ART REVIEWS : ‘Night’: Pop Works Filtered Through a Gay Lens

That Pop Art evolved as a response to the macho metaphysics of Abstract Expressionism--silk-screens instead of paint swaths, soup cans instead of biomorphic forms, camp instead of the sublime--is something upon which most art historians will agree.

Less readily agreed upon is the extent to which this response was coded by the homosexuality of many of Pop’s most prominent artists--this, at the cost of our understanding both of post-war American art and the construction of gay identity.

“Perilous Night: The New Queer Pop” at the Highways Gallery enters into this particular art historical, and more broadly cultural, lacuna. Itself framed as a response--to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s current John Cage exhibition, as well as several recent museum shows that have elided Pop’s gay sensibility--”Perilous Night” features the work of a group of contemporary artists who appropriate Pop iconography in order to uncover the latter’s gay subtexts and, in the process, negotiate their own identities.

With the exception of Keith Boadwee’s color photographs of Jasper Johns-style targets (painted directly on Boadwee’s rear-end), and Chuck Stallard’s reworking of Robert Rauschenberg’s automobile tire prints, the work in this show is less charged than the issues it raises. Clearly we are living in a different sociopolitical moment, wherein it is possible--and for some, necessary--to acknowledge sexual orientation in one’s work. Yet what impact does this kind of freedom (or at least its promise) have upon artistic practice?

Work as lackluster as Adam Ralston’s boxes of Trojan condoms, presented in the manner of Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, or as trite as Phranc’s cardboard “Butch Boxers,” which allude to Claes Oldenburg’s painted plaster sculptures, is not very encouraging. These self-consciously politicized objects are profoundly anticlimactic, while the works they reference--shaped by what critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “the epistemology of the closet”--continue to resonate on multiple levels.

This somewhat dignified exercise in “outing” reveals that difficult questions are still being avoided. What needs to be asked is how the closet can be both a productive and a repressive presence in an artist’s life; and what artists will choose to do with the burden of freedom, once the doors have been flung open.

* Highways Gallery, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1755, through Nov. 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Beautiful Deception: In his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Peter Hopkins shows a series of staggeringly beautiful paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery. These are, however, quite deceptive. Produced without paint, a brush or the artist’s touch, each is a conceptual trope, dictated by a unique, predetermined and minutely calibrated system.

“Site O” is as delicious as one of Helen Frankenthaler’s stain paintings. Only the painterly incident is due to something as unaesthetic as grime. “Site O” is, in fact, a double bedsheet that has been slept on for a specified amount of time, dragged through New York’s East River, and overlaid with a thin sheet of taffeta, for that special sparkle only art possesses--in theory, that is.

Hopkins’ paintings muddy up (quite literally) the purity of the abstractions they conjure. They are tainted objects, soaked not with pigment, but with surgical dye, bleach or any number of noxious substances; and layered not with imagery, but with bolts of cheap, glittery fabric. In bringing the detritus of the post-industrial environment into the bright, white realm of pure visuality, Hopkins adheres to the dialectical character of the work of Robert Smithson, to whom the younger artist has long paid homage.

Yet whereas Smithson’s “non-sites”--rocks and debris imported into the gallery space from various “sites”--hinge upon an oscillation between the inside and the outside, the determinate and the indeterminate, the one and the many, Hopkins’ paintings do not. Their sheer beauty consumes everything in their orbit, including the myriad implications of the materials that formed them, and the complexities of the conceptual program that structures them. Here, then, there is no back-and-forth.

Hopkins also puts several perfumed pieces on display. These likewise follow an elaborately detailed plan and attempt to infect the gallery space with the carnal excess that space habitually represses. Yet as with Hopkins’ paintings, the information the viewer brings to these scented works dissipates in their very presence. Though the artist seems determined to demonstrate how things might work otherwise, sensuality overwhelms the mind--again, and yet again.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Nov. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Machine Age: In the science-fictional reality of the late 20th Century, our access to information, perception of our bodies and interaction with other bodies is either permeated, filtered or controlled by the machine. The choice depends on your level of cynicism--and perhaps seduction.

If you’re as cynical--and as seduced--as sculptor George Stone, you might go so far as to argue that the machine is so pervasive it threatens to transform everything in its midst into its mechanistic like. In a new installation at Ruth Bloom Gallery--”Unknown, Unwanted, Unconscious, Untitled”--Stone tests this latter proposition, as well as its converse: Somewhere in every machine a body is lurking.

The installation is highly theatrical. Ten electronic machines, shrouded in silver neoprene bags, lie on the gallery floor. Connected by thick cables to a power source in the ceiling’s rafters, the computer-controlled apparatuses wriggle, writhe, shiver, shudder, hesitate and squirm--when they aren’t lying perfectly still.

The allusions, or perhaps illusions, fly fast and furious: homeless people asleep in an alleyway, soldiers dying on a battlefield, Frankenstein monsters stirring from the deepest of slumbers. Whether the references are sociological, literary, psychological or even balletic, it is impossible not to think of these machines in human terms.

Some are very active; others are passive. Some resist their confinement; others give in to it. The processes of identification are instinctual and cannot--it seems--be stalled. This is both fascinating and alarming.

Stone’s installation cautions us about our tendency to animate the inanimate--to imagine vulnerable humans where there are only gears and electronic parts. It is, of course, easier, less messy and even less costly to nurture technology than to nurture each other. This work insists, however, that only the real have real--and certainly very immediate--needs.

* Ruth Bloom Gallery, 2112 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 829-7454, through Nov. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.