ART REVIEWS : It’s Hot and Steamy in Phyllis Green’s ‘Turkish Bath’

The inspiration for “The Turkish Bath,” Phyllis Green’s show at Jan Baum Gallery, is J.A.D. Ingres’ painting of the same name, one of art history’s most notorious odes to Orientalism. The hot-house atmosphere Ingres incarnates--all damp flesh, intertwined limbs and Near Eastern froufrou--becomes, in Green’s hands, both hyperbolic and irresistible.

Green distills things into sculptural essences. Exoticism--a pendulous form covered in black mesh and leopard skin, with a hookah pipe for a tail--reclines on a bed of brocade, like a world-weary odalisque. Post-coital bliss is a speckled ceramic vessel with pale green velvet cords dangling limply from its many protuberances. Animal magnetism is a fetching creature who resembles the Queen of Anteaters--with a white leather horn, a gold cord wrapped around her neck S&M-style;, and an obscenely pointed pink tail. Forbidden pleasure is a two-pronged object adorned with demure white leather buckles, like a pair of Siamese twin Lolitas.

To call these little sculptures eccentric is an understatement. Indeed, Green’s objects are so odd they verge on self-parody. To this end, they are ostentatiously placed on overstuffed fur pillows, which are themselves placed on silk-swathed pedestals. This is, however, less a commentary on those accouterments that deem an object “art” than a sly demonstration of a trick of the trade: When it comes to seduction, presentation is everything.

The work superficially resembles Lauren Lesko’s opulent fetish objects. Yet where Lesko stresses a feminist psychoanalytic reading, Green refuses to get stressed-out. It’s hard to work up to a hard-sell when you are yourself lost to sensual abandon. Indeed, Green so revels in her baroque sight gags and lavish materials--ostrich feathers, neo-Victorian fringe, Ultrasuede, velvet polka dots, gold netting--that critique is quite beside the point. This is not to say that her sculpture is dilettantish. It is as perverse and as concentrated as good perfume.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 932-0170, through Dec. 23. Closed Sunday and Monday. *

Rust Never Sleeps: California assemblage art can be thought of as a long-playing ode to rust. Rust is a romantic metaphor for the passing of time. It insinuates the poetry of use and the beauty of waste. It has lost a bit of its frisson due to overexposure over the years. But George Herms, whose “Project X” is now on view at Kohn Turner Gallery, demonstrates that certain materials, like certain aesthetics, never die; they merely await reincarnation.

Here is a surfeit of rusty things--gas cans, silverware, car parts, mattress springs, muffin tins, tools and so on--as well as old pieces of newspaper and discarded pieces of clothing that, by proximity, look rusty, too. These post-industrial discards are amalgamated into sculptural assemblages, and arranged in, on and above grid-like shelves--one of Herms’ favorite modes of display, borrowed from surrealism.

Indeed, the most interesting of these assemblages are those that owe the greatest debt to surrealism and its attraction to peculiar juxtapositions. Among them is a piece titled “Appolinaire,” which enshrines a chipped coffee cup from a restaurant named after the famous poet and a huge tangle of wire suspended from the ceiling like a tumbleweed floating out of a dream, studded with a scythe and a piece of melting glass.

Despite the deadbeat allure of individual pieces, the show works best as a whole--as a kind of studio-cum-mindscape. What ties it all together is Herms’ longtime signature--the word “LOVE,” stamped in capital letters with a backward E. “LOVE” shows up in corners, on the undersides of objects, on dangling pieces of yellowed paper. This word is a perfect talisman for a man who has never allowed his wit to compromise his generosity of spirit, and a perfect gift for those viewers willing to pick through the refuse to find it.

* “Project X,” Kohn Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453, through Dec. 17. Closed Sunday and Monday. *

Jokester: In Michael Coughlan’s new work at TRI Gallery, profound truths masquerade as dumb jokes--maybe so successfully that when they unveil themselves, these truths feel like an intrusion, or a party-pooper’s pieties.

Dumb jokes are fun, and it is hard not to have fun in the presence of a large, papier-mache mountain with glistening soap bubbles spewing from the top and popping delicately on their way down to earth. Equally crowd-pleasing is a plywood shelf, empty except for three lonely rubber worms, and a few nylon rope cobwebs in the corners.

Coughlan, however, wants to offer more than a series of quirky visuals. He wants to paint a wry portrait of the artist as callow youth. “Self-Portrait as a Small Volcano” thus is about the problem of being full of ideas whose transparency is evident to everyone else except you. “Still Life for the Fecund Ascetic” is about being cursed with a head so empty that everybody and everything--except the proverbial worms--have taken a hike.

There is something winning about the capacity to operate on multiple levels. Like that of Dennis Oppenheim, Rebecca Horn and Jack Pierson (an idiosyncratic trio, yet all come to mind here), Coughlan’s work is both playful and conceptually dense. Yet there is a flip side Coughlan must consider as he goes for it all. And that is the fact that it is more difficult than it looks to wed whimsical form to serious (if self-deprecating) content. This work is very promising (the titles alone are quite wonderful), but it still feels semi-detached, as if one or the other--form or content--would do just as nicely as both.

* TRI Gallery, 6365 Yucca St., Hollywood, (213) 469-6686, through Nov. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday. *

Land Ahoy: At Margo Leavin Gallery, “In the Field” is a museum-quality survey of landscape in recent photography. One of its most notable accomplishments is its avoidance of the usual opposition between nature and culture. Here, the notion of landscape includes not only the expected verdant glens, rolling hills and stormy clouds, but also those interventions and desecrations afforded by the human presence.

In this, the show pivots on Sharon Lockhart’s two photographs of teen-agers positioned against ocean backdrops. Her merciless inspection of their blemished faces assigns topographical significance to expanses of skin; at the same moment, the quivering waves seem to minutely calibrate their volatile, inner lives.

Lockhart is interested in the passage from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Probably the most compelling images in the show track the passage from the “natural” to the “unnatural.” Robert Yarber shoots trees that are all but masked by the nervously flickering light. Andrea Robbins and Max Becher document the windmills and farmhouses of Holland, Mich., the neon-orange reflections on the water undermining the absurdly homey architecture. Collier Schorr depicts a partially clad boy straddling a tree, the milky white of the image an index of the boy’s tarnished innocence--or perhaps his precocious will-to-vacuity.

Meanwhile, the show sweeps across nations, decades and aesthetics, making all sorts of unexpected connections. Bas Jan Ader’s High Romantic trumpery finds a strange bedfellow in Jack Pierson’s romance with the down-and-out, and Stephen Prina’s conceptualism suddenly looks as ornate as Maria Nordman’s spiritual urbanism. All shows can’t be everything to everyone. This one does its best--and its triumph is that it manages not to look superficial in the process.

* “In the Field,” Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Dec. 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.