ART REVIEWS : Focused Survey of Jeanloup Sieff Photos

Sexy models and wizened corpses stand in as the human bookends to French photographer Jeanloup Sieff’s wide-ranging yet consistent oeuvre. At Fahey/Klein Gallery, more than 80 black-and-white silver prints made between 1953 and 1989 include tasteful portraits, elegant landscapes, dignified nudes, exquisite fashion photographs and artfully composed documentary shots.

Although Sieff’s fashion photos, made on assignment for Vogue, Harpers Bazaar and Jardins des Modes, account for fewer than one-fifth of the pictures in this survey, their cool stylishness can be found in every genre of the 62-year-old photographer’s work. Even the mummified monks, portrayed as they’ve lain for centuries in Italian catacombs, seem to be fastidiously coiffed and fussed over, their crumbling robes and dusty rosaries carefully arranged to convey a refined sort of horror that’s simultaneously comic.

A sense of bemused detachment runs through all of Sieff’s pictures. Aristocratic sophistication is especially vivid in a portrait of Alfred Hitchcock striking a ridiculous Halloween-monster pose as he pretends to menace a gorgeously aloof starlet. Sieff’s campy image suggests that impeccable manners are all that’s required to brush aside life’s sometimes terrifying surprises.

His nude photos, exclusively of women and comprising nearly a third of the exhibition, never look hot, lascivious or even remotely suggestive. Come-hither glances are clearly beneath the dignity of the professional models Sieff presents as graceful studies of nonchalant formality.

To be beautiful is to be objectified, a fact the French photographer simply accepts. In this sense, his photos are profoundly and refreshingly un-American.

Unlike much feminist-inspired photo-based work, which gladly dispenses with beauty in its noble attempt to prevent women from being treated as things, Sieff’s art demonstrates that being objectified has its own pleasures and that categorizing individuals as either subjects or objects is somewhat simple-minded.

If it weren’t for the excessively politicized climate in which art finds itself in this country, Sieff’s photos would be seen for what they are: highly conventional compositions in which mannered detachment--from passion and politics--is the modus operandi.

* Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250, through Sept. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Showing for Dollars: More of a sale than a show, the inaugural exhibition at Richard Heller Gallery demonstrates that these categories are not mutually exclusive. Including more than 400 artists and more than 500 pieces--most at cut-rate prices and many in unlimited editions--this giddy celebration of free enterprise is indebted to the Pop notion that art can’t be viable or effective if it doesn’t at least inspire you to lay out some cold cash.

Nearly all the works in this unabashedly low-end venture fall into three categories. Most are relatively inexpensive souvenirs of well-known artists’ trademark styles, like Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms” stamped on golf balls, Claes Oldenburg’s fold-up mouse sculpture, Roy Lichtenstein’s paper plates printed with Ben Day dots and Annie Sprinkle’s raunchy playing cards.

Artists without signature styles, including the young and the unknown, can hardly make souvenir versions of their unidentifiable oeuvres. Instead, they work small and swiftly, like Andy Alexander, whose tiny bug-eyed aliens could be the prototype of a line of mutant children’s toys.

The most interesting works, which form the third group, consist of souvenirs of popular culture the artists have altered, irrevocably twisting the original significance of the modified icons.

Mike Kelley’s wooden paddles with the Declaration of Independence printed across their business ends overlay sadistic fraternity rituals and the foundation of American freedom. Perry Vasquez’s baseball bats engraved with the signatures of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, among other heavy-hitters of Western civilization, conflate hero worship and original thinking. Both artists cleverly turn common souvenirs into ambivalent symbols of power and its perversion, providing apt contributions to a show about the glories and pitfalls of mercantile democracy.

* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Wednesday. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Technical Wizardry: Modern technology serves romantic purposes in Floris Neususs’ variously scaled photograms at Stephen Cohen Gallery. Glowing and ghostly, at once slick and mysterious, these unique camera-less images capture light as it permeates the surface of photosensitive paper, sometimes leaving crystal-clear traces and at other times recording indistinct shadows.

Neususs is a master of the arcane, difficult-to-control process in which he has worked exclusively since 1960, when he was 23. Taking giant rolls of chemically treated paper and dozens of lights into gardens and streets at night, he creates dense, layered images that seem to wrest the invisible essences from things, magically documenting the auras that emanate from people, plants and common household objects.

The level of technical wizardry impresses. Initially, it’s fascinating to explore the artist’s capacity to draw with light, to watch him exploit contrasts between light and shadow, demarcating crisp silhouettes and freezing light’s luminous movement in the eternal present.

After a while, however, Neususs’ subjects fail to sustain interest. Without more engaging motifs than portrait silhouettes, leafy patterns and abstract forms, his stunning technical proficiency seems to be all smoke and mirrors, a repertoire of illusionistic tricks with little substance behind them.

* Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., (213) 937-5525, through Saturday.

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Art and Youth: “Greatest Hits” is a nicely crowded group show at TRI Gallery that takes its title from compilations of music but puts a spin on things by presenting mostly new works. The exhibition’s intentional misuse of a retrospective format slyly suggests that its 19 predominantly young artists are doing their best work right now.

Nearly all of the images and objects explore the significance of architectural space, examining the shifting links between exteriors and interiors. Privacy and public display dance dizzyingly around one another, blurring the boundaries between domestic shelter and urban exposure.

John Souza’s life-size still-life of color-coordinated consumer products gives intimacy a chill. Likewise, Amy Adler’s color photograph of a drawing of a head shot of Jodie Foster beautifully confuses role-playing and being one’s self.

Lesley M. Siegel, Kevin Hanley, Trudie Reiss and Laura Howe focus on the facades of buildings, sometimes discerning a trace of personality in otherwise faceless structures. Photographs by Dani Tull and Jody Zellen humorously present interiors that are not refuges from the outside world but extensions of its dangers.

Snapshots of shopping carts stuffed with colorful junk are all that remain of Gordon Haines’ audience-free performances in which he pushes a cart around town, loading it with garbage until his sculpture-on-wheels is complete. Using the street for his studio, Haines pinpoints some loaded moments at the intersection of self-expression and utter anonymity.

* TRI Gallery, 6365 Yucca St., Hollywood, (213) 469-6686, through Sept. 16. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.