ART REVIEWS : Restoring Ceremony to the Experience

For more than 20 years, John M. Miller has been making paintings so consistent that his work feels almost like a religion. Now on view at Patricia Faure Gallery are several of the Los Angeles-based artist’s most recent efforts, which--like any liturgy--result from a series of ritualistic actions performed according to a prescribed scenario.

Slashes and pairs of dashes are arranged on rectangles of unprimed canvas in vertical columns, horizontal rows, diagonal swaths, or all three--depending on how you look at it. How you look at it is not at all incidental. It is the subject of Miller’s deceptively simple, phenomenologically sophisticated work.

A room full of Miller’s apparently deadpan works leaves the uninitiated viewer rather non-plussed. These make Mondrian’s plus-and-minus grids seem florid, Agnes Martin’s geometric abstractions as fragile as blown-glass vases and Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings positively expressionistic. Miller’s paintings are that emotionally and aesthetically blank--and that frustrating.

Seeing very little, the viewer opts for more intense scrutiny, hoping for the dazzling things the infant sees in a blank, white wall: unexpected shadows, sudden streaks of light, tonal shifts and other optical effects not immediately visible to the jaundiced eye. None of these, however, is forthcoming. What you see, to quote Frank Stella, is what you see.

So what, then, is to recommend this work? If Stella’s project was to insist upon the non-referentiality of abstract painting, Miller’s project is rather different. It has something to do with establishing new patterns of attention, and then drawing attention to those patterns.

In making the viewer aware of the act of looking, the paintings prolong the look itself (if only out of a sense of shame). This, in turn, has something to do with restoring a sense of ceremony to the public experience of the art object--a blatantly liturgical, obliquely subversive and very interesting idea.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Aesthetics of Earth Art: Michael Heizer’s “Double Negative” (1969-1970) was created when the artist and his crew sliced into the surface of Mormon Mesa, Nev., making two cuts to a depth of 50 feet that faced each other across a 1,500-foot divide. Two hundred and forty thousand tons of earth were displaced to create this staggering void, long held to be emblematic of the macho aesthetics of Earth Art.

Mia Westerlund Roosen, whose work is now on view at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, begs to differ. Her “Madam Mao” (which would be considered gigantic by any other standard) is a miniaturized take on Heizer’s grand-slam bid for immortality.

A comparatively delicate mound of 18 tons of earth, placed in the center of the gallery and measuring 6 feet high, 30 feet long, and 20 feet wide, “Madam Mao” is crowned by a long, narrow and very visceral cavity of pearly pink concrete. Heizer’s monumental void is transformed into a tongue-in-cheek image of feminine “lack.” So much for masculine posturing.

Such overtly feminist gestures are uncharacteristic for Roosen, whose latter-day Post-Minimalism owes much to Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. Since the mid-1970s, Roosen has created sculptural objects whose abstract forms carry distinctly sexual charges. Early on, Roosen favored materials such as fabric, thread and polyester resin; later, she turned to pigmented concrete whose surface could be manipulated to resemble skin--dimpled, tucked, stretched, engorged or sagging.

Several of Roosen’s recent concrete pieces are included in this show, though their impact is muffled by the cheeky bravado of “Madam Mao.” “Domestic Disturbance” is a black-and-white striped “rug” with something vaguely sinister swept beneath it. “Scraggs” is a sphere studded with multiple phallic appendages. “Empire” is a footstool whose concrete cushion looks quite a bit like a puff pastry.

Making soft things look hard and hard things look soft is hard. Roosen manages it to impressive effect, though her reliance upon established formulas prevents her work from being as startling as one might hope.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Feb. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

The Boomerang Effect: Jeanne Dunning has memorably photographed hair, long manes of it seen from behind, with every broken strand still acutely, awkwardly, visible. She has also memorably fabricated tiny “Flaws,” sculptural forms that resemble bits of flayed skin studded with moles and other, unnamed imperfections.

Dunning’s art is like a boomerang: It confronts us with our bodies, estranges us from them, and then reverses its course, making the body and its terrors tolerable, if not as benign as we might like them to be. Her new work at Richard Telles Fine Art is as disturbing as ever--which is quite disturbing, indeed.

Here are crystal-clear images of impossibly murky “truths:” a woman with Pre-Raphaelite streams of pubic hair, or a tiny, third breast nestled in between her legs, or a nipple placed smack in the middle of her extended tongue, like an ulcerating sore. These photographs make explicit Dunning’s debt to Surrealism, especially its romance with the metamorphic body.

Yet her work foregrounds the sense of humor Surrealism’s seriousness of purpose often concealed. This humor is evident in a pair of diptychs, both called “Leaking.” Each juxtaposes a close-up image of a luscious, peeled tomato with an image of the fruit spilling out of the mouth of a young woman, like an uncontainable tongue.

Considerably less clever is “The Toe Sucking Video,” which pivots, rather predictably, on the toe’s morphological similarity to a penis. This piece is much more interesting in terms of narcissism, but one suspects that this effect is unintentional.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (213) 965-5578, through March 18. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Decorative Screens: “Biombos,” at the Iturralde Gallery, is an appealing exhibition of decorative screens from Mexico and Uruguay. The screens are various sizes, the larger ones poised on the floor, others mounted on the wall, the smallest placed on pedestals.

Multi-paneled objects, most designed to be seen from both sides, the screens afford the artist ample room to create abstractions, spin out allegorical cycles, contrive narrative schemes, fabricate altarpieces to the Virgin and engineer mystical triptychs.

Esau Andrade’s “The Family” is particularly witty, referring to the design aesthetic of Piero Fornasetti, the famous fragments of the Imperial Roman monument to Constantine and the saturated colors of the Mexican folk vernacular. Paloma Torres’ piece looks very much like a Cubist sculpture, with projecting rectangles and squares of rough-hewn colored clay from Oaxaca and Zacatecas. Javier Marin’s screen is covered with Neoclassical imagery: On one side, large-scale nudes floating through a bright blue sky in the manner of Sandro Chia; on the other, a series of fragmentary figure studies.

In this company, Perla Krauze’s modestly scaled screens stand out, though they seem as if they are trying to hide. These are patchworks of pieces of amate paper, sewn together and stretched between spindly wooden sticks.

The up-and-down and zigzagging stitches are echoed in the fragile marks that cover the surfaces of the screens. In between these marks, unresolved doodles and irregular borders are tiny images, such as a pair of stockinged legs, a headless man, a crescent moon. Krauze’s work is full of little surprises: cheerily precarious, insistently handmade and very charming.

* Iturralde Gallery, 154 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-4267, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.