ART REVIEWS : Naughty Dolls Don’t Make for Bad Girls

Demonic little girls are particularly delicious--especially for grown women who have long since learned to rein in their demons. Clad in maniacally frilly white dresses (just the thing to cover up the tattoos on their smooth tummies), standard-issue Mary Janes and glasses that resemble those sported by the artist, their hair frizzed Don King-style, their lips pursed in concentration, and their fists clenched with anger, Kim Dingle’s little girls vent their pint-sized ids while they still can.

These handmade, multiracial, porcelain dolls (just about the size of your average, terrible 2-year-old) seize control of their nursery in Dingle’s wonderful installation at Blum & Poe Gallery. To call these creatures “bad seeds” doesn’t quite do them justice; Dingle, with typical sarcasm, names them “Priss.”

Standing in their wooden cribs like mutinous pirates, they survey the destruction they’ve wrought. The floor is littered with dismembered stuffed animals, sawdust, sheets of newspaper and empty tuna cans. The little lamb wallpaper is covered in violent crayon smears and distinctly fecal handprints, as well as several deadly looking darts, which have only just missed their targets. One little girl has broken out of her crib, which is in pieces all around her; in front of her is an electric sander and a mallet.

This installation makes Dingle’s paintings and manipulated photographs of belligerent babies seem rather winsome, even sweet-natured. The dolls are ferocious; as such, they offer an object lesson about sculptural authority.

There are yet other possible readings of the work. Allusions to the sacred cows of contemporary art abound: Mike Kelley’s stuffed animals, Robert Gober’s wallpaper, Jasper Johns’ targets, Cy Twombly’s handwriting, Jackson Pollock’s gestures. To call Dingle’s installation an intervention into the masculinist history of art, however, makes it sound far more reasoned, even pedantic, than it is.

The work is clearly political and clearly feminist; but Dingle is not, as she has been called elsewhere, a “bad girl.” Unlike someone like Nicole Eisenman, her tongue is nowhere near her cheek. It is stuck straight out, poised to do real damage.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through March 3. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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The Innocuous ‘Venuses’: The work of Robert Graham conjures the “Erotic Frigidaire”--the label that has been given to the work of Neo-Classical sculptors such as Antonio Canova, whose marble nudes are notable for their glacial surfaces and equally icy sexuality.

Graham, however, is no Canova. The miniature scale of the female nudes he has produced over the years--known collectively as the “Venuses”-- precludes this; so, too, does his rather more pedestrian execution. Graham’s sculpture is marked by a conflation of would-be sexiness and near-total vacuity. Yet the work never quite gels, even on the level of pastiche.

The current exhibition at Chac-Mool Gallery showcases what are supposedly the last of the “Venuses”--32 sculptures, each less than two feet high, each mounted on a high pedestal. The effect is somewhat surreal: a gallery stuffed with Lilliputian goddesses who resemble fashion models. Plucked of body hair, their locks gathered in sleek chignons, these latter-day deities are as airbrushed as sculpture gets.

There are eight different poses and four different bronze patinas to choose from. “Gabrielle” poses with her arms lifted over her head to show off her breasts and the musculature of her arms. She looks particularly good in a pale grayish finish. “Koreen,” with her hands on her hips, is most elegant in a painted oil finish.

If one is critically inclined, one might think here of certain fantasies of prostitution. Yet the work doesn’t demand this kind of reading. Graham’s vision of well-toned, depilated women would be offensive if it weren’t so innocuous.

* Chac-Mool Gallery, 125 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 550-6792, through March 31. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Video In, Video Out: At the Long Beach Museum of Art, “Intelligent Ambience,” an exhibition of 37 single-channel videotapes by 43 different artists curated by Kathy Rae Huffman and Carole Ann Klonarides, is organized around a series of provocative questions. Where and how does technology intersect with daily life? How will we navigate the intangible architectures of cyberspace? How can space be visualized and how might vision be spatialized?

Video is a particularly poignant medium with which to confront such questions, for digital technologies both expand and render obsolete video’s system of visualizing space. We tend to think of space as something that exists in time: The landscape is eternal, the built environment endures.

We think of vision, on the other hand, as something fleeting--a fugitive glance, the blink of an eye. The new technologies complicate these distinctions, as shown in work by artists as various as Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Les Levine and Bruce Yonemoto. Especially intriguing in these terms is Van McElwee’s “Inside,” a very short tape in which a mall is transformed into a series of dynamic grids--the virtual space of interactive communication.

Accompanying the show is an evocative installation by Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic in which vision perseveres, while the object literally dissolves. The piece consists of 36 blocks of dry ice, upon which a life-sized image of a nude woman is projected. Her slightest movement within the darkened space is startling; the sound of her shallow breath is equally unnerving. As time passes, the blocks of ice become smaller, and her body becomes increasingly fragmented, caught in the spaces between the ice, an unmoored image emblematic of the age of electronic simulation.

* Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, (310) 439-2119, through Feb. 19. Closed Monday and Tuesday.