ART REVIEWS : Cheryl Donegan’s Subversive ‘Head’

A woman with short, dark hair approaches a plastic bottle with a spout on its side. She pulls the plug and a milky liquid starts to pour out. The woman, moving in sync to a thumping rock score, catches the liquid in her mouth, swallows it, spits it back in the container, lets it dribble from her lips. When the fluid runs out, she licks around the spout. The piece is over.

In “Head,” a three-minute video at Kim Light Gallery, artist Cheryl Donegan asks a question: What makes a scenario pornographic?

Clad in a cropped athletic top with her face stripped of makeup, Donegan stars in this particular screen test. She is, however, no typical fetish object. Her performance, first off, feels like a workout. Yet this piece isn’t just about the labor accrued within the pornographic regime of faked ecstasy. It’s more ambitious than that.

The pleasure Donegan interrogates--like that which comes at the end of any hard work-out--is autoerotic. Donegan is attractive, but she is emphatically unavailable. Unlike Jeff Koons, who played at pornography in his recent “Made in Heaven” series, she doesn’t acknowledge her audience; she never even looks at the camera. She has other things on her mind. Perhaps, watching her enjoy herself, so do we.

The most interesting part of the video comes at the end, when the artist spits a prodigious amount of liquid against the pink backdrop and produces what looks suspiciously like an Action Painting--a dripping mess, recast as an aesthetic trace of the body’s exertions. Donegan, however, has taken the language of this macho spectacle, read it through a familiar script of feminine submission, and produced a third thing, something distinctly feminist. “Head” is at once subversive and sexy; but it is, finally, not about sex--autoerotic or otherwise. It is about the viewer’s head, and about how the artist can become mistress of it.

* Kim Light Gallery, 126 N. La Brea Ave . , (213) 933-9816. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through July 24. Colors of Dreams: In Jan Groover’s still-life photographs at Fahey/Klein Gallery, tin funnels, milky decanters and clay figurines--along with the occasional pear--are arranged on vertiginously tilted tabletops that are suffused in what can only be described as a perfumed haze.

Photography is, in many ways, a prosaic art. Groover, however, is attracted to poetry. And indeed, her forms are deftly articulated; her colors are subtly realized. In the platinum prints, the full range of grays is exploited. In Groover’s color images, the muted hues--ochres and umbers, or the particular shades of rose one finds in hand-tinted photographs--look like the colors of dreams.

Yet these images are so dreamy they are insubstantial, so still (even for still-lifes) they are lifeless. Groover holds an important place in photographic history; she once pushed the parameters of her medium. But the work has since been smothered in its own hyper-aestheticism. These photographs, most dating from the last 10 years, are far from her best; they resemble nothing so much as backdrops for a swoony advertising campaign.

* Jan Groover at Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through July 10.