ART REVIEWS : Bravura Highlights ‘LAX / 94’ at LACE

Full of energy, if disjointed, the “LAX / 94” exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions features sculptures, photographs and drawings by Annie Appel, Charles Dickson, Kayren E. Lyle and Mary Cecile Gee; a video projection by Jennifer Steinkamp; and a series of performances by the Antenna Repairmen, a musical group who “play” ceramic vessels made by sculptor Stephen Freedman.

The visual arts component of the show adheres to the organization’s longtime commitment to identity politics. Too often in LACE’s history, this commitment has come at the expense of aesthetic sophistication. Aesthetic criteria, however, seem somewhat irrelevant given the sheer bravura of the work of Dickson and Lyle, in particular.

Lyle’s emotionally impassioned and visually spectacular “Stand by Your Man” is a frenzied, red-lit altar to the African American male. Festooned with candles, beads, cloth dolls and photographs of everyone from unnamed family members to Malcolm X and Nat Turner, the piece marries spiritually coded forms to an explicitly didactic message: African American men have been demonized by the media. If the marriage is not completely satisfying, neither is it gratuitous.

The same can be said for Dickson’s work, especially the massive installation that dominates LACE’s main room. A series of door frames surrounded by African fetish-figures, cast body parts crucified with golden spikes and a chariot-style vehicle laden with chains, barbed wire and shells, the piece is a narrative--a morality tale about unvanquished hopes. The scale complements the importance of its theme.

Appel’s photographs of flames and Gee’s drawings of cruciform shapes cannot possibly compete, although their interest is admittedly slight. All but lost in this over-heated context, they belong in another show entirely.

Steinkamp, given the luxury of her own room, fares much better with an elegant installation that confirms her position as the most interesting artist in Los Angeles working in digital media.

“Elbowroom” is one of Steinkamp’s signature projection environments, constructed from a computer animation. She plays with the terms of modernist abstraction--color and form, figure and ground--while wickedly mocking its academicized sterility. Covered with an oscillating pattern of blue and pink light, the walls seem to be breathing. Steinkamp reminds us that painting isn’t dead: It just takes a while to recognize.

* Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 957-1777, through Jan. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Homoerotic Utopia: Tom Bianchi’s new photographs at Couturier Gallery describe a homoerotic utopia where men with massive pecs, delts and lats embrace one another in the surf, dart in and out of shady coves and collapse, exhausted, in their well-appointed beach home--without generating so much as a raised eyebrow.

Bianchi’s celebration of homosexual love is matter-of-fact, but not unflinching. It has decidedly political overtones, yet it is only incidentally confrontational. Though he credits Robert Mapplethorpe as an important influence, Bianchi’s soft-core images are far closer to Herb Ritts’ photographs of a nude Cindy Crawford: sexy, commercial and rather silly for any pretensions otherwise.

Like Ritts (and most fashion photographers), Bianchi is a myth-maker. It’s somewhat irrelevant that his subjects here are two “real” people, the “best-known gay couple in America” according to the flyleaf of Bianchi’s new book, “Bob and Rod,” from which these images are taken. Bob and Rod are indeed men in love, but they are also good-natured, well-muscled props, deployed to advertise a total lifestyle: specific workout regimes, spending habits, leisure activities, aesthetic choices and, of course, sexual orientations.

If Tom of Finland’s cartoons codified a certain vision of macho homosexuality, Bianchi’s images interpellate the gay male as consumer.

Most interesting are those photographs that acknowledge the gay male predilection for high camp. In one, a grinning Bob and Rod pose at the edge of a glitzy swimming pool, each holding a colossal leaf over the other’s presumably colossal genitals.

In what is certainly the most amusing image in the show, Bob and Rod pose inside an abandoned, mock-classical structure. Standing atop a broken column, their arms raised flamboyantly in the air, the naked lovers incarnate undying phallic rectitude. Consumers of this particular myth, straight or gay, are likely to be legion.

* Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 933-5557, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Ordinary People: Stern J. Bramson was a commercial photographer from Louisville, Ky., who spent his life documenting rather ordinary things: a party for employees and their families at the National Cash Register Corp.; a re-enactment of an car accident; four generations of a single family, from a wizened great-grandfather to his acorn-faced great-grandson.

On view at Paul Kopeikin Gallery is a charming group of Bramson’s photographs. Culled from the files of the Royal Photography Co., the family business in which Bramson worked from 1946 until it was sold (negatives and all) in 1973, these images have been discovered by the art world, and accordingly celebrated.

It’s easy to see why. Normality doesn’t often appear this peculiar--at least, not without bearing traces of an artist who is trying too hard.

This isn’t to say that Bramson’s photographs lack self-consciousness; rather, they lack guile. Surreal juxtapositions and pictorial puns abound, but they are a perfunctory effect.

A 1946 picture of a group of models staring up, enraptured, at a blank projector screen seems like something out of Allen Ruppersberg or John Baldessari. Yet, given the fact that the image certainly documented something (a newfangled technology? the models’ cardigans? their matching hairdos?), it is no conceptual fillip; it’s truly bizarre.

Equally strange is a contemporaneous photograph taken inside a factory. Bramson observes the photographer on call getting ready to shoot. The foreman points down toward the floor, yet there is nothing for the photographer to see there.

This image would be a fine example of the notion that a photograph automatically renders that which it captures extraordinary, even when what it captures is thin air. Yet Bramson is no critical theorist, and his innocence makes the work that much more appealing.

Without a doubt, however, the best of the lot is a 1962 photograph of magician Baron Lavelle at home with his wife and children. Docile creatures they are, helping Dad with his work.

While Mom floats through the air with her eyes shut tightly, the Baron’s daughter allows herself to be sawed in two, her shoes abandoned on the floor next to her disembodied feet. The Baron’s heir apparent, sliced in two at the waist, rests on the coffee table like an anthropomorphic cookie jar.

Who’s the real magician here? This is as close as Bramson gets to winking.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-0765, through Saturday.

Out of Site: In theory, a site-specific work of art doesn’t just sit there, self-contained and circumspect; it engages with its site. Though this sounds woefully obvious, experience shows it isn’t.

Marcos Luytens’ site-specific project in the La Brea Tar Pits indeed engages with its locale, one of the juiciest in Los Angeles. But it does the bare minimum, sinking a great opportunity in a platitudinous quagmire.

Pit No. 4, the site of Luytens’ intervention, was excavated in 1913.

A fenced-off soup of plundered tar does remain--not as dramatic as the big pit along Wilshire Boulevard, with its make-believe dinosaurs, but pretty evocative, nonetheless. No fewer than 360 skulls were collected there, including those of the saber-toothed cat, the dire wolf and the grand sloth.

What Luytens chose to do here was collect modern-day cast-offs (old tires, shopping carts and broken TV sets); enrobe them in shrink-wrap, his signature material; and place them in the tar pit. These are meant to be future ruins of the industrial age, stuck in the primeval bitumen.

Luytens wants to tell a cautionary tale about our propensity for waste and our casual abuse of the environment. The tale has been told countless times. Luytens squanders his chance to lend it new urgency by doing something so predictable.

He might have exploited the connotations of shrink-wrapped fossils--packaged for easy consumption by scientists (or artists) seeking after immortality. But he doesn’t do anything vaguely intriguing. Instead, he entombs site-specific cliches.

* George C. Page Museum, (Outside in the Tar Pits), 5801 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6311, through Dec. 29.