Energy, Rage Result in Unruly ‘Behavior’

For her third solo exhibition at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Nicole Eisenman has transformed the gallery into something that resembles the bedroom enclave of a whip-smart, culturally savvy teenager. Plastered over the walls are cartoon-like drawings and magazine cutouts, to which she’s added her own scribblings, while strewn across low-lying pedestals and spilling out onto the floor are shrine-like accumulations of bubble-gum racing cards, soiled stuffed animals, thrift-store doll heads and Mr. T action figures.

Like the 1970s and 1980s pop culture she both reveres and reviles, Eisenman’s madcap display offers a gold mine of subversive pleasures--if you’re willing to wade through sections of affably unapologetic inanity to find them.

Eisenman’s work has always been fueled by hyper-caffeinated energy and a genuine rage at sexual oppression and social injustice. Unlike many of her pop-obsessed contemporaries, she is blessedly free of the kind of cynicism that currently passes for postmodern cultural authority. In her newest work, Eisenman celebrates the creative inspiration she derives from her amped-up, manic enthusiasms, yet doesn’t fully acknowledge the risks that go with them.

The collective detritus in “Behavior” takes aim at the so-called gender wars by targeting familiar cliches about the birds and the bees. The first section of this sprawling installation involves a make-believe plot in which a SWAT team (gleefully enacted by Eisenman and her friends in a series of color photographs) is called out to exterminate a swarm of bumblebees. The remaining parts include an island-like shrine filled with marshmallow ducks and artificial flowers, and a flock of winged creatures that are half-bird, half-bee, all umbilically connected with plastic hot-rod tracks and curlicue coils of orange rope.

Counterbalancing Eisenman’s romance with speed is a persistent threat of entropy and social breakdown. In the painting “Spiral Car,” a ridiculously distended vehicle circles in on itself, its grimacing male passengers powerless to stop the impending collision. On the floor below, Eisenman stages a mini fender-bender, using clumsy figurines driving plastic bread-bag cars (and comically invoking director Jean-Luc Godard’s famous car-wreck scene in “Weekend”).

Although Eisenman is an expert at pumping up a single cliche to ridiculous proportions, she also tends to run things straight into the ground. After a while, you begin to notice that her ideas don’t always add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. This makes Eisenman something of a kamikaze artist who prefers to dive-bomb her prey from above rather than deal with the far messier ground wars below.

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

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Novak as Icon: At Gallery Luisotti, Slavica Perkovic’s multimedia ruminations on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” won’t make much of an impact unless you come armed with a lot of prior information. It helps to be on familiar terms with feminism, post-structuralism and psychoanalytic film criticism--the grand triad of “isms” that underlie Perkovic’s highly academic approach to Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece.

Titled “EROS (the Eternal Repetition of the Same),” Perkovic’s exhibition zooms in on the cipher-like qualities of actress Kim Novak, who played dual roles in the film as the mysterious Madeleine and her tarty double, Judy, each of whom beguiles and betrays Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie. Perkovic adds yet another layer of artifice to Novak’s cinematic charade by assuming the identity of Novak playing both Madeleine and Judy in a video and series of video stills. In the video, Perkovic/Novak/Madeleine/Judy smooths her hair, pouts, casts her eyes downward or looks away, at some points appearing self-conscious, at others completely oblivious to the camera.

The problem is that Perkovic’s cold and lifeless images don’t really stand up on their own. The accompanying group of critical essays offers some fresh insights on Novak’s contributions to “Vertigo,” but even so, Perkovic is rehashing material that has already been thoroughly dissected by feminist film scholars over the past two decades.

Perkovic takes this all so deadly seriously, you find yourself longing for some of Hitchcock’s trademark morbid humor. There’s plenty of room for playfulness and, yes, even pleasure, in this type of post-structuralist feminist analysis, but there’s precious little in evidence here.

By offering some intriguing reinterpretations of a classic thriller, Perkovic’s installation works best as an invitation to revisit one of Hitchcock’s greatest films. As an exhibition, however, “EROS” is disappointingly inert.

* Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through July 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Staple Experiences: Jill Poyourow is fascinated by food: where it comes from, how we prepare it, the ways in which food can connect us to other people and to the past. At Post Gallery, Poyourow’s elegantly understated exhibition of paintings and drawings takes us back to a time when her European ancestors labored to produce food staples such as bread, cheese, lettuce, knockwurst and sauerkraut. Like the Germanic cuisine she portrays, Poyourow’s low-key paintings offer hearty if not exactly mouth-watering fare.

At first, some of these images appear almost laughably pastoral: a robust farm wife baking bread; a dairy farmer carting giant wheels of cheese past a picturesque mountaintop; a kerchiefed woman tossing plump heads of lettuce into a large bin. The longer you look, however, the less sentimental they seem. You notice the air of meditative concentration on these farmers’ faces, and the solitary nature of their labor.

In fact, Poyourow has carefully copied many of these scenes from photographs in a Time-Life book on German cookery. This gives her paintings a certain bloodless quality, which seems strangely appropriate, given our increasingly abstract relation to the food we eat.

Although she takes food as her starting point, Poyourow’s underlying interest is in the nature of nostalgia and its relation to memory and to cultural and familial history. How can we stake a claim to our ancestors’ experiences, her paintings and drawings ask, if we’ve lost our visceral sense of connection to them?

Poyourow’s embroidered panels narrow the scope of her investigations, while hinting at the darker side of European history. Stitched onto plain sections of brown linen are “sketches” of stale and fresh yeast cells, starches and ascospores as they might appear under a microscope.

This urge to classify, to weed out the degenerate from the normal, to locate similarities and differences, also describes the prevailing interests of modern science, technology and genocide. Poyourow reminds us that food is at once personal and political, always enmeshed in the complicated web of history.

* Post Gallery, 1904 E. 7th Place, Los Angeles, (213) 622-8580, through June 13. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

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‘Corn’ and Critters: Kelly McLane’s paintings of dogs, deer and farm animals at DiRT Gallery are cheerfully corn-pone and weirdly disconcerting. Rendered with near-photo-realistic clarity, these creatures stand in sharp contrast to dreamlike backgrounds of muted color and floating pastel bubbles. Like forlorn soothsayers, they are trapped somewhere between the surreal, the hyper-real and the absurd.

Titled “Corn,” McLane’s group of paintings draws liberally from kitsch Americana’s vast image pool. She conjures up a mad cow foaming at the mouth, a jovial Lassie, a neglected bulldog standing helplessly in a minefield of his own poop, a freakish farm sheep displaying a double anus and an apostolic fawn earnestly licking the left ear of Christ.

“Corn” is also the title of the show’s central work. A giant ear of corn thrusts diagonally across a bright red background, intersecting a thin gray strip of suburban tract homes. The vegetable’s unblemished perfection (no doubt the result of a healthy dose of pesticides) evokes an unquestioned belief in technology as progress, along with the bland idealism that has fed countless generations of Americans.

McLane’s muscular uber-corn also recalls Jennifer Pastor’s deliciously artificial cornstalk from several years ago. Pastor’s sculpture poked fun at the sublimation of nature and cyclical time in favor of patently manufactured seasonal differences, finding humor and a perverse hopefulness in today’s hyper-real culture. McLane, however, mourns the loss of tangibility--and the sense of compassion and responsibility that go with it.

Like Shakespeare’s doomed Ophelia, her animals are casualties of a profoundly unnatural order. We’ve shunted them to the sidelines, making it that much easier to forget about them. McLane re-constellates this universe so that nature (or what’s left of it) takes center stage. She reminds us that the process of domestication--of animals and of the land--is often anything but civilized.

* DiRT Gallery, 7986 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (213) 822-9359, through June 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.