Molinier’s Works Treat Body Both as Temple, Fetish Object

It’s hard to know which is more perverse, the work of Pierre Molinier, now on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, or reaching his show by first passing a group of Tibetan monks making a mandala sand painting in the museum’s community gallery. Molinier’s photographs and the monks’ painting are both intense meditations on the self, but they take profoundly different routes and reach radically different destinations.

The mandala’s vision of a harmonious cosmos serves as a map toward personal enlightenment, a catalyst toward purification and healing. After even a brief encounter with this beautiful image and its nourishing process, seeing Molinier’s work comes as a shock and causes the spirit to plummet, as the mood of transcendence gives way to that of degradation.

Molinier (1900-1976), a French artist, photographed himself, primarily, during the last decade or so of his life, though his images rarely represent him as either a man or aged. He appears instead as a hermaphroditic hybrid--usually bare-chested, wearing women’s stockings, heels and gloves, as well as a mask that hides his own features or a female mannequin’s head that replaces them with a stiff, idealized beauty.

Props are limited to chairs, stools, chains, whips and Molinier’s collection of handmade, leather-wrapped dildos. In these photographs and photomontages, narcissism joins forces with the autoerotic to forge a cult of the self, indulged through self-portraits in various poses of sexual availability.

Though made in the 1960s and ‘70s and related to body art of the period, Molinier’s work appropriates a style of dark decadence associated with the stiletto heels and fishnet stockings of the 1920s and ‘30s. He is said to have had influence over a school of Viennese “actionists,” and his work clearly resonates with the self-obsessive, theatrical masquerades of many contemporary artists, from Matthew Barney to Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura.

Art historical credentials aside, as one scholar of the artist’s work has aptly stated: “We do not really have a discourse for describing what Pierre Molinier’s pictures are about that is not already a discourse of moral and medical judgment.” In affinity with the Surrealists, Molinier aimed to subvert bourgeois strictures of decency, as well as to bend the codes of gender. His incestuous yearnings, predilection for bondage and other unprintable acts certainly deviates from the norm, far enough to provoke and repulse. Inevitably, his pictures become the viewer’s personal litmus test for locating a boundary between art and pornography.

Molinier’s work itself has been fetishized in this exhaustive, worshipful show, guest-curated by Wayne Baerwaldt. For all its kinkiness, though, the work is only minimally erotic and, for all its taboo-busting bravado, the visuals are not terribly inventive.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 586-6488, through Sept. 20. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

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Drive-Ins, Moving: Jeff Brouws photographs in the same crisp, typological manner as Bernd and Hilla Becher, the German pair whose extensive series of water tower images epitomizes the camera’s capacity for dispassionate clarity. But abandoned drive-in theaters, the subject of Brouws’ current work at Craig Krull Gallery, are not water towers. They carry a piquant emotional load, so that even when cataloged in a straightforward manner, they are inescapably sentimental, richly infused with nostalgia.

The screen of a theater in Orange, for instance, is framed by newer office buildings behind it, their nondescript geometries filling the top half of Brouws’ image with abstract patterns. The anonymity above is countered by a forlorn anthropomorphism below. The sickly-looking posts with their listening apparatus hanging off them double as low-tech IV feeding devices scattered across a litter-strewn asphalt field.

The blankness of the abandoned screens is startling throughout Brouws’ series. Glaring rectangles of white, they stand like billboards advertising loss, absence, an irretrievable past. Many of the screens have begun to decompose; one looks skinned, another burned, and several have eroded down to their brittle, skeletal scaffolding.

Brouws describes much of his work, including surveys of vernacular roadside culture and carnival fairgrounds, as second-generation New Topographics, according to a forthcoming catalog of the drive-in photographs. Lewis Baltz, especially, has been a model for him, though Brouws’ work tends to be easier on the eye, less severe. In his images of deteriorating drive-ins, once-popular communal sites of private pleasure, Brouws fuses conceptual exercise and social document, yielding a body of work as sociologically bittersweet as it is formally pure.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 828-6410, through Aug. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Mortal Coil: Victor Vazquez, a Puerto Rican artist now exhibiting at Couturier Gallery in his first solo show in L.A., speaks fluently in the languages of ancestor worship, ritual sacrifice and spirit offerings that are basic to the syncretic, African-derived religions of the Caribbean region. His photo-based sculptures and installations are dense and evocative accretions of symbols, whose meaning is cumulative, rather than specific and directed. Always, the work abounds in texture and aspires to a soul-excavating depth.

“Fragments,” the largest of the installations, consists of a row of nine tall, crude shovels standing on a runner of dirt and leaning against the wall. A photograph rests within the paddle-like blade of each shovel. One shows a blindfolded woman, another a dead chicken. One image of an eye appears to be crying tears of real wax. From each shovel hang bits of string and a fragment of charcoal.

In other works with altar-like presentations of symbolically resonant objects, Vazquez incorporates candles, rosary beads, cowrie shells, dried rose petals, images of sacrificed chickens, photographic self-portraits, heaps of coffee beans, cinnamon sticks and corn kernels. Vazquez activates the senses throughout, and in “Ojo, Lengua y Oreja” (Eye, Tongue and Ear), he constructs a wall-mounted shrine to each, using photographs of the body parts repeated inside mesh-covered boxes.

The most searing of Vazquez’s works end up being the simplest, the large black-and-white photographs toned in rusty orange. In one untitled image, a female nude reclines on her side. Taped to her shoulder, along her spine, on her hip and down her leg are bird feathers that conjure, perhaps, the flight of dreams of this woman nearly subsumed by the dense warm blackness of sleep. More eloquently than any of the more sculpturally complex works in the show, this image encapsulates the painful dichotomy at the heart of all Vazquez’s work--that between the physical and the spiritual, the mortal and the transcendent.

* Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea, (213) 933-5557, through Aug. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Shape Shifters: Hoang Vu’s quietly engaging wire sculptures shift fluidly between the botanical and biological, often meandering further afield into biomorphic abstraction. Delicately knitted together in patterned webs of wire, the dozen works at Sherry Frumkin Gallery emerge from the wall on curving stems.

They suggest myriad life forms--vessels, pods, flowers, fruit--that belie the dull grayness of their transparent skin. “Honcat” resembles a pair of kidneys, twins echoing each other’s curves. “Vu” looks like a pair of bulbous breasts, or a split egg, each shell an empty cup. “Phoi” is at once a pair of lungs and the lobes of a Venus’ flytrap.

These are slight works, like fragments of poems, and free of all tension. Globular, bulbous or petal-delicate, the shapes seem to continue to evolve even in their stillness mounted on the gallery walls. In this graceful installation, light passes through the benign cages of wire to draw linear shadows on the wall behind them--another of the works’ modest pleasures.

* Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 453-1850, through Aug. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.