ART REVIEWS : Rummaging in the Getty’s Storerooms

“Connections 2” marks the second in a series sponsored by the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities in which artists are invited to produce their own installations using the center’s collection of historical books, prints, letters, photographs and other documents.

The tradition of having artists and other so-called “non-professionals” ferret around the museum’s storerooms is new. It responds to the wave of 1980s art devoted to institutional critique; in this, it should be seen as a defensive gesture, designed to foster the illusion of the museum’s accessibility while protecting its hegemonic role.

Such controlled tampering has, in any case, yielded fascinating results, as when Barbara Kruger tackled the Museum of Modern Art’s archives to examine photos of “great” artists; and Joseph Kosuth plundered the holdings at the Brooklyn Museum to cogitate upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s own cogitations.

At the Getty Center, the results are less fortuitous. Part of this is due to the fact that the seventh-floor gallery is really a glorified hallway and thus, the space allotted to each of the four artists involved is sharply circumscribed. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that all the artists are committed to explicitly extra-aesthetic agendas; and sociopolitical change doesn’t fit comfortably into the department-store-style display cases that--perhaps by necessity--dominate here.

Harry Gamboa Jr.’s work suffers from an overload of visual and textual material. Letters by muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, and Gamboa’s own photos and musings, work in dialogue to explore Chicano identity. But these are poorly integrated with a slew of archival postcards of Los Angeles. The latter, juxtaposed with references to the recent riots and earthquake, are framed as metaphors for the region’s besmirched innocence. As such, they are regrettably stale.

Rachel Rosenthal is interested in monotheistic culture’s demonization of animals, nature and “the animal in us.” To that end, she displays illustrations of animal-human hybrids culledfrom texts as various as a Napoleonic account of Egypt; an early 20th-Century book of Russian fables; and Max Ernst’s “ Une semaine de bonte. “ She does perhaps the best job of showing off the center’s holdings, though as an artwork, her installation is overly didactic, plagued by hyperbolic, eco-feminist rhetoric.

Noah Purifoy creates a five-foot high shadowbox, filled with Fluxus objects, leather-bound manuscripts and collaged, Christian imagery. As a statement about the institutional power of both art and religion, the mock-reliquary might have been interesting. But accompanied by life-sized mannequins of a nude priest and boy, the installation becomes at once tasteless and moralistic, and worse yet, artistically void.

Only Nobuho Nagasawa manages to skirt the limitations of this format to offer something truly provocative. Her installation features four globes swathed in computer-generated images derived from rare maps of the Roman Empire, the Christian era, the Third Reich and architect Richard Meier’s drawing of the new Getty Center, now under construction.

Under the Getty globe is a Plexiglas box filled with memorabilia belonging to J. Paul Getty, and across the way, a telling photograph of Getty, taken by Yousuf Karsh. In one economical blow, Nagasawa evokes the relationships between conquest and desire, art and empire, and does so without whitewashing her own desires, her own complicity in the living and the telling of the tale.

* “Connections 2,” Getty Center, 401 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 458-9811. Closed Sundays, through June 30. *

Gender Talk: If the feminist reading of the “male gaze”--voracious, predatory and relentless--has become a critical commonplace, Judith Simonian makes the commonplace uncanny. In her new work at Ovsey Gallery, gendered positions are turned inside out and then deftly reversed so that we are back where we started, but also somewhere else.

The haunting paintings of Balthus, which record the artist’s defiantly perverse fascination with young girls, provide the pretext for Simonian’s work. She repaints several of the most lubricious on the flip sides of white panels that hang from the ceiling, several inches in front of the wall. When the viewer looks through the holes Simonian cuts in the paintings, precisely where the heads of the young girls should be, he or she sees his or her own face reflected in the wall-mounted mirrors opposite--the viewer as the viewed object, framed within an image, trapped inside the mirror.

This is not simply Jacques Lacan meets Barnum and Bailey, though there is certainly a playful, even carnivalesque aspect to Simonian’s aesthetic trickery. Instead, this is a sophisticated intervention into the politics of looking--at bodies, at art, at any or all combinations thereof. For when the viewer looks through the designated hole, what he or she sees is not so much Simonian’s lascivious “re-painting,” but a picture of him or herself as voyeur, a picture of his or her own desire to see.

As voyeurs, we are invariably frustrated, for the moment we turn to look, we lose sight of ourselves completely. Simonian suggests that the image--like the self--is always incomplete; and that the gaze is merely an instrument by which we seek to stave off this knowledge.

* Judith Simonian, Ovsey Gallery, 170 S. La Brea, (213) 935-1883. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through April 16.

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Messenger: It is difficult to write about Hannelore Baron’s work without resorting to superlatives, despite the fact that her small, spotted and frayed collages evince a marked distaste for excess of any kind. The German-born Baron embraced an ideal of humility, a vision of the art object as message--or rather, intimation--offered without expectation of anything in return.

Fifty of Baron’s collages and constructions, produced from 1975 to 1987, the year she died, are now on view at Manny Silverman, and it is a rare pleasure to see them. Carefully, indeed reverently assembled from bits of old fabric and hand-colored scraps of paper, sometimes covered with illegible scrawls or rudimentary figures, these objects seem like memory fragments. They want to speak, but they know too much has already been lost. They are, thus, fragile, sometimes stitched together--literally--by nothing stronger than worn pieces of thread.

Baron was an untrained artist, though she certainly learned something along the way from Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell. Despite these influences, her work is neither whimsical, cerebral nor surreal. It is powerfully self-effacing, a contradiction anywhere but here.

* Hannelore Baron, Manny Silverman Gallery, 619 N. Almont, (310) 659-8256. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through April 9.