ART REVIEWS : Bloom’s ‘Floating World’ of Fluid, Intrusive Detail

The theatrical nature of Barbara Bloom’s work makes it a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. You can’t possibly be neutral, for example, about a dramatically underlit installation that features a solid red floor the color of Chinese lacquer, upon which are placed hundreds of masks of Asian faces and over which is positioned an “Orientalesque” bridge that itself holds a wooden vitrine containing six grains of rice, each of which has an erotic Japanese miniature reproduced on it.

“Pictures From the Floating World,” at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, is at once carelessly extravagant and fetishistic about the tiniest detail, weirdly offensive in its cultural politics and so vague as to evade a position entirely. It is perverse in a beguiling way, and admirable if only for its bravado.

Perhaps unexpectedly, Bloom’s new work recalls her 1989 installation, “The Reign of Narcissism,” a 19th century-style parlor stuffed full of upholstered chairs, columns, busts, moldings and mirrors, all featuring the artist’s silhouette, likeness or signature. Beyond the period setting, “Narcissism’s” self-conscious evocation of the artist-as-maestro sets us up for this installation’s visually sumptuous, highly particularized exploration of vanity.

Indeed, the title of the piece has several meanings. In medieval Japan, the “Floating World” was a Buddhist expression referring to transitory life; later, it referred to the pleasure quarters of Edo, the courtesan’s realm, where theatricality was an everyday affair.

Bloom herself characterizes this installation as being about scale: “the very large and the very small; the vast population and the intimate act; the bombastic lead-up to a fleeting punch line.” And certainly ego, over-inflated or diminished by experience, has everything to do with scale.

This becomes clear in two fabric screens silk-screened with erotic imagery taken from ukiyo-e prints. In one, Bloom prints the images so faintly that you have to peer closely--humiliatingly so--to make out what is happening. In the other, the miniature figure of the artist intrudes upon the action, a spy in the house of love.

This is the effect of Bloom’s work as a whole. The artist is always there, watching, making sure that you are doing the same.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through Jan. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

***

Prime-Time Plans: Like “The Brady Bunch Movie,” Mark Bennett’s work at Mark Moore Gallery indulges a nostalgia less romantic than embarrassing; but since no one is immune, what’s the difference?

Homily-spouting patriarch Mike Brady was an architect, and if not exactly in deference, at least in reference to his memory, Bennett makes architectural drawings on blueprint paper. These correspond to the floor plans of places most of us know intimately, though we’ve never been there: the Bradys’ split-level suburban home; Gilligan’s wind-swept but well-appointed island; Perry Mason’s office at the Bank of California Building; Mary Richards’ hyper-efficient, working-girl’s apartment.

If it’s absurd, it’s also fair to say that contemplating these televisual spaces feels like performing a ritual or, perhaps, making a pilgrimage to a holy site--one that is at once mysterious and safe, unknowable and completely familiar. Here, a cigar is more than just a cigar--especially if you’re conjuring it, in your mind’s eye, in a dirty ashtray on Oscar Madison’s paper-logged desk, which, as Bennett reminds us, was located right near the front door of the apartment at 1049 Park Ave.

Television delivers a soothing and eventually numbing brand of satisfaction. It is hinged upon repetition: Oscar smokes cigars, Felix catches the ashes before they hit the rug. Bennett’s drawings, like Proust’s madeleine, bring everything back, and the alarming thing is not how easily we are again soothed, but how intensely felt are the memories.

Experiencing public fictions as private truths is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia, and Bennett certainly plays up the way TV has colonized our minds. To call this good-natured work critical, however, is probably stretching the point. But then the line between criticism and complicity has always been vastly overstated.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-3031, through Jan. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

***

Bare Minimalism: At Newspace Gallery, Timothy Nolan’s first solo exhibition consists of domestic objects--wire racks, polished metal grills, waffle irons and so on--wrapped and woven with white and off-white ribbon and webbing. Hanging on the wall in spare arrangements, these Minimal objects are elegant but immensely dull.

Part of this has to do with formal issues, and on this count Nolan’s labor is insufficiently intricate to provoke interest. The simple patterns he weaves are largely dictated by the manufactured forms that interpenetrate them. Thus, there is no standoff between the prefabricated and the handmade, only an irony so gentle that it fails to register.

The other problem--one by no means particular to Nolan--has to do with male artists who appropriate what has traditionally been demeaned as “women’s work.” The argument has been made that since culture--at least in America--has long been construed as the realm of the feminine, those artists who resist macho theatrics and tacitly acknowledge this in their work are at least being honest.

Yet this position doesn’t explain away the privilege, if not necessarily the power, that male artists have always been awarded, to the exclusion of their female counterparts. If artists like Mike Kelley and Jim Isermann get around this double bind by virtue of the mega-warps and unexpected wefts of their craft-intensive work, Noland is simply not that creative, or maybe that cagey.

* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (213) 469-9353, through Jan. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

***

Film Clips: Though it has always been very good, Carter Potter’s work keeps getting better. At Angles Gallery, he remains faithful to an idiosyncratic, dual obsession: “paintings” made out of woven strips of film leader (the first few feet of a reel of film, used primarily for threading the projector), and “sculptures” made out of couches, turned on their sides, unstuffed, dismembered and/or paired, like the unlikeliest of lovers.

If the couches are full of history, but cursed by their ineluctable ordinariness, the celluloid images, wrapped around wooden stretcher bars, are brand-new: high-gloss, high-style and gorgeous.

Eschewing the random bits and pieces that made up the earlier film pieces, Potter goes in for monochrome here, continuing to reference High Modernism, only this time going after its Holy Grail. Most interesting is the white one, beneath whose surface you can make out the cross of the stretcher bars, in a nod to the religiosity of Modernist art.

The most spectacular is made out of thick vertical strips of 65-millimeter black silver-less leader. It has the look of a stripe painting crossed with the extravagant visual and musical effects of a Busby Berkeley musical. Without exactly saying so, its reflective surface does a number on Modernist self-reflexivity, plus a whole lot more.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Jan. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.