ART REVIEWS : Sherrie Levine’s Copies of Copies: Another Parasitic Display

As art’s relationship to society has changed throughout this century, artists have modeled their activities on all sorts of disciplines, fantasies and even animals.

Minimalism gave us the artist as an industrial laborer. Pop presented the artist as a refined consumer of common commodities. And California Assemblage proposed that the artist is a pack rat, who furtively digs through culture’s junk in search of castoff gems.

Given the complexities of modern society, it’s not surprising that painters, sculptors and photographers think of themselves in an increasingly chameleon-like fashion, suggesting, among other roles, that they’re social critics, social scientists, alchemists, advertising agents, cooks, therapists, fortunetellers, children, adolescents, home decorators, stylists and parasites.

Of this last category, New York-based artist Sherrie Levine is the best. Her profoundly academic work at Margo Leavin Gallery (and, concurrently, the Museum of Contemporary Art) is top-of-the-line parasitism.

To make “After Degas,” “After Cezanne” and “After Van Gogh,” Levine photographed images of these modern masters’ paintings from catalogues and textbooks. Printed in black and white in a standard 8-by-10-inch format, her handsomely framed photos look like the byproducts of a high-end publishing job.

Although Postmodern commentators believe that Levine’s copies of reproductions offer a scathing critique of originality and authorship, her pictures of famous paintings don’t do anything the printing press hasn’t done for 500 years. The only difference is that Levine’s belong to a signature style, which insincerely insists there’s no such thing as a signature style.

Each of Levine’s six sculptures, “Chimera: After a Broken Leg,” consists of a molded plywood leg-splint, copied from a 1940s design by Charles Eames for the U.S. Navy. To these graceful forms Levine has added a gold-plated label, like those found on trophies, with her name and date engraved.

The splints are encased in plexiglass boxes, and a tacked-on title refers to prior works by Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. Elsewhere, her paintings on mahogany panels are silhouettes lifted from George Herriman comic strips.

To Levine, official art history (as defined by art school textbooks) is a living organism into which she seeks to embed her exceptionally derivative photographs, paintings and sculptures. Her goal, like that of a wood tick or intestinal microorganism, is to leech sufficient vitality from the defenseless host, ensuring the survival of her art, which could not sustain itself on its own.

Given this thoroughly narcissistic model of art-making, all that’s left for the viewer is to identify the sources to which Levine has appended her name. This might be a game, but it’s hardly recreation.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 273-0603, through April 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Costly Tokens: Two years ago, artist Daniel J. Martinez produced a series of little metal tags that visitors to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York were required to pin to their clothes when they paid admission to the 1993 Biennial exhibition. These tokens were exact duplicates of those ordinarily used at the museum, except that in place of its initials--WMAA--the artist substituted phrases from the sentence “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White.”

At Robert Berman Gallery, Martinez presents the collector’s edition of this project, offering 11 sets of multicolored tags enlarged more than 10 times the size of the original pins. Their prices are even more greatly inflated.

These souvenir replicas won’t get you into any museum. Meant to hang in the homes of collectors sympathetic to the artist’s simple, political message, they symbolize affiliations among like-minded people. Like upscale bumper-stickers made to go over the sofa, they are not as interesting or problematic as their earlier, more public version.

Martinez’s small, functional tags packed a punch because they forcibly put words in the mouths of museum visitors--whether or not a particular viewer happened to agree with the artist’s sentiments. Imagine having to wear a campaign button for a politician you voted against, and you get an idea of how it would feel to be a walking advertisement for a position you neither believe in nor support.

The best critique of Martinez’s opportunistic attempt to speak on behalf of others appeared in the art publication Coagula. On an enlarged silhouette of a tag was printed: “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be Daniel Martinez.”

This sharp piece of satire efficiently undercut Martinez’s pretense of speaking for all museum visitors. Incisively demonstrating that group identity cannot be formed as easily as a tag can be attached to a lapel, it also suggested that the most powerful response to art begins with individuals, not with stereotypes or labels tacked on one’s clothing.

Paradoxically, Martinez’s recent attempt to capitalize on his museum-tag project reveals ambivalence about being a self-appointed spokesperson for the excluded, or a shameless salesman to the wealthy, whatever the color of their skin. Neither role leaves much room for art, trading its risks and rewards for social- and market-oriented speculation.

* Robert Berman Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 315-9506, through March. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Shifting Canvas: Julia Fish is a Chicago-based landscape painter whose feathery touch endows the solid objects in her matter-of-fact pictures with a wonderfully understated sense of mystery. At Christopher Grimes Gallery, three modestly scaled, nearly photographic close-ups of a vine-covered brick wall, a red brick walkway and a house’s fake brick siding are much more engaging as oils-on-canvas than as real things.

Substances appear to be almost atmospheric in Fish’s patiently built-up images. Her delicate paintings do not suggest that the world is on the verge of dissolving or melting down into some hallucinatory stew. Nor do they intimate that it’s best to see reality through rose-tinted lenses.

Fish’s deliberately out of focus pictures describe a shifting, malleable world that has not yet settled into sharply delineated conventions or stale cliches. Although a trace of Mondrian’s stiff, formal armature suffuses her straight-forward paintings, they are also shot through with a dose of Seurat’s under-appreciated, hands-off pointillism. This influence accounts for the fresh, proto-Pop kick of Fish’s haunting images.

Like the 19th-Century Frenchman, whose seemingly unemotional style belied the quiet charge of his art, her tightly restrained paintings open onto common spaces where subjective impressions take shape, finding, in otherwise inhospitable surroundings, a little room for intimacy and individuality.

* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through March 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Illusion Minus Magic: Lies Kraal’s 10 handsome abstractions at Kiyo Higashi Gallery hover uncomfortably between the realm of pictures and the world of things. It seems as if her masterfully crafted, sensitively painted and lovingly waxed monochrome panels have one foot firmly planted in the space of three-dimensional objects and the other solidly set in the realm of two-dimensional images.

Each of Kraal’s exquisite, labor-intensive works consists of one or two extremely slight ridges running horizontally across an unmodulated square of dense, saturated color. Built of very thin layers of modeling paste, these gradual protrusions have been fastidiously sanded to form tiny, convex seams or visual glitches in otherwise perfectly smooth fields.

If Kraal hadn’t enhanced these minimal ridges with painted highlights and subtle variations in the shades of the pigment, it would be impossible to see them when you face the paintings frontally. Instead, she has used a traditional illusionistic trick to tell a truth about her materials, layering pictorial sleights-of-hand atop actual, topographical contours in the surfaces of her monochromes.

As a result, her abstractions feel mildly schizophrenic, as if they don’t know whether they’re pictures to be looked at or objects to be touched. Although straddling these categories often makes for edgy, resonant works, in Kraal’s case it detracts from her considerable talents as a painter. The intriguing optical qualities of her best pieces get swamped by the gimmicky illusionism in this unresolved body of work.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (213) 655-2482, through April 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.