On the Road Again With Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg’s annotated photographs at Fahey/Klein Gallery combine the familiarity of snapshots with the untouchable aura of myths. Nearly 100 black-and-white prints by the legendary American poet take viewers on a rich, sentimental journey that is at once melancholic and upbeat.

For more than 50 years, Ginsberg (who turned 70 this month) has been pointing a camera at his friends and surroundings, recording trips to India and Mexico and making spur-of-the-moment portraits of such notables as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Robert Frank, William Burroughs and Peter Orlovsky. Almost invariably, the people in his pictures gaze straight into the lens, as if trying to look into the future where they might catch your eye and convey something profound.

Each modestly scaled print is captioned with a handwritten passage that identifies the individuals portrayed, describes their location and often provides some insight into their state of mind. You don’t have to be an expert in handwriting analysis to sense the nervous hurriedness of Ginsberg’s penmanship.

His brief texts seem to be fueled by the jittery energy that comes with the conviction that life happens fast. They’re also charged with the dark promise that you’ll miss life’s magic if you don’t pay attention to its mundane details.

Some of Ginsberg’s captions simply state the facts, telling of a picture’s who, what, where and when. Others strive to explain its hows and whys, fleshing out bare-bones information with personal impressions and narrative complexity.

These passages are animated by the same nonstop breathlessness that drives Ginsberg’s Beat poetry. Both pick up speed as you keep reading, gathering facts and feelings into a rhythmic, meaningful mix that pulses in your ears as it echoes in your head.

This indiscriminate inclusiveness gives Ginsberg’s writing its powerfully anti-elitist feel. Likewise, his annotated photographs are readily accessible without dragging viewers down to the lowest common denominator. As wondrous as they are generous, these works dive deeply into the humdrum of everyday life to find something extraordinary, if not sacred, in its midst.

* Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250, through Aug. 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

The Dark Side: Anthony Ausgang’s cartoon-inspired paintings embrace art’s dark, dangerous side. Titled “Car Phone Sex in the Fast Lane,” his exhibition at Zero One Gallery is a refreshingly unpretentious antidote to the popular misconception that art is good for you.

The centerpiece of the show is a recently overhauled 1970 Mercury Cougar that was even more recently totaled when it crashed into a bus. Ausgang bought the wreck for scrap metal and used it as a canvas, painting his trademark cartoon characters on its fenders, doors and roof.

Outfitted with a portable car phone and littered with pornographic advertisements for phone sex, the twisted auto is a creepy Pop monument to the potential power images hold over viewers. The car demonstrates that when pictures stimulate fantasies or successfully solicit involuntary bodily responses, bad things can happen.

These circumstances weren’t any different for the ancient Greeks. Helen’s beauty so bedazzled a young man from another city-state that he forsook his fellow citizens and abducted her, leading to thousands of ships being launched during the Trojan War.

Ausgang’s installation may not appear to be as heroic as the events celebrated by Homer’s poem, but his show is based on the same principles. Beauty--whether in muscle cars, mythical women or eye-grabbing paintings--entices people to take risks, sometimes acting against our own best interests.

If Ausgang’s altered car makes this point with literal force, his paintings make it more figuratively or metaphorically. The best ones are round, like fish-eye rearview mirrors, creating the illusion that the Day-Glo cartoon cougars they depict are hot on your heels, ready to sink their fangs into your backside.

* Zero One Gallery, 7025 Melrose Ave., (213) 965-9459, through July 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Problem Solved: Over the last three years, Dennis Hollingsworth’s large abstract paintings have shown up in several notable group exhibitions around town as well as in a small solo show. Although these thin, loosely gestural works always looked facile and competent, they seemed somewhat undeveloped because their elusiveness felt like mere flimsiness. However, the L.A.-based painter’s new body of work at Blum & Poe Gallery resolves this problem with considerable elan.

Collectively titled “Wet on Wet,” Hollingsworth’s seven abstractions are compact and solid. All but one of these dense, compressed canvases measure only 18-by-14-inches. Each is slathered with such thick layers of oil paint that it nearly has the presence of a gooey, three-dimensional relief.

Hollingsworth uses brushes, squeegees, palette knives, plastic sheets and dental equipment to tease paint into a wild variety of shapes, including striped lines, burr-like star-bursts, frazzled flicks, root-like smears and fancy dollops that resemble the decorative flourishes on expensive cakes whose frosting got squashed in the box.

With delicate palettes of beige, cream and custard--punctuated by pumpkin, avocado and daiquiri--Hollingsworth’s beautifully distasteful paintings lure your eyes into the complex processes of their making as they turn your stomach into a knot. Their odd combination of unsettling color and queasy texture jells into works of original and insidious attraction.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Saturday.