ART REVIEWS : Bristol Photos: A Look at What Is Exotic

Horace Bristol’s fascinating photographs of Japan and Korea play to the West’s still-undying taste for exoticism--for tattooed Japanese gangsters, geisha girls gathering cherry blossoms and monks having their heads shaved; for fortune tellers, Noh masks and opium smugglers.

The vintage contact prints at Stephen Cohen Gallery, most dating from the late 1940s, are each only a few inches square. As such, they can’t be looked at, they have to be peered into, as one would peer into a telescope. Only then can we see the world they frame--part historical reality, part imaginative fantasy, an “Orient” that no longer exists.

Most photographs are predicated upon voyeurism--cultural and/or sexual. What makes these images particularly interesting is the extent to which they acknowledge the constructed nature of their objects of vision. These are documentary photographs, yes, but unusually stylized, self-conscious and varied in tone.

Some are highly cinematic. One features noir lighting and ambience--a Tokyo prostitute lighting a cigarette under a train overpass, glamorous in her gritty setting. Another prefigures the Japanese monster movies of the 1950s and ‘60s--a welder in full protective gear shot from below dwarfs the construction site behind him.

Some are formal exercises--the skeleton of a bombed-out Japanese aircraft factory, like lace stretched against the midday sky; a close-up view of moths emerging from a silk cocoon, a constellation of bumps, bulges and curves.

Yet other images are ironic. In one photograph from 1948, a woman clad in a traditional kimono pushes a small child outside to play. In the background, pinned to one of the bamboo screens encircling the interior space, are two American movie posters, one of a young Joan Crawford.

Just as the West has invented an “Orient,” so the latter has invented a “West,” pieced together from Hollywood’s dream machine and bands of roving GIs. Bristol deftly suggests that what’s “exotic” depends on where you’re standing--and, of course, on who’s doing the looking.

* Horace Bristol at Stephen Cohen, 7466 Beverly Blvd., (213) 937-5525. Closed Sunday and Monday, through July 10.

No Taste for Subtlety: In her first West Coast exhibition, at Mark Moore Gallery, Canadian artist Myriam LaPlante turns the male-coded rigor of Modernist abstraction inside out. Instead of feathery edges of paint--as in Morris Louis’ veils of color or Jasper Johns’ brushy surfaces--LaPlante gives us actual goose-down feathers laid onto boards to resemble textured fields of paint. Once she’s revealed Modernism’s repressed “feminine” side, LaPlante turns femininity itself inside out--the fluffy feathers depicting chastity belts or head crushers, or serving as backdrops for cascading leather whips. Here, nice becomes nasty; soft becomes hard; docile becomes subversive.

Subversion is always a good idea--especially when it comes to art and history, both of which tend to fetishize tradition, and to move with more than all-due caution. A feminist intervention into Modernism’s “seminal” ideas and “master”-pieces is indeed all the rage now. But LaPlante’s art lacks subtlety. “Flag” is an emblematic opposition--a “painting” split down the middle, one half covered with black feathers, the other with white feathers. Behind this painting is another, the two held apart by metal brackets. If you step to the side and peer at the space between them, LaPlante decodes the initial opposition: One image’s back surface is plastered with women’s underwear, the other’s front surface with men’s ties.

LaPlante is clearly game, but she lays all her cards on the table before the game has even begun. Subversion isn’t about giving it away. Such impatience is a mistake; all it does is forestall the possibility of shaking anyone’s consciousness.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032-A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031. Closed Sunday and Monday, through July 17.

Dada’s Spiritual Heirs: In “Close to Home,” the mythology of the domestic takes a dramatic turn. Here, home is not necessarily “where the heart is,” nor is it “sweet.” For curator Laura Whipple, home is a splintered metaphor for the psyche, where malaise and reverie co-exist with dysfunction and pride, violence and irony.

The six artists in this show-- Ann Schneider, Tricia Todd, Annetta Kapon, Mara Lonner, Pierre Picot and Whipple--are among Dada’s spiritual heirs. Here, as there, paradox reigns. Whipple places a pair of magnifying glasses into a pair of drinking glasses--or is it the reverse?

It doesn’t really matter, with magnification, one expects distortion. Thus, household objects become the grounds for speculation--and then speculation twists into trepidation. Constructed from chains, wire and washers, Lonner’s “Comforter” emblematizes the malevolence of the quotidian object much in the manner of Man Ray’s “Gift”--an ordinary iron except for the row of tacks projecting from its surface.

The gallery space itself is an important element of this show. Located in the home of Susan Landau, the gallery’s co-director, the show becomes a three-dimensional trompe l’oeil. Where the art stops and the decor begins is unclear; visitors will make mistakes, overlook things, backtrack. The comforts of home are suddenly uncomfortable. That’s the point.

Since home is a chimera, however close you get, you’re always at least one step away from where you thought you’d like to be.

* 1529 Wellesley, Los Angeles, (310) 447-3014. Wednesdays through Saturdays, through June 26.

Politics of Identity: In Renee Petropoulos’ current show, things are more than a little uneasy. The main gallery boasts paintings that are not framed, but frames--circles of lusciously rendered flowers, animals, fleurs-de-lis and heraldic crests, each with a huge hole occupying what should be its center.

In one adjacent room, the walls are painted with rectangular fields of color, the whole set off by fractured moldings that jump from the middle of the room, up toward the ceiling, and then down toward the baseboards. In the other, a butterscotch-colored wall is covered with paintings of hats--a Spanish mantilla, a bishop’s miter, a medieval hood, a Dutch lace cap.

This is, however, not a small world after all. It’s a big world, where the propaganda of plenty disguises a paucity of resources, where xenophobia masquerades as national pride. Petropoulos has long been interested in the politics of identity, especially national identity, and in questions of reflection, especially the way in which the one reflects--or is reflected by--the other.

In the current show at Rosamund Felsen, these themes resurface, though more tentatively, more obliquely. National symbols are disguised, letters from myriad alphabets are whitewashed, motifs taken from coins are abstracted. This is at once a source of frustration and of relief.

For what happens is that Petropoulos’ painting itself--deeply saturated colors, tensely abbreviated compositions, highly skilled renderings--comes more clearly into view. This alone is enough of a pleasure--and, at least for now, enough of a challenge for Petropoulos.

* Renee Petropoulos at Rosamund Felsen, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652-0172. Closed Sunday and Monday, through July 3.