ART REVIEWS : Dan Graham: Exploring Vision and Knowledge

Dan Graham’s impressive, life-size maze at Margo Leavin Gallery is an incisive exploration of vision. Part barricade, interior decoration, labyrinth and abstract landscape, the handsome walk-in sculpture ranks among the best he has made.

“Hedges and Two-Way Mirror Glass Labyrinth” consists of three nearly 8-foot-square, two-way mirrors, and three shelf-like structures, each containing seven tiers of leafy green plants. Looking at its components, you cannot tell if you’re seeing through a tinted window or catching the mirrored reflection of the part of the gallery you occupy.

Vision doubles back on itself. You no longer know if what you see is really there or merely an illusion. Space both collapses and expands, as the installation demonstrates that the path from perception to knowledge often detours through ungrounded beliefs, unreliable assumptions and unfair expectations.

Graham’s six-panel construction is more than a disorienting collision between the austere geometry of Minimalism and the sterile design of anonymous corporate lobbies. It also ambitiously reconsiders Minimalism’s adamant rejection, in the ‘60s, of painterly illusionism.

The figure-ground ambivalence at the root of illusionism is transformed into a three-dimensional environment that includes the viewer’s body. Instead of emptying art of illusionism, Graham invites us to enter that realm.

Walking into the beautifully sky-lit space is like walking into a painting. The formal shifts between figure and ground, solid and void, presence and absence, which once belonged exclusively to two-dimensional images, suffuse every cubic inch of the gallery.

This experience is more open and supple than that provided by many of the 51-year-old, New York-based artist’s earlier projects. They were somewhat constrained by a tendency to dutifully illustrate academic theories of the invisibility of the individual in the face of the modern city’s daunting architecture.

Graham’s new installation is more playful. It suggests that Minimalism’s attempt to eliminate illusionism from art was misguided, and it implies that much current work, based on a similar disdain for deception, is likewise off track. Art, like life, is riddled with illusions and misapprehensions, and these confounding intersections are precisely where its power resides.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through May. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Narrative Associations: “Fantastic Voyage,” Arthur Tress’ 30-year retrospective, surveys the work of a photographer less concerned with formal refinement and/or technical perfection than with pictorial content. His restless, wide-ranging body of work stands or falls by the narrative associations each image elicits from a viewer.

The 60 photographs at Stephen Cohen Gallery ensure that almost everyone will find a poignant subject or evocative moment. But none of these sentiments is pursued by Tress beyond the obviousness of artfully designed, greeting-card cliches.

Included are black-and-white documentations of rural and urban children; staged tableaux indebted to Surrealism; antique aquariums filled with colorful tidbits of kitsch; men striking conventionally homoerotic poses; arty scenarios into which the photographer’s shadow intrudes; and preposterous snapshots that “accidentally” capture the sinister underbelly of modern life.

Standard psychoanalytic themes predominate. Sexual dread, fantasized decapitation and stylized death are given convincing, if well-worn, form.

The relentlessness with which the New York-based photographer tries out established styles and exploits diverse approaches gives his exhibition some of the unease and impatience dramatized by his best photographs. When he steers clear of overwrought fakery and is not swamped by overblown, tongue-in-cheek irony, his art has the capacity to quietly depict the real weirdness that lies just beneath the surface of contemporary existence.

* Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7466 Beverly Blvd., (213) 937-5525, through May 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Gross Excessiveness: Huma Bhabha makes first-rate gross-out art. Her slimy, repulsive sculptures transcend disgust. They’re so over-the-top with gut-wrenching, stomach-turning, flesh-crawling excessiveness that they might carry you over to the sublime side of fear.

Four stunning floor pieces make up the young, New York-based artist’s debut solo show at Kim Light Gallery. The sculptures have the scale, presence and vulnerability of pets, those beloved, domesticated creatures we care for and share our homes with, in exchange for loyalty and warmth. The only difference is that her “pets” seem to have lived through a nuclear apocalypse.

Describing them as unsightly mutations only begins to get at their utterly repugnant nature. They appear to be fragments of living viscera, ripped from the insides of unidentifiable beasts. For some unknown reason, which probably not even Darwin could explain, they have somehow managed to survive--with oozing wounds, exposed membranes and raw nerve endings.

“Pustalymf,” “Cryosfinx,” “Chogynus” and “Venomoth” put you face-to-face with the scary creatures that inhabit a child’s over-active imagination. Bhabha’s sculptures are like those horrible blobs of poisonous protoplasm that kids insist are sitting on the bottom of murky wading pools, despite parental assertions that nothing’s down there except sand, rocks and mud.

As a result, Bhabha’s type of horror shares more with Walt Disney’s saccharine vision than with that spelled out by the popular champion of unrepentant evil, Stephen King. The sweetness only intensifies the unsettling force of her work.

* Kim Light Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-9816, through Saturday.