ART REVIEWS : A Tip o’ the Hat to Entertainment Industry Collectors

Contrary to popular myth, great art does not always come from hunger. A thriving art scene is fueled by consumption, and consumption is fueled by money. Preferably, lots of it--as in Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence and New York in the 1980s.

Recessions, however, mean less money and less consumption; and Los Angeles, sadly, has been hard hit. But there’s one place in Southern California where money, if it doesn’t exactly flow, is still being made and spent.

“Hollywood Collects,” an exhibition at Salander O’Reilly Galleries/Fred Hoffman of 59 works of modern art on loan from actors, agents, producers, business managers, directors and film company executives, addresses itself to that community--to the members of L.A.’s entertainment industry who have, historically, been impassioned collectors of art. The exhibition works in two ways: as a “thank you” to people like TV producer Barry Lowen, whose bequest forms a cornerstone of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s permanent collection, and actor Steve Martin, who is a trustee of the County Museum of Art; and as a goad to those within the community who have yet to take the plunge.

However self-congratulatory, this endeavor is well-merited. But what we really need to drum up is support not just of art, but of L.A. artists, who are scandalously under-represented in the show, and in too many local collections. If L.A. art ever needed some high-placed boosters, it’s right now.

For those of us who aren’t actors, producers, film company executives and so on, the show offers a selection of quite wonderful 20th-Century work, ranging from a drawing by Matisse to a vacuum cleaner encased by Jeff Koons, from a stunning self-portrait by Diego Rivera to a deadpan abstraction by British newcomer Damien Hirst.

The gallery is at pains not to state which collectors own which works. Armed with a list of all the lenders’ names, however, it is impossible not to hazard a few guesses. Here are a couple of hints:

Some of the matches make perfect sense. Ed Ruscha’s “Invasion of Privacy,” for example, is owned by publicity-battered sports star John McEnroe. Others are more like poetic justice. A heroically scaled painting by Lawrence Gipe, the word “complicity” spelled out across the bottom like a blistering indictment, is owned by none other than Sylvester Stallone.

“Hollywood Collects,” Salander O’Reilly Galleries/Fred Hoffman, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 247-1500. Closed Sunday and Monday . Through March 6.

Disembodied Parts: They poke up at you, like hundreds of little fingers, rounded at the tips, short and stubby in length. You want to run your hands across them and feel the bronzed surface, but there is something altogether unnatural, altogether frightening about the profusion of disembodied parts. Anyway, something else is beckoning.

It looks like a sweet roll, propped against the wall, crusty around the edges, curling on itself. From within the dark interior a faintly phallic form asserts itself; look again, and the phallus is gone, nothing but a small flap of fleshy latex.

Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture is about psychological derailment, sexual ambiguity and emotional intensity. Long before Minimalism became too minimal, too calcified and too cocksure, inspiring artists like Eva Hesse to rebel with visceral materials and willfully fortuitous forms, Bourgeois was there, insisting upon the subjective, sensual, and contingent nature of art. At 81, she continues to be there, making new work for the upcoming Venice Biennale, and inspiring a new generation of artists interested in the body, the mind and their myriad discontents.

The show at Linda Cathcart’s new exhibition space is particularly interesting in that it brings together a group of Bourgeois’ works, the originals of which were first seen at an exhibition at New York’s Stable Gallery in the 1960s. It is a stunning array--a large hanging piece bulging with pockets and perforated by openings; a mound of bronze lumps that appear alarmingly tactile and mobile; a split-open heart you want to take into your hands, perhaps because it so resembles a pair of buttocks, breasts or testicles. But, perhaps it’s quite the opposite. What Bourgeois’ work may indeed reveal is that sexuality and the body are nothing if not sculptural inventions.

Louise Bourgeois at Linda Cathcart Gallery, 1643 12th St., Santa Monica, (310) 392-8578. Open Saturday and Sunday, 12-5. Through Feb. 21.

Literal Art: Roni Horn’s exhibition comes as rather a disappointment for those of us enamored of her peculiar sculptural forms. Forged of gleaming metals and often displayed in pairs, these forms are so uncompromising in their materiality that they seem to turn themselves inside out in the very act of viewing, their starkness becoming strangely lush, their economy all about excess.

The current work is less complex, less conceptually nuanced, less seductive. It deals with language, and in this, it suffers the fate of much linguistically based art: It is too literal. Take “Kafka’s Complaints, Complete”--a series of thick aluminum plates into which are set epoxy resin letter forms that spell out those things that annoyed Franz Kafka, as per his letters--”Fur,” “Teeth,” “Heavy Furniture” and so on. The piece functions purely as narrative; we read the inventory but then, what? In which directions does Horn then push us?

The space between words and things is vast; the links between them tenuous. Yet here, they seem somehow interchangeable. The work fails to address how Kafka’s words have become Horn’s things, how obsessions have become objects developed within the space of art, and how meanings have thereby been transformed. Neither this work--nor two others included in this show--offers any room for contemplation, much less room for delectation. In this, the show falls far short of Horn’s own, high standard. It seems to require serious rethinking.

Roni Horn at Margo Leavin, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603. Closed Sunday and Monday. Through March 6.

Decisive Moments: If the rhythm of daily life is soothingly routine, Joseph Koudelka is interested in those instants when the rhythm is broken, when something shifts, when the clandestine beauty of the everyday becomes suddenly and irrevocably evident.

This fine retrospective surveys the Czechoslovakian-born photographer’s work from 1963 to the present, including his most recent, oversized panoramas. It is filled with what Henri Cartier-Bresson has called “decisive moments,” those moments when the subject reveals itself in its most telling aspect and evocative form: an old man silhouetted against an ancient building, his face as craggy as its decaying walls; a child climbing into the outstretched arms of a marble Madonna and gently kissing her lips; a man kneeling down to plead with his exhausted horse.

Yet unlike Cartier-Bresson, Koudelka does not hanker after the surreal. His work is less magical than stubbornly sociological. He is interested in the smoking streets of Prague in 1968; in the ways in which men strive to maintain their dignity in dirty, French pissoirs ; in the persistence of spirituality in the rural communities of his native Czechoslovakia.

The most remarkable image in the show falls into this latter category. Here, Koudelka captures the hustle and bustle of the early morning streets: an old woman waits on her stoop, a team of horses making its way while a child dressed in a white gown and a pair of wings speeds by on his bicycle, destination unknown. What this image insists--what this work indeed insists--is that the miraculous is not really a miracle. It is, merely, business as usual.

Joseph Koudelka at Fahey-Klein, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250. Closed Sunday and Monday . Through Feb. 27.