ART REVIEWS : ‘Go Down Stairs Diagonally’ Offers an Off-Balanced View

Walking into “Go Down Stairs Diagonally” is like waking up in someone else’s dream. You feel that things are out of sorts and that you’ve stumbled into a stranger’s fantasy.

This twisted group exhibition curated by artist Paul McCarthy invites viewers to do two things at once--to experience the sculptures, photographs and drawings in the immediacy of the present and to analyze them from a distance. At Rosamund Felsen Gallery, each of us is simultaneously a psychoanalyst and a patient.

We get caught in the perverse, middle ground between steamy intimacy and cold detachment. McCarthy’s mischievous exhibition proposes that we get to know our compulsions and phobias not to escape their debilitating influence, but to more fully embrace their peculiarity and weirdness.

An inflatable plastic balcony--in bright, beach-ball colors--seems to be breathing in slow motion. With air continuously pumped into and sucked out of it, Albano Guatti’s elastic sculpture alternately protrudes from the wall and dangles limply over our heads. It enacts a cyclical, sexual drama of firm fullness and withered exhaustion.

Two furry, six-foot toy skunks--that seem to be identical twins--stand on pedestals and grin gleefully, expressing exaggerated childlike sweetness. As McCarthy’s monstrous playthings tower above us, their prosthetic erections stare us straight in the face, making it hard to forget that childhood and sex are never separated by much, and that adulthood is a strange mix of both.

Dieter Roth’s chocolate sculpture and spice painting emphasize the physical connection between the visual arts and oral fixation. Resembling injured, 3-D cartoons, Franz West’s gauze-wrapped lumps of papier-mache remind us that violence lurks just beneath the surface of society and sometimes erupts in random attacks against the defenseless.

Likewise, Bernhard and Anna Blume’s gigantic photographs of an old man’s walk in the woods transform an ordinary bourgeois pastime into a nightmarish trek to the dark intersection where religious fervor meets repressed sex and dumb lust couples with mild-mannered decorum.

Jason Rhodes’ obnoxious celebration of failure insists that a loser’s get-rich-quick scheme is more fascinating than a successful, corporate advertising campaign. His send-up of motorcycle mythology, lava lamps and Joseph Beuys makes a place for nutty entrepreneurs in the face of institutionally sanctioned facelessness.

Aura Rosenberg’s 20 black-and-white photographic portraits of the faces of men having orgasms clinches the suspicion that we’re intruding on someone else’s dream. Taken by the partner of each man, the images are supposedly exposing a moment of naked intimacy, but they actually mask their subjects behind a list of cliched conventions. We read anguish, ecstasy, struggle, release, bliss, concentration and fakery into the photographs, often with ease--and interchangeably.

“Go Down Stairs Diagonally” compels us to see that distance and objectivity regularly lead us astray. Like McCarthy’s purposefully demented art, his exhibition demonstrates that immersing ourselves in our immediate fears and desires might generate little knowledge, but yields experiences that we wouldn’t trade for anything.

* Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 8525 Santa Monica Blvd., (310) 652- 9172, through Sept. 4. Closed Sunday and Monday. *

Substantial: A broad selection of prints at the Social and Public Art Resource Center marks the impressive public debut of El Nopal Press. Run by artist-printer Francesco Siquieros, this low-budget, high-quality operation focuses on the work of artists based in Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Over the past three years, Siquieros has published prints by 15 artists including Victor Estrada, Robert Gil de Montes, Ruben Ortiz, Eloy Tarcisio and John Valadez. Working mostly at night and on weekends, he has used a small, converted letter press in his downtown loft to produce a diverse and substantial portfolio.

This month, Siquieros received a prestigious grant co-sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and two Mexican corporations. The award will allow him to dedicate more time to his fledgling press. His goal is to use art to facilitate the exchange of ideas between the United States and Mexico.

The border and its shifting significance predominates the exhibition. In many of the colorful prints, contemporary advertisements and cartoon characters jockey for position among traditional religious symbols and pre-Columbian artifacts. Emphasis is given to the fact that cultural identity is an ongoing process that drifts across borders as it is continually reconfigured.

Yishai Jusidman’s nearly invisible and delicately gorgeous images of geisha exemplify Siquieros’ radically international intentions. Printed on eight types of exquisite Japanese paper, these captivating lithographs show that any subject is available to ambitious artists, regardless of nationality.

Jusidman’s five prints are also a technical tour de force and a sophisticated exploration of perception. The same group is displayed to better effect at Patricia Shea Gallery, where their deeper frames allow for more space between each translucent layer of paper. Four related oil paintings on panel offer an even more mesmerizing experience of Jusidman’s ghostly art. Hauntingly intelligent, they fuse a tradition of Eastern pleasure-giving with a Western history of monochrome painting.

* Social and Public Art Resource Center, 685 Venice Blvd., (310) 822-9560, through Sept. 25; Closed Sunday. Patricia Shea Gallery, 2114 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 452-4210, through Sept. 4 . Closed Sunday and Monday. *

Lively L.A.: “Art in Los Angeles: Eight Artists in the Sixties” offers a surprisingly lively reminder that a wide variety of art flourished in the city 30 years ago. This group show at Asher/Faure Gallery stands out because of the high level of quality of its paintings and drawings.

Nothing else unites its otherwise arbitrary sampling of works. Too small to offer a comprehensive survey, and too conventional to present much of an original argument, the exhibition relies on the straightforward authority of its individual pieces.

It is simply a pleasure to see John McLauglin’s starkly serene black and white abstraction next to Craig Kauffman’s pink and lavender plexiglass bubble. Ed Ruscha’s wry commentary on the viscosity and illusionism of paint still looks fresh, as do Billy Al Bengston’s shiny chevrons and Llyn Foulkes’ apocalyptic collages.

John Altoon’s obsession with biomorphic sensuality comes through in a tendril-filled image, and Robert Irwin is handsomely represented by a substantial eight-inch thickly framed hand-held painting. Ed Moses’ paper flowers neatly typify a career marked by reversals, shifts and accidental unfoldings.

The exhibition’s tendency toward self-congratulatory boosterism is tempered by the fact that art in Los Angeles is too often thought of as having no history. The problem with the show is that it refrains from making generational links and aesthetic connections, instead presenting history as a series of unrelated masterpieces made by great men.

* Asher/Faure Gallery, 612 N. Almont Drive, (310) 271-3665, through Aug. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.