Art Review

Explanatory Works: If you discount their exploitativeness, cut-and-paste aesthetic, belabored hipness and rather remarkable ugliness, you might find a way to like Joel Peter Witkin’s photographs--but then again, there wouldn’t be much left not to like.

PaceWildenstein, however, has put together a well-edited survey of works by this postmodern pasticheur that offends less than usual and at least begins to explain the devotion of Witkin’s legions of fans.

Witkin’s subject matter has always been self-consciously difficult--gender confusion, bodies with missing limbs, the ravages of disease and prejudice. But placing a tattooed and corseted quadriplegic or a mutated fetus in a theatrical setting and then mucking around with the negative is hardly daring--and, in fact, can be as boring as any spread from an alternative lifestyle magazine, especially if you aren’t particularly interested in the goods on sale.

This show features several such images, stuffed to bursting with art historical references designed to lend a certain dignity to the proceedings, and rendered with techniques including chemical toning, hand scratching and printing through layers of tissue paper, meant to guarantee the “artiness” of things. The images that are the most convincing, however, are those that show the greatest restraint, both in terms of subject and style.

One features a female nude in black gloves wearing a cadaver’s face strapped to the back of her head as if it were a chignon. On one level, it’s pure camp, giving new meaning to the term “bad hair day.” On the level of form, however, Witkin has fashioned a lovely study of black and white. He has taken particular care with the figure’s skin, which glows like alabaster, almost as if the artist had massaged it into submission. This image betrays the kind of brutal intimacy Witkin so palpably desires, but usually gets all wrong. It alone merits a visit.

*

* PaceWildenstein, 9540 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 205-5522, through Saturday.