Injecting the Ordinary With Dynamism

Andreas Gursky is among the best of the rather large crop of German artists who have built on the Minimalist precedent set in the 1960s and 1970s by photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher (Gursky studied with Bernd Becher at Dusseldorf Art Academy). The Bechers systematically photographed industrial buildings--grain elevators, gas tanks, water towers--creating black-and-white archeological typologies of artifacts of the modern world. By contrast, Gursky uses supersaturated color, huge size and sharp visual intelligence to inject an almost unspeakable glamour into mundane modern spaces. He invests things that are perfectly ordinary with such an excruciating degree of particularity that each one seems like the undisputed original from which all others must have been descended.

Like painter Roy Dowell, who in 1998 magically transformed a street-side window at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art into an optical spectacle of abstract color and commercial products, Gursky has used a local 99 Cents Store as raw material for one of five recent photographs currently at Regen Projects. His other subjects include a packed sports arena in Cologne, Germany, at the exhausted end of a wrestling or boxing match, a small detail in a Constable landscape painting, one page of type in a German book and, finally, the soaring atrium of a modern San Francisco hotel. Like frozen cinema, these big pictures look familiar while creating other worlds.

Gursky sometimes digitally manipulates the image, though really there’s no way to know that just by looking. And being looked at is what these pictures viscerally crave--seamless digital manipulation becoming something like an artistic equivalent to expert facial plastic surgery.

His sleek, glossy, strip-framed, photographic C-prints are huge, each about 7 by 9 feet. Their size gives them the spectator-sport quality of images that compete in the public sector--billboards, bus-bench ads, movies. They are eager to seduce.

And they succeed. “99 Cent” unfolds in wave after wave of lush, synthetic, horizontally banded color--Mr. Goodbar, Chuckles, Downey fabric softener, L’eggs--like a Gene Davis stripe painting gone Pop. The boxing ring at the center of the Cologne arena is a focus of after-match chaos, where the surging energy of thousands of witnesses has been densely concentrated like the unfathomable core of a nuclear reactor. Even the presumably pastoral flicks of brushy paint in “Untitled X (Constable)” are writ so large as to approach the dynamism of an explosive Pollock.

The strict geometries of “San Francisco,” whose unlikely subject is the vast emptiness of a John Portman-style hotel lobby ringed with balconies, are marked by a crisscrossing cascade of tiny twinkle-lights. At the bottom, a generic, curvilinear sculpture composed from sleek brass rods looks like a postindustrial heart coolly beating within a crystalline urban chest cavity.

It’s instructive that the most beautiful and compelling works here--”99 Cent” and “San Francisco”--are also the most vulgar, while the weakest is the most cerebral (the book page). Gursky’s art performs an unexpected and unlikely salvage job as surely as the Bechers’ does.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424. The gallery is closed through Jan. 3. Regular days are Tuesdays-Saturdays through Jan. 29.

*

Light Source: “Ellipsis,” the subtle and contemplative new installation by Linda Hudson at Otis Art Gallery, is as much about what’s not immediately discernible in the room as what is. As an operative principle for art, her negation of text (which is what an ellipsis is) is quiet but emphatic--and thoroughly convincing.

“Ellipsis” has four parts: a long curve made from plastic poured across the gray cement floor, like an arc of light that seems to have oozed in from the baseboard reveal between the floor and the surrounding walls; a cylinder, an inch or two in diameter and maybe 8 or 9 feet long, woven from multicolored fishing line and suspended from the ceiling (its loose ends unravel on the ground); 3,908 cable ties, made of shiny white plastic and affixed to one matte-white wall, floor to ceiling, in a grid pattern; and, finally, a white-and-clear checkerboard painted on the glass of a floor-to-ceiling corner window, albeit irregularly (the grid is warped, like a psychedelic Op-Art pattern or a tracing made from a flowing checked curtain).

This corner window is something of a key to the larger installation. In all four components the quintessentially Modern symbol of the grid--modular, precise, scientific, soulless--begins to break down.

The woven fishing line creates an organic cylinder. The cable ties are affixed vertically in horizontal rows, but the loose ends of plastic are inevitably irregular and shatter the light, visually softening the wall’s hard surface. Suddenly the long arc of plastic on the floor, bounded by the boxy room, seems wholly of a piece with the cable ties, fishing line and undulating window pattern--neither straight nor curved, or perhaps both at once, depending on your vantage point.

As if looking in one end of a telescope and then the other, the experience of scale becomes wonderfully elastic here, as your perceptual mechanisms shift back and forth. Light is the agent for the subtle magic Hudson makes--light filtering through glass, light made translucent in plastic, light broken into a spectrum of color in fishing line. Light is her ellipsis that illuminates the context.

* Otis Art Gallery, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 665-6905. Through Feb. 12. Call for holiday hours.

*

Surface Style: Nadar had Pierrot, the classic pantomime clown descendant from the commedia dell’arte, whom he photographed in the 1850s in a hauntingly beautiful sequence of images that crystallize poetic silence. By contrast, William Claxton had Rudi Gernreich and Peggy Moffitt, the fashion designer and model of topless swimsuit fame, who crystallized something potent about the 1960s. If, as a photographer, Claxton isn’t Nadar’s equal, a thoroughly engaging show at Craig Krull Gallery nonetheless demonstrates a winning and clever collaborative ethos that is distinctly of its time.

The show coincides with the publication of “The Rudi Gernreich Book” by Taschen. Most of the 16 color and 28 black-and-white photographs date between 1964, year of the topless swimsuit, and 1968. Six are vintage prints, the rest from later editions.

Claxton employs the seamless white background perfected for fashion photography by Avedon, but he uses it in a slightly different way. Coinciding visually with the magazine page, where the photograph was originally expected to appear, Claxton’s white background is a surface expressly prepared for a sleek, graphic, almost two-dimensional image of a model wearing clothes.

If painting had Clement Greenberg chanting the virtues of flatness, with Morris Louis pouring streams of pure color down unprimed canvas, fashion photography had Gernreich designing gridded, striped, polka-dotted fabrics, and Moffitt (Claxton’s wife) wearing dead-white makeup, post-Twiggy painted eyelashes and a geometric Sassoon haircut. The look is intensely graphic--sharp, flat, clean, affectless--while its kinship to the printed magazine page is echoed in Gernreich’s 1968 “Typeface Dress,” with matching tights and scarf. The horizontal bands of black (and sometimes red) letters in assorted styles of type clothe Moffitt in the very medium of print her image will in turn inhabit.

In several photographs, Moffitt wears harlequin-patterned clothing, while stylized triangular “tears” are marked beneath her eyes or circles of “blush” are affixed to her cheeks. These Pierrot motifs are given an Eastern twist, often through the model’s asymmetrical gestures and sometimes through elaborations of her hair. Here, Kabuki pantomime is the referent, as up-to-the-minute stylishness is made to appear timeless and eternal.

What’s being said in the mime enacted by these acutely stylized performances? Simply that surfaces matter most--the surface of clothing, of mass media, of skin. The famous picture of the topless swimsuit at the entry to the show brings all three together, in what finally must be regarded as an inseparable collaboration among designer, model and photographer.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410. Through Jan. 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Call for holiday hours.

*

Disquieting Mull: Martin Mull’s new paintings on linen and paper have the poignant delicacy of childhood memories, where the edges around an idealized past have begun to wrinkle, curl and tear. A sense of youthful damage characterizes the three new oils and four watercolors at Patricia Faure Gallery--damage tempered with bittersweet loss.

Mull employs a technique of painterly collage, in which fragmentary pictures from multiple sources jostle against one another for attention on the painted field. (Stylistically it recalls a more fragile, domestic version of early paintings by German artist Georg Baselitz.) A picture of a boy sitting on a man’s shoulders before a white clapboard house, for example, looks torn and pasted down, the ragged edges of oil paint slowly melting into fluid stains.

Mull’s style also sometimes recalls period illustrations in children’s books. But these casual scenes of life’s ordinary pleasures--learning to swim at camp, watering the lawn, picnicking in the park, roasting Thanksgiving turkey--are subtly injected with perturbation and angst. It isn’t quite Norman Rockwell done by David Lynch, but it’s certainly characterized by a profound disquiet.

Whether in the largest (and strongest) painting, aptly titled “Conventional Wisdom,” or in the smaller, sketchbook-like watercolors, Mull’s paint is often thin and fluid, seemingly poised at the brink of dissolution, or rough and choppy, like a roiled sea. Your eye tries hard to pull awkward, fragmentary shapes and objects into sharper, more coherent view--but the pictures tenaciously resist clarity.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479. Through Jan. 8. Closed Sundays and Mondays. By appointment today through Jan. 3.