ART REVIEWS : Luciano Perna: Modernism Domesticated

If Clement Greenberg had been a bigger fan of “Hints From Heloise,” Modernism might have looked very different. Imagine it: All-over abstractions made of squiggles of raw spaghetti instead of skeins of dripped paint; grids consisting of squares of fabric stained with cooking oil, coffee, ketchup and pistachio ice cream.

Luciano Perna--as iconoclastic as ever--has already imagined it. Forget flatness, he proclaims mischievously: Think wash-and-wear! This witty and concise body of work at Christopher Grimes Gallery features, in addition to the spaghetti “paintings” and stained grids, a waterlogged column of dirty pots and pans descending into a soapy tub. Perna domesticates Modernism’s masculine-encoded rigor. Latching onto whatever materials are lying around, he devises a revisionist, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic. It celebrates ingenuity rather than inspiration, work rather than heroics, dishpan hands rather than the evanescent touch of genius.

Cleaning up, after all, is much like the most challenging works of art; both are concerned with transformation. Perna’s grid paintings play out this logic according to the peculiar dramaturgy of the TV commercial. Here, four canvases are identically soiled with a pantry-ful of different substances. One canvas is designated the control, while the other three are washed with competing brands of detergent.

Arranged in a neat row, the resulting faded grids testify to the transformative power of domestic products--Tide, Wisk and Surf, among them. What’s more, they coyly conjure the fading hold of an emphatically undomestic Modernism.

Overall, Purex seemed to do the best job. None of the detergents, however, conquered Perna’s red lipstick, which not only remained steadfast, but ran all over everything else. Freud warned us long ago of the return of the repressed. That the lipstick--a cliched marker of femininity--refused to be erased seems, then, to be no accident. Indeed, Perna’s art resonates strongly with certain feminist strategies--the interrogation of male-dominated systems such as Modernism, the validation of so-called “feminine” materials.

Yet how easily do such feminist strategies sit when they come from a male artist? Should female artists be prepared to share this particular floor with those whom they are ostensibly challenging? Is there indeed room for everyone?

Perna’s work raises questions--of inclusion and exclusion, recalcitrant orthodoxies and modes of resistance. Where it will stand when the soap bubbles clear is another question entirely. In the meantime, the work is clever and important insofar as it suggests that cleaning house is nothing to take lightly.

Christopher Grimes, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373. Through March 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Photographic Memories: For Duck-Hyun Cho, history is more than a memory, and a memory is more than a faded photograph. History is the present turned inside out and viewed from the other side; memories are things that can be touched, but that need to be held.

Cho, who lives and works in Seoul, South Korea, gathers old photographs, translates them into black-and-white drawings and presents those drawings as sculptures, framed by bulky structures of steel, lead and wood. Those structures are layered with fragments of antique embroidery, maps of Korea and images of the bright, blue sky. Then, the fragments are painted over, so that only traces of traces remain.

The images at the center of each piece at Dorothy Goldeen are equally eloquent: a beautiful young girl in traditional dress holding a flower; a group of sober-faced women posing with a pair of watchful missionaries; a baby bathing in the silhouette of her mother’s face; an old woman, her hands clenched in front of her, her every wrinkle etched with a clarity that is less cruel than astonishing.

Wrenched out of the grip of the ephemeral and transmuted into constructions as heavy (literally) as lead, these faces, these pictures, refuse to fade away. They are hyper-present. They are monumental. And that monumentality is defied only by their intimacy.

Inspired by the birth of his own daughter, Cho’s work embraces the history of Korea--particularly the history of women in Korea--during the bloody, turbulent 20th Century. But what it makes palpable is the artist’s desire not just to honor the past--his country’s and his daughter’s--but to touch it in some literal sense. It is therefore crucial that Cho transcribes the photographs onto canvas not by machine, but by hand--painstakingly, with respect for every detail, every nuance, every fold of every garment.

This, however, is not enough. And so the artist embellishes the images--with tiny scraps of iridescent silks, with thread sewn and knotted according to the configuration of a favorite constellation. These small flourishes work like candles lit in front of altars or offerings made at gravesides. They do the work of mourning, while expressing hope for something better to come.

Cho’s work insists that history cannot tell its own stories. Nor can photographs speak for themselves. Their power is activated--for good or for ill--only through our intervention; their meanings result only through our intention. Cho’s intervention, Cho’s intention, is nothing if not honorable.

Dorothy Goldeen, 1547 9th St., Santa Monica, (310) 395-022 2 . Through April 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Painting/Sculpture Hybrids: Gerald Giamportone makes tiny stripe paintings on circles of birch and poplar. These are affixed to wooden armatures in such a way that they project from the wall, sometimes by as much as a foot. Right away, there’s a problem: If the supports are more substantial than the images, can you call the works paintings?

Call them painting/sculpture hybrids. At Angles Gallery, they are arranged in vertical rows of three, four or five. Here’s another problem: They don’t really look like anything else, although they recall bits and pieces of other things--Donald Judd’s minimalist stacks and Brice Marden’s cool stripes, the stoicism of Doric columns and the perverse wit of their postmodern variants.

With Giamportone’s work, however, you aren’t rewarded for looking for or at what you normally look for or at when you look at art--the medium, the influences, the touch of the artist’s hand. Instead, these intensely focused works focus you on the act of looking itself, and on the modular rhythms of the objects.

You find yourself getting caught up in all those parallel lines, the white stripes echoing the shockingly geometric grain of the wood; in the minute differences in color and texture between birch and poplar; in the infinite precision of the fabrication; in the attention paid to dimension and scale. In all this, the work confounds expectations in order to offer pleasures that are cerebral, but also sensual.

A small suite of watercolor drawings on tissue accompanies the exhibition. These echo the configuration of the objects--circular disks arranged along vertical axes. What’s extraordinary are the crinkles generated in the tissue by the application of the paint--force fields connecting one column of dots to another, vectors directing the eye back and forth and up and down in seeming defiance of the reductiveness of the image. Indeed, Giamportone’s work is never really reductive. What it turns out to be is oddly, insistently lush.

Gerald Giamportone at Angles Gallery, 2222 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019. Through April 3. Closed Sunday and Monday.