Utopia will not appeal to everyone. But, it is charged with energy; it is empowering.

To claim that power is a masculine structure is a cop-out. Such logic turns the rest of us into victims, when power should be--at the very least--exactly what an “Anti-Masculine” aesthetic strives for.

* Kim Light Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-9816, through Jan. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Meaty Mortality: Kiki Smith’s new work makes your skin crawl. You feel it in in your bones, in the pit of your stomach, behind your eyes. Its stench crawls up into your nostrils--the unmistakable stench of rotting flesh.

The moment of terror comes when you realize that it is “your” stench, “your” body that is rotting--not something else, not somewhere else, not someone else. Smith transforms the buried consciousness of mortality into an open wound.

Her new works at Shoshana Wayne Gallery are body parts, cast in bronze and colored the red, blue and iridescent silver of raw meat. Heads are mounted on spikes. Intestines are stretched out along the wall. Arms and legs are tossed into heaps on the floor. Like “Gray’s Anatomy,” Smith envisages the body as flayed and chopped into bits.

Yet, her work is less didactic. She offers not a science lesson, but a warning--against pride, ignorance and cruelty. This work is many things, but most of all it is a plea for mercy.

The heads are particularly startling. All features, all personality, all particularities have been stripped away. What’s left is what we all possess under our different skins: folds and strips of flesh, in the smaller head ringing the eye sockets, in the larger one as desiccated as pieces of beef jerky.

Smith fashions her forms from actual pieces of meat, draped and wrapped over bases of wax and clay, then cast in bronze. It comes as little surprise. What is surprising is the extraordinary series of color photographs that accompany the sculptures, documenting the painstaking, rather messy process.

Pinned to the wall are images of hanging skeletons, wax-covered hands and juicy hunks of well-marbled meat. In some photographs, it’s difficult to distinguish the real from the fabricated. Are these bits of dried wax, drops of amniotic fluid or flakes of dead skin?

Mixed among these images are several shots of real legs, covered in the purple and red marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma and laid out against the clean white of hospital sheets. AIDS has long been a subtext of Smith’s work, something conjured obliquely, but without fail. Here, she confronts its horrors more directly.

If she risks a certain gratuitousness, opening herself up to charges of exploitation, she manages to transcend the risk, to clear herself of the charges. For in the end, these photographs are not adjuncts to the art. The art instead provides the context in which to receive the photographs--a context in which we realize that our fears are not of others, but for ourselves; in which we are humbled; in which we are made, strangely, more human.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733, through Jan. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Cow Cow Bogy: Maria Fernanda Cardoso makes art out of the bones of cows. Bleached to a creamy white, they resemble tiny Greek columns, chess pieces or tightly clenched fists. Laid out on the floor of the Ruth Bloom Gallery in myriad geometric patterns--interlocking triangles, neatly configured squares, impassive rows--they seem to declare territory, mark borders, separate the inside from the outside.

Yet, Cardoso’s interest is not in generating metaphors. Neither is it in inflaming Modernism’s passion for the ordinary object transformed into art--from Picasso’s bicycle handle-bars to Carl Andre’s coolly stacked bricks. Bleached cow bones are, after all, not exactly ordinary objects in Los Angeles in 1992. They are mysterious and alien, so we read in them all manner of metaphors and images.

In Cardoso’s native Colombia, however, the bones of animals are exceedingly ordinary sights. Entrances to residences are often paved with sheep’s bones, arranged in decorative patterns. What interests Cardoso is forcing a series of difficult questions: What presumptions do artists make about their audiences? Whose language is universal? Whose Modernism is it, anyway?

In the past, Cardoso has produced floor grids made of guava-paste candy and columns made of gourds. These ape the forms of Modernism, while substituting for the latter’s stubbornly antiseptic materials their own stubbornly “exotic” stuffs. If these works suffer from a certain one-dimensionality--uncomfortably close to Rachel Lachowicz’s lipstick remakes of Modernist/misogynist classics--Cardoso’s new work is more complex.

Refusing to trivialize the problems of First World hegemony and a colonialist mind-set, this installation also refuses simple antidotes--least of all, the art world’s too-easy embrace of the “multicultural.” Cardoso wisely insists that we proceed here with great caution. One person’s multiculturalism is, after all, another person’s culture, while “difference” signifies nothing more than where you happen to be standing.

* Ruth Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through Jan. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Neat Tricks: On view at Jan Turner Gallery is a small but beguiling exhibition of drawings, collages, sculpture, prints and photographs, exchanged over the years by Bruce Conner and Tony DeLap, on the subject of magic.

Both men have long been fascinated with the necromancer’s art. DeLap first took up magic when he was 12, spent most of the 1960s immersed in card tricks and has long made sculpture in which what is seen contradicts what is known.

Conner also learned about sleight-of-hand as a boy, at a local magicians’ society. With its obscure effects and hermetic character, his art reflects this childhood passion.

Now you see DeLap’s delightful, doctored postcards: Picasso with his hands pressed up against the window, a white rope slyly painted between them; or, an image of a 19th-Century bridge in Rouen, France, with the silhouette of a woman floating mysteriously beneath it.

Now you don’t. Instead, it’s Conner’s paper collages, derived from turn-of-the-century steel and wood engravings; oversized playing cards, with entire landscapes hovering inside a pair of hearts; or, a “self-portrait” with geometric patterns carefully shielding the face from view.

There are also photographs of DeLap performing levitations, one of Conner’s strangely encrusted assemblages, DeLap’s seemingly impossible sculpture of a floating table, and Conner’s exquisite, two-sided response.

In magic, something must be hidden; in art, something must be revealed. This show turns one thing into another. Art becomes a conversation, becomes magic, and then becomes art again. It’s quite an elegant trick. Watch it closely.

* Jan Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453, through Jan. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.