Art Reviews : Re:Solution Starts Off on Wrong Foot

The Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies has a new name and a new address. Located two doors away from Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions on Hollywood Boulevard and a few blocks from the newly relocated TRI Gallery, the nonprofit center is positioned to be a highly visible venue for the exhibition of contemporary photo-based art.

However, the center’s new name--Re:Solution, the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies--suggests that serious problems may lie ahead. Not only is it an unwieldy title, it also represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how art works.

Re:Solution has more than one meaning. It refers to the sharpness of images, speaks of artistic resolve--especially of commitments and priorities often articulated by manifestoes--and further recalls that photographs take shape in chemical solutions.

The problem with Re:Solution is that it also suggests that art solves social problems. When it’s effective, however, art always raises more questions than it answers.

Bureaucrats and fund-raisers often treat art as social therapy, but it’s irresponsible for a publicly funded arts institution to dedicate itself to such an ill-conceived goal. The more important job of a venue like this is to provide a forum for diverse approaches to art.

Re:Solution’s inaugural exhibition, an annual show this year selected by Denise Miller-Clark, director of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography, is what results when art is expected to resolve social contradictions. The work by its 11 young artists is cliched and forgettable.

Although (political) content is meant to take precedence, the most interesting aspect of the show is the variety of forms in which its images are presented. Included are framed and unframed C-prints, black-and-white enlargements, light-boxes, projected slides and mirrors. Added to the inventory are computer-generated images, storyboards, silk-screened T-shirts, placemats and key chains.

Rather than demonstrating the strength and diversity of socially oriented art, the exhibition demonstrates that this type of work has already become an empty, academic formalism. The same old idea--that art is good for us--gets dressed up in a variety of forms.

For art and society, it is finally offensive that art be required to serve as a symbolic solution, when real ones are needed.

* Re:Solution, the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, 6518 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 466-6232, through July 23. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

Sweet Pop: George Stoll’s painstaking paintings of paper towels and fast-food wrappers recycle Warhol’s famous statement “I want to be a machine.” Where the father of Pop pushed this impossible desire to its limits, by using photo-silk-screens to make paintings and by turning his studio into a factory, Stoll backs off from the jarring, impersonal nature of early Pop.

His brand of Pop is sweeter, more personal, almost touching and wholly nostalgic. At TRI Gallery, Stoll’s diminutive, hand-crafted copies of the disposable wrappers that advertise fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell display the artist’s absorption in mindless activity.

On close view, his touch is omnipresent. None of the patterns are perfect, but are suffused with human inconsistencies. Stoll’s tracings of newspaper pages and sheets of plywood are even looser and more obviously the work of an individual, hardly that of a machine.

His three series share little of Warhol’s fascination with relentless repetition. Each of Stoll’s works is perversely one-of-a-kind. Fussed over and precious, they have the presence of collectibles.

A cautious craft ethos collides with a love of mechanical reproduction. Stoll’s images blend the hallucinatory perfectionism of Vija Celmins’ landscapes and Maxwell Hendler’s super-realistic pictures with Pop’s trademark, slap-dash speed. The combination is confused yet charming.

* TRI Gallery, 6365 Yucca St., (213) 469-6686, through July 17. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.