ART REVIEWS : Presenting History as an Elaborate Fabrication

Jeffrey Vallance’s latest exhibition is a mock miniature museum that doubles as a dubious religious shrine and an earnest research project. Installed at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, “Three’s a Shroud” ranks among his most impressive and hilarious works. It is incisively intelligent and wickedly funny, plainly matter-of-fact and utterly preposterous.

Vallance’s artifacts, pictures and souvenirs display the ways fact and fiction intermingle to produce myths that might be impossible to believe but are also impossible to disprove. His exhibition is timely, original and compelling because it treats history as something more than an incontestable story dictated by the dominant few.

In Vallance’s hands, historical reality is nothing but the byproduct of a clever individual’s willingness and ability to put one’s wildest imaginings into practice--to manifest one’s fantasies as works of art. Although his installation may not look like an ordinary exhibition, it exactly fulfills this description of the role the romantic artist traditionally plays.

The Shroud of Turin, the Holy Lance that pierced Christ’s side, and the Veil of Veronica are the legendary bits of history that Vallance conjures up to work his devilish magic. His re-creations of these divine artifacts wear their fakery on their sleeves. Some exaggerate the parts of the shroud that resemble circus clowns or George Washington’s bust. Two seemingly identical versions of the “original” sword raise questions about the veracity of this entire endeavor.

But the outlandish claims that have been made throughout history for even less impressive fragments of cloth and more mundane pieces of metal make Vallance’s silly propositions seem sensible.

For example, historians have recorded that the Holy Lance, before it penetrated the side of God, was forged from a meteorite by Cain’s great-grandson, passed through the hands of King David and Solomon, and was used by Brutus to kill Julius Caesar and Caligula to kill his sister.

Vallance’s fake museum scrambles the relationships between fact and fiction, rumor and reality. It uses the documentary language of ‘70s conceptualism to lie--to demonstrate that truth is never self-evident but must elicit our belief if it is to be convincing.

“Three’s a Shroud” presents history as an elaborate, irrational fabrication not to distance us from its developments, but to bring us more deeply into its puzzle.

* Jeffrey Vallance at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652-9172, through April 17, closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Bookish Sensibility: Peter Wuthrich uses books to make paintings. His works at Thomas Solomon’s Garage are more than clever, conceptual exercises because of their quietly astonishing beauty. They criticize abstract painting while preserving much of its visual allure. They create peculiar illusions, sustaining and rewarding our focused attention.

The 30-year-old Swiss artist’s first solo show in the United States is an impressive inventory of ways to arrange books without ever opening them. Wuthrich has affixed 35 pairs to the wall in an open grid that resembles a handsome color-chart. He has stacked about a thousand in a corner. With their spines to the wall, their white, cream, beige and brown pages--sandwiched between uniformly tan covers--form the cross-section of a thin slice of landscape.

Wuthrich has also built little cottages of books he’s cut into quarters. He’s constructed emblematic narratives by combining embossed covers of some books with the blank covers of others and mounting them serially on the wall.

His best piece consists of about 150 books he’s laid on the floor in the shape of an elongated oval. Its various shades of aquas, grays, blues and greens create the impression that you’re looking at a small pond. The different thicknesses of the books and the optical effects of their various tones combine to form a shimmering ambiguous surface.

Like painters who prefer the refined quality of linen to the roughness of stretched canvas, Wuthrich uses only books with linen covers. Like the best abstract paintings, his works momentarily arrest language, demanding to be perceived and understood visually, not linguistically. In his perversely silent library, you’re never compelled to read. Instead, you’re wholly content to skim the surfaces of things, which, due to Wuthrich’s skills as a colorist, are remarkably rich in themselves.

* Peter Wuthrich at Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax, (213) 654-4731, through April 11, closed Mondays.

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Nature of Desire: When sex is the question, even simple answers can hide deep complications. “TRI-Sexual,” a group exhibition that addresses the body’s omnipresence in the works of young artists, stands out because it openly embraces confusion. Without a narrow agenda to articulate or a specific identity to define, this eight-artist show offers an insightful, if tentative, exploration of the polymorphous nature of desire.

Monica Majolie and Lutz Bacher powerfully implicate their viewers in dark dramas of voyeurism and exhibitionism. Majolie paints exquisite little oils of close-ups of her own wounded and bruised body, as well as homosexual, sadomasochistic acts she can only imagine. Bacher couples images of ‘70s heterosexual pornography with advisory texts. Her works draw you into stories you know you should avoid but simply can’t resist.

Keith Boadwee also implicates his viewers in a game of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, but from an outrageously playful angle. His color photograph of a “Flower Power” painting on his derriere revisits the ‘60s with cheeky insubordination.

It targets the territory where insults and pleasures overlap, falling wholly into the eye of the beholder.

John Souza’s viscerally gripping piece attacks the mechanics of our bodily functions. His human-scale assemblage resembles a disemboweled cyborg. It looks utterly lifeless but nevertheless embodies the menacing possibility that with a few more parts it could be rebuilt.

Randy Ray’s remedial handicrafts, Larry Mantello’s giddy party decorations and Marilyn Minter’s drippy pictures of fruits and genitals add to an environment in which desire constantly slips out of bounds, inviting us to account for its elusive, uncontainable nature. Even Richard Hawkins’ arrogantly lazy magazine cutouts do not take too much away from this otherwise high-spirited exhibition.

* “TRI-Sexual,” 1140 S. Hayworth, (213) 936-8255, through April 26, open Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays.