‘Water’ Proves to Be a Slippery Subject

Jennifer Bartlett’s art has always been like a cup of tea with lots of milk and sugar--benign, rather than brisk. Perhaps this is the reason she has long been a major figure on the contemporary scene: Her large, quasi-conceptual paintings of the seasons, the elements and so on are pleasant enough not to rile anyone, and on occasion, interesting enough to elicit what passes in corporate corridors for the “shock of the new.”

In “Water,” a show of new work at the Gagosian Gallery, Bartlett fans will no doubt be cheered by more of the same. Others may be less tolerant of what looks to be a haphazard mix of Minimalist grids, warmed-over Cezanne bathers, miscellaneous Sunday painter pabulum and Joel Shapiro-esque miniature forms (boats, bridges, and houses--not to mention starfish, driftwood, lily pads, and puddles) placed on the floor in front of each painting, as if desperate to escape.

The idea of materializing painted objects is a tantalizing one, but particularly odd in this context. Bartlett has always been at pains to use water as a metaphor for space, time, whatever it may be. The physicality of her cast iron, painted wood, welded steel and glass objects, however, militates against this, dulling whatever sparkle the paintings manage to emit. In the end, the whole thing feels too much like a merchandising effort gone sour--something for everybody becoming nothing for anybody.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through July 19. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Refreshing Wit: With wit being in such short supply, particularly in the art world, and especially during the summer--the John Waters show at Pace Wildenstein MacGill is positively refreshing. If refreshment is the last thing you’d expect from the director of “Pink Flamingos,” these color and black-and-white photographs will make you think again.

Tending less toward the grotesque than the mildest of burlesque (with the possible exception of some close-ups of the heaving chest of the late, great drag queen Divine, in prayer), these images--culled from Waters’ favorite horror films, art-house non-smashes, ‘50s melodramas and television shows--are shot directly off TV screens and arranged in vertical or horizontal rows, like reshuffled movie stills. Mini-potboilers in their own right, they give new meaning to the term “director’s cut.”

Though mid-career works by painter John Baldessari may come to mind, Waters is far less elliptical, taking pleasure in sight gags that are no less amusing for all their obviousness. In “Face-Lift,” a slew of images from the plastic surgery cult classic “Ash Wednesday,” featuring Liz Taylor’s gruesomely stitched upper lip, are juxtaposed with “Tonight Show” footage of Waters’ trademark hairline-fracture mustache. Never one to kowtow to vanity, Waters’ “Self-Portrait” is chock full of a bug-eyed Don Knotts caught in the middle of his career-long double-take.

Elsewhere there are movie-star junkies, Ross Hunter-era decolletes, an array of Hollywood-style Christs, and Francis the Talking Mule (who does a neat segue into Jessica Lange as Frances Farmer). But the piece not to miss is “Zapruder,” taken from Waters’ little-known 1966 movie, in which an 18-year-old Divine plays the part of Jackie Kennedy on that unforgettable day in Dallas when her husband, the president, was killed.

* Pace Wildenstein MacGill, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 205-5522, through July 26. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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In Excess: Something is clearly out of whack in this purportedly two-person show at Richard Telles Fine Art. It’s not possible to pay attention to Gilbert Bretterbauer’s ceiling-to-floor spill of patchwork flags and dangling lightbulbs--not with recent UCLA grad Liz Craft’s “Quo Vadis” in the next room.

It might be fair to say that “Quo Vadis” defies description, but it’s probably more accurate to say that it craves it. Think of it as a not-quite-to-scale (but enough so as to be stunning on that count alone), semi-furnished room whose four walls have collapsed inward, as if to create an X. It is a meditation upon impossible geometries, by way of Home Depot and Gordon Matta-Clark; a profusion of willed eccentricities, primary among them tiny ball sculptures that could have been made out of old chewing gum but weren’t, and numerous cat statuettes, alternately covered in white flocking, cottage-cheese-ceiling material, multicolored carpeting and black and white fake fur. It is also a triple homage to Rubik’s Cube, Todd Oldham and King Zoser’s Step Pyramid in Saqqara, Egypt.

“Quo Vadis” is this, and more, which may add up to a lot, or nothing at all, depending upon your willingness to indulge what is already a well-developed taste for excess. Like many emerging artists, Craft hasn’t wholly processed her influences (everything from Surrealism to Jason Rhoades), but no matter. Her bravado--tinged with irony, but hardly saturated with it--more than compensates.

* Richard Telles Fine Art, 7380 Beverly Blvd., (213) 965-5578, through July 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Pointed Images: Uta Barth’s photographs trade on the power of suggestion, which is not to say that they traffic in innuendo, but that they incarnate moods rather than scenarios.

In previous bodies of work, Barth depicted interiors and exteriors as if seen through a scrim of gauze, wax paper or frosted glass. Swathed in blur, these photographs alternately conjured frustrated longing, vacated dreams and the perversity of perception itself.

At ACME, “ . . . in passing,” a new portfolio of 10 small images beautifully packaged in a mint-green case, pursues some of the same visual strategies: oblique angles, skewed frames, hazy lighting and soft focus.

Instead of setups, however, these are appropriated images taken from fashion layouts, travel brochures and so on, in which something is being sold to someone. Barth, however, leaves out the something. What’s left are pictures of seduction itself.

More specifically, here are swoony fields of color and light, and at their edges an eye, thick with mascara; a hand holding a cherry; or the back of a man’s head, turning in the direction of a disembodied female arm. These partial views rely upon a certain sense of deja vu, and also upon a taste for romanticism, all but trampled by conceptualism’s rule. Still, there is no mistaking these images for reveries. They are as pointed as barbed wire.

* ACME, 1800-B Berkeley St., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5818, through July 5. Closed Sunday and Monday.