A Place Where the Material and Spiritual Worlds Meet

A heavy hand is at work in Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s pictures--and not just the hand of the artist, who frequently posed and staged his photographs, but the invisible choreographer of life itself. Crystallized moments of intense potency occur both by calculation and by nature, and Meat-yard (1925-72) had an exquisite ability to recognize their poetic potential.

An excellent selection of his photographs at Paul Kopeikin Gallery demonstrates with compelling consistency Meatyard’s acute consciousness of the human drama. Though in his short working life (he suffered from gout, had a heart attack in his 30s and died at 46 of cancer) Meatyard also made extensive studies of light on water, calligraphic twigs, multiple exposures and images shot out of focus, this grouping concentrates on his emotionally dense photographs of people, usually just one or two at a time, in shallow, stage-like spaces.

In an untitled image dated circa 1960, a young boy stands before a wall, flailing his arms until they are merely shadowy blurs emerging from his T-shirt sleeves. Above him a black hole penetrates the wall, and on either side of it, the paint has peeled in the vague shape of bird’s wings. Fixed to earth, the boy nevertheless transcends, and Meatyard, with his own modest means, has composed a poem of distilled power on the twin forces of matter and spirit.

Abandoned spaces, rooms seeped in loss, provide the portentous settings for many of Meat-yard’s pictures. Acid bright light sears the windows and seems to threaten the silence of these musty rooms, where graffiti scars the walls and rocking chairs strangely stir. In one image, the eye is pulled from the indeterminate emptiness in the room toward the floor, where dust and debris have gathered in the corners, and the ghostlike traces of a man’s feet are all that have registered of his presence.

Resonating between the poles of connection and abandonment, beauty and loss, Meatyard’s work is deeply affecting--though it’s not always easy to account for its power in words. Influenced profoundly by Zen philosophy, which the photographer Minor White introduced him to in the mid-1950s, Meatyard favored suggestion over description, intuition over intellect. He was an optician (in Lexington, Ky.) as well as a photographer, and in both occupations he worked to refine the capacity to see.

He practiced a Zen-like alertness to even the most minute or mundane of signals. With Meatyard, remembered his friend the poet Wendell Berry, “nothing was wasted.”

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 138 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 937-0765, through Oct. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Connections: “The Great Drawing Show” at Kohn/Turner Gallery is an all-you-can-absorb feast with a vast range of offerings covering a broad span of time, thanks to the collaboration of Flavia Ormond Fine Art in London, which supplied a dozen works from the late 16th to the 19th centuries. With just over 100 works, hung salon-style, several deep and with regard for correspondences in theme or style rather than time, the show claims no thesis or organizing principle other than to assert the timeless appeal of the drawing medium.

That it does, through specific highlights as well as an encyclopedic embrace of styles and sensibilities.

There is compulsion in abundance (Jacob El Hanani’s weave pattern drawings and Lynne Woods Turner’s work, for instance), and there is compassion (a scratchy little ink drawing by Tracy Emin, “Crying to No One,” reeks of vulnerability). The sacred makes numerous appearances in 17th century Italian drawings, and the profane regularly claims a place in the contemporary work.

There is humor--in Lari Pittman’s “Mix Vigorously and Ingest,” for one--and hubris, as in a smug, political snippet by Raymond Pettibon. There is the cuddly (Tom Knechtel’s sweet portrait of a cat) and the cantankerous (Gericault’s sketch of “A Soldier Berated by a Priest”); the cool and collected, epitomized by Agnes Martin, and the barely containable, exemplified by Nancy Rubins’ mess of torn scraps as well as the centrifugal force of a De Kooning; the mysterious (a luscious April Gornik charcoal) and the mundane (toilet paper wrappers drawn by George Stoll).

Understatement and excess, whimsy and wisdom, even satire and sports have a presence in this enjoyable collection, which also features work by Arthur Dove, Fred Tomaselli, John Chamberlain, Cy Twombly, Richard Diebenkorn, Richard Tuttle, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Hilary Brace, Boucher and Tiepolo.

* Kohn/Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 854-5400, through Oct. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Bookish Pursuits: The paperless society that the Digital Age promised but didn’t deliver has found a new incarnation in a show by Gaza Bowen at Couturier Gallery. Her installation, “Bibliotheca Memoria,” transforms the entire gallery into a library reading room of the future, a future that has little use for the written word.

Things carry more value than ideas in our hypermaterial culture, yet things, too, get discarded, and at an astonishingly rapid pace. Planned obsolescence has crowded our landfills, and that is where Santa Cruz-based Bowen found both the concept and the raw materials for her installation.

As in a conventional reading room, Bowen’s contains a genteel arrangement of books, tables, chairs, lamps and shelves, but hers are all fashioned from cast-off materials scavenged at the dump. One lamp is a recycled gasoline can, the chairs are all rickety and rusted. The books, as small as a pencil box and as broad as an old album, are made primarily of scrap metal but incorporate leather, glass and other odds and ends. They’re ingeniously constructed, with nesting parts and frequent surprises.

Zipper pulls aid in turning pages, which, in the largest books, turn on a spine of copper pipe. Some open to reveal compartments of bottles, matches or bolts, but most consist of a sequence of pages, each a different texture and density of rusted metal, from delicate wire mesh to ragged-toothed circular saw blades.

“Road Warrior” meets the Bodleian here, and it’s horrifying in a way--but also amusing and provocative. Looking back on the present from a projected future is a strategy familiar from science fiction, and one whose inevitable distortions and extremity are easily forgiven if the view sharpens our perceptions. Bowen’s work does feel hyperbolic, but its crafty resourcefulness bears a worthy message about, as she puts it, “a culture gone haywire, whose very demise is found in its success, in its ability to overproduce an abundance of unrespected, undervalued items, to create and destroy compulsively.”

* Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 933-5557, through Oct. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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From Near and Far: Josef Sudek (1896-1976) aimed to be a bookbinder before losing his right arm in the First World War. He may have been, as one commentator later wrote, a member of the “ruined generation,” whose plans and schooling were disrupted by the war, but Sudek managed to resurrect himself as a photographer in the 1920s, ultimately becoming one of the medium’s central figures in Czechoslovakia.

A selection of Sudek’s work at Peter Fetterman Gallery skips back and forth through several decades, starting with elegant, soft-focus images of park-goers on Koln Island, where he was born. Sudek’s shift from this luminous, romanticized vision to more abstract conceptions of space and form echoed broader trends within the medium, in particular the waning influence of Pictorialism.

Two 1930s photographs looking down onto a courtyard and a truck-clogged intersection show Sudek at his Modernist best, attuned to the flattening effect of an elevated perspective. Pavement becomes pure pattern, pedestrians mere punctuation marks.

Sudek assumed a definite distance in both the Koln pictures and the street scenes, shooting one series from afar and often from behind the figures, and the other from overhead. Other photographs of places within Prague--cemeteries, forest, river, streetcars in the snow--are similarly well-composed but depersonalized, attractive yet remote.

The essential Sudek, Sudek the poet, emerges when his subject turns modest and small, and his focus inordinately intense--the still lifes and images from the window of his studio. Here, in images of condensation on the glass, a single branch of blossoms seeming to yearn toward its source in the tree beyond, an egg resting in a small wooden bowl like a domestic nest, is where Sudek reveals the depth of his inner world. Here is where we can see him negotiating inner and outer, where the public man plumbs his private soul.

* Peter Fetterman Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-6463, through Nov. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.