ART GALLERIES : A Spectacular Brown Colors the Message

There is no getting around the fact that John Miller’s sculptures and reliefs are colored a startlingly credible excrement brown--and textured accordingly.

At Richard Telles Fine Art, roiling mounds, lumps and heaps of the stuff (or rather, a fine facsimile thereof) are studded with buried treasure: toy guns, golf balls, miniature golden bells, tiny cavemen, plastic letters. This is the detritus of childhood, the gifts the child wants to receive (if only to summarily discard them), and those the child chooses to give (her only power, according to Freud, being the ability to produce or withhold feces).

Miller has long played with the notion that infantile delight in excrement translates into adult cathexis in art-making. Though his work uses this equation in order to provoke a variety of questions about consumerist excess, besmirched innocence and environmental catastrophe--the spectacular nature of the material often overwhelms the best-laid plans.

This time Miller maintains control, while coyly begging the question of whether or not artistic control is itself a symptom of anal-retentive behavior. The six sculptural units clustered here become a narrative with the title “Topology for a Museum.” It’s an economical move, which makes obvious the fact that a museum is little more than a heavily romanticized disposal site for cultural waste products.

In this scatalogically over-determined context, Miller’s small, color photographs are far too oblique. Like an aesthetically sophisticated take on “Where’s Waldo?” (itself about as anal-retentive a game as one can imagine), the images make demands.

Instead of demanding we find something or someone, they ask us to articulate an absence or to pinpoint an aberration, an inconsistency or a failure. But the images of Jim Morrison’s grave at Pere Lachaise Cemetery, soon to be relocated; of a monument to Lenin, for which only the base remains, and of a park littered with the discarded needles of junkies are not up to the task assigned them.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (213) 965-5578, through March 12. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

Failed Symbolization: Eleanor Callahan, wife of photographer Harry Callahan, is not your typical muse. Unlike Charis Weston, whose idealized body served her husband, photographer Edward Weston, as any number of ready-made, sculptural forms, Eleanor’s body is recalcitrant.

In a well-known series of images dating from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, on view at Jan Kesner Gallery, Callahan goes to great lengths to conceal Eleanor’s face, presumably in order to present her as a generalized icon of femininity. Nude, she reclines in the grass, flaunts her breasts and pregnant belly, and raises her arms over her head, a shapely black silhouette against an unmodulated, white field.

And yet, the broken contours, dimpled flesh and irregular curves of Eleanor’s body all conspire against Callahan’s plan. Eleanor is not reducible to a symbol, except perhaps as a veiled symbol of resistance to any attempt at symbolization.

One might compare these images to Picasso’s paintings of his wives and mistresses, now at the L.A. County Museum of Art. Picasso is able to grind his women down into personifications of Menace, Fertility and Melancholy. Callahan is not, and his work is all the more riveting for this failing.

Billed as a retrospective, the exhibition frames the Eleanor photographs within the larger context of Callahan’s work. Callahan’s experiments with manipulated multiple exposures--a shot of Eleanor in her living room, cropped into an egg-like oval that floats over a wintry landscape; intersecting rows of office building windows, which suggest a rigidly geometric composition gone haywire--are interesting historically, but less so aesthetically.

More compelling are Callahan’s attempts to achieve a pure form of linear expression, such as an electric wire or the infinitely narrow space between a woman’s buttocks, which fill an entire frame. These images transcend technical wizardry in order to examine the structures of compression, both formal and philosophical.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through March 5. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

A Wordy Exhibition: In an elegantly conceived installation at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Eva Schlegel toys with the oft-uttered and entirely lamentable banality that art is a universal language.

Schlegel works backward, beginning not with art but with language, which she swiftly denudes of all content, reducing it to pure form, pure image. This she does by silkscreening a number of texts, each one blurred to the point of illegibility, onto large sheets of glass. These lean against one another and against the gallery wall, much in the manner of Joseph Kosuth’s work, though Schlegel’s props are a bit more diffident about their status as theoretical propositions.

All that is recognizable are the formal structures of various literary genres: a letter, with its heading and staccato salutation; the densely packed paragraphs that characterize a theoretical text; the stop-and-start rhythms of an interview; the irregular patterns of poetry. Yet the needs for distraction, information and revelation those genres are designed to fulfill have been denied.

Schlegel knows that we are never content to let things rest at form, accepting retinal pleasure as an end unto itself. We crave meaning, so much so that we are willing to fabricate it in its perceived absence.

What Schlegel gives us is a mirror-like picture of frustrated desire. Both the starting and the end point of art, his very lack of closure makes art infinitely seductive.

As for the truism that it can be everything to everyone, Schlegel offers instead this much more radical proposition: Art can be anything to anyone.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 5th St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733, through Feb. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.