ART REVIEWS : Revealing Look at the Boys of Summer

Andrea Modica’s photographs of the members of the Oneonta Yankees, a minor league ballclub from Upstate New York, make for perfect viewing on a hot August afternoon. These portraits of the “boys of summer”--clad in pin-stripes, eyes shaded behind caps, cheeks stuffed full of tobacco--are, however, more than pleasant diversions. Like the game of baseball (at least according to its aficionados), the photographs on view at Paul Kopeikin are both beautiful and complex.

Sports stars are our heroes, our mythic figures; Modica is interested in myths-in-training, in unripe heroes. The faces in her images are unfamiliar, mostly young and strangely transparent. In those faces, and through those bodies, we see the fine-tuning of a performance--the clenched jaw, the level gaze, the crossed arms. We also see the places where the performance is still raw--where masculinity, as publicly enacted by the athlete, has not yet been finessed.

Everywhere there are clues suggesting vulnerability. A portrait of a catcher stresses a long, thin, painfully adolescent neck, complete with bulging Adam’s apple. Another image of two outfielders, as elegantly composed as a fashion photograph by Irving Penn, foregrounds one player’s hands placed clumsily on his thighs, the anxious look in his eyes indicating an awareness of his own awkwardness.

Other photographs stress the sexuality of the players. One dark-haired Adonis sprawls on a bench, his legs spread, his head tilted to one side, his eyes glazed. Another sits on the field, arms wrapped around a raised knee like a Playgirl centerfold.

The most interesting of these depicts a pair of infielders, posed like the matching sides of a Rorschach blot. Dressed like twins, their bats are slung over their shoulders in opposite directions at identical angles, and their shoes are touching just enough to merit notice--and to suggest a profound if unnerving comfort with each other’s bodies.

Masculinity is a masquerade that relies upon certain attitudes, poses and acts. Intimacy must appear in the guise of camaraderie, competition must be balanced against fair play, individualism checked by team spirit, and violence borne of aggressivity controlled. Modica’s images, billed as portraits, document this masquerade--and the imperfections, slips and cracks generated thereof, the places where so-called “inappropriate” behavior has yet to be repressed. In this, they are both daring and conceptually sophisticated. They reveal the hard work that goes into the perpetuation of one of the mass culture’s favorite summertime--in fact, perennial--fantasies.

* Andrea Modica at Paul Kopeikin, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-0765. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through Aug. 21.

Contradiction: In the 1980s, abstract painters of a critical bent were caught in a whopping contradiction. Artists like Peter Halley and Philip Taaffe carried on about the collapse of history and fomented a serious brouhaha about the death of painting. Yet at the same time, they kept busy trying to gain a foothold in painting’s--yes!--ongoing history.

In the 1990s, millenarian talk about the eclipse of both painting and history has subsided, though the assault on high modernism continues. James Hyde, whose abstract paintings are now on view at Angles Gallery, offers insight into modernism’s overarching promises and purist stance. But his work isn’t pungent enough to be labeled an assault.

Hyde’s is, rather, a speculative endeavor, a tentative look into the mechanics of formalism, a low-key investigation into the possibilities for nonobjective painting now that those possibilities are no longer so highhandedly dismissed.

Hyde pulls you in with the lure of the gesture--brushy swaths of paint in colors as intense as mustard yellow and as luscious as pomegranate red. Yet once you come in closer, instead of Willem De Kooning-like texture, you get the flatness of a Roy Lichtenstein-style cartoon.

This flatness is due to the use of fresco, a centuries-old technique in which pigment is sunk deep into the plaster support, leaving a smooth, unmodulated surface. Here, however, the plaster is not slathered directly onto the wall, in the traditional manner, but laid onto massive chunks of pebbly, white Styrofoam projecting from it.

All of a sudden, the Renaissance has fast-forwarded into the age of plastics, with a post-World War II pit stop (or deliberate false turn) taken along the way. Time, medium and stylistic conventions blur, and then derail altogether. What we are left with are a bunch of expectations. Hyde gets us to confront them, and to see that expectation is more than half of what art is anyway.

The other half--at least as far as these very sculptural paintings show it--is concerned with deft manipulations, imaginative permutations and a steadfast refusal of the rhetoric of exhaustion. Hyde offers us visual and other pleasures--a fine antidote to millenarian thinking.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through Sept. 12.

Common Ground: Obsessions and nonsense, waste and hyper-productivity, refinement and rubbish meet on common--if somewhat chipped and faded--ground in Joan Mahony’s multimedia installation, “Where Oryx Cross Crumbling Schists,” at Linda Cathcart.

Like on a crowded city street, the scene is marked by sensory overload: the sounds of footsteps, breaking light bulbs and the occasional scream; the look of boxes of Tide, rusted license plates and dead flowers.

In Mahony’s work, this miscellany is transformed into a series of rarefied tableaux and finely retooled objects. Mahony is a scavenger with the eye of an aesthete, the touch of a poet and the rigor of a neurotic. Here, then, is a three-way collision between Simon Rodia’s celebration of junk, Marcel Duchamp’s taste for irony and Blanche DuBois’ desperate yearning for grace.

So we get “A Happy Moment Like This,” which features a cracked porcelain kitty poised in an rotting window frame covered with torn curtains of white gauze, “sand paintings” made with glitter-saturated glue, a “stamped letter” consisting of a crushed tin of Thai candy placed in the top right corner of a ratty piece of wood and a melted, plastic milk carton juxtaposed with a discarded oven dial, set to “Hold Warm.”

Mahony is a post-Pop artist, and humor--however black--is her trump card. It prevents her from falling into the trap of romanticizing society’s discards, as did so many of the California assemblage artists of the 1960s, to whom she nonetheless owes a sizable debt. At the same time, it allows her to laugh at her own compulsion for order.

In the center of the room is her monument to systematism--a large wood-and-cement lean-to, neatly equipped with “shelves” filled with mini-dioramas, each strictly color-coded. Prominent among them is an aquatic narrative featuring a pair of sea-green high heels, some fake, greenish pearls and a few jars of Kraft Parmesan cheese, poised like underwater sentinels. This is order custom-designed for a recessionary climate and rendered into a spectacle of absurdity. In short, it’s like the whole show--weird and quite wonderful.

* Linda Cathcart, 1643 12th St., 2, Santa Monica, (310) 392-8578. Open Fridays, through August.