Sherman Is the Very Picture of How Others Fall Short

People-watching is a terrific pastime. Price-wise, it can’t be beat. And the human dramas that unfold are so loaded with poignant moments--both tragic and comic--that they make movies look over-polished and way too long.

What I like most is noticing the creative energy ordinary individuals bring to the task of dressing themselves up before going out in public. There’s nothing more touching than seeing what someone has done to get his or her own imperfect face and physique to approach a beauty ideal currently in fashion. Without exception, successful attempts to fit into such stereotypes are far less compelling than near-misses and outright failures.

At Gagosian Gallery, 12 new photographs by Cindy Sherman give brilliant form to some of the many ways people (particularly women) fashion themselves after a “look” or a “style” only to fall short of its general characteristics. Although each color print depicts the artist wearing various wigs, outfits and facial expressions, not one is a self-portrait. Rather than articulating Sherman’s inner essence, her flagrantly fake masquerades scrutinize the differences between individuals and types.

Some of the strongest show middle-aged, middle-class women striving to lower their age and raise their status. Dreams die hard in these loaded photos, and it’s amazing to see so many sitters who seem so well adjusted to the reality of their bodies.

Very few of Sherman’s personages appear to be deluded about their natural attributes. Their demeanors suggest that they know they aren’t what they once were and that they’ll never be anything like the celebrities whose styles they emulate. But all act as if that’s no reason not to put one’s best foot forward. Even the most placid are animated by the discontent that drives people onward--not necessarily upward, often just further and further out there.

Indeed, most of the women represented by Sherman are pretty far afield. One seemingly serene 40-something would be a generic hippie except for her acrylic fingernails covered with lavender polish. A younger woman, dressed like a high school music teacher, appears too intensely over-eager to put anyone at ease. And a third, who wears polyester shorts and tank top, looks like a low-budget aerobics instructor who works overtime as a prostitute.

Strange combinations are the norm in Sherman’s pictures of misfits. The incongruities that take shape in them attest to the distance between a person’s self-image and his or her actual appearance. By exaggerating these mismatches, Sherman invites viewers to bring their skills as people-watchers into the gallery, where she shows herself to be a great documentary photographer of the psychic spaces that make up a large part of all of us.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through April 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Moving: John McCracken’s new sculptures compress time and space into compact units, squeezing great expanses of the former and vast volumes of the latter into 4-, 6- and 8-foot-long chunks of dazzling color. Imagine the weighty solidity of a gold bar and the unfathomable power of a black hole, and you’ll have an idea of the company these dense yet untouchable wall sculptures keep.

Measuring only 4 1/2-by-5 inches on a side, each perfectly polished piece of lacquer-coated, resin-covered fiberglass hangs horizontally in the long upstairs showroom at L.A. Louver Gallery, where skylights bathe everything in a warm glow.

In form, McCracken’s long, skinny sculptures resemble beams of wood or steel used in construction. But there’s nothing functional about these extraordinarily finished abstractions. In them, the veteran artist simplifies the faceted structures he has worked with for years to focus on color, using its ever-changing effects as the slippery architecture on which to build this supple body of work.

“Ah-Ay-Ah” has the presence of a sunset and hot rod all rolled into 6 feet of synthetic stimulation. Shifting from metallic yellow to glistening purple by traversing a range of glorious oranges, its unnaturally beautiful surfaces look different from every angle, inviting your eyes to zip down it like a fast car on an open road.

Similarly speedy, “Gleena” takes you from night to day and back again. Enhanced with sparkling flakes of gold and red, its metallic green surface gleams with the promise of hot summer nights spent cruising in low-riders. Sliding from burgundy to orange, “Kanoon” moves from the refinement of wine to the wallop of tequila sunrises, picking up intensity while never forgetting about pleasure.

The dense black of “Kreya” is speckled with reflective flecks of deep blue, which recall crystal-clear night skies and powdery stardust. Seemingly frozen in the icy sculpture, these innumerable pinpoints of light--like all of McCracken’s works--provide endlessly fascinating experiences for viewers who like art that moves them in more than one way.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through May 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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In Between: Enjeong Noh brings the intense scrutiny and delicate touch of first-rate portraiture to paintings about relationships. In a solo debut that is more than promising (in that it delivers a satisfying body of work right now), 12 oils on canvas and panel give chilling form to the emotional distance that sometimes opens up between people, creating yawning chasms where there was once only intimacy.

Three works at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art take a straightforward approach, depicting pairs of nude and partially dressed people lying on beds. Pairing two men, two women and a man and a woman, Noh’s lovingly painted pictures are far less interesting for the sexual orientations of their couples than for the depth, complexity and range of emotions they convey. Sweet yearning, post-coital loneliness and narcissistic reverie charge them with electrifying energy.

Two other works present solitary individuals but imply the presence of other people by means of a letter and a rumpled bunch of sheets. In each, the man or woman depicted has his or her mind on too many other things to give intimacy its due. A sense of irreparable damage suffuses these images, making their alienation palpable, if impossible to pinpoint.

The most ambitious paintings transpose what ordinarily takes place within an image to what transpires between it and a viewer. Sometimes Noh elicits our involvement by drawing us in for an intimate view of a face portrayed in close-up. At other times, she treats viewers as voyeurs, as if we just happened to catch a glimpse of someone through an open bathroom door.

Although it is difficult to generate more than fleeting interest in this format, the Korea-born, L.A.-educated artist manages to stop viewers in their tracks before “Woman in Bathroom,” a nearly life-size painting of a young woman so lost in her thoughts that she’s oblivious to anyone standing before her. By making viewers seem to disappear, Noh draws us more convincingly into the picture, where physical distance diminishes and emotional force increases.

* Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through May 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Love of Artifice: Roger Minick’s color photographs of Legoland document America’s budding love affair with artifice. Not so long ago, Americans expected art to be authentic, as unmediated a reflection of an artist’s true vision (and pure soul) as was humanly possible. Today that is no longer the case. As Minick’s crisp, unsentimental pictures at Jan Kesner Gallery demonstrate, we as a people are perfectly comfortable with fakery of all sorts, the grander the better.

In one of 14 images from an ongoing series, Minick depicts two boys looking at a scale model of Rockefeller Center made from the colorful plastic building blocks as a real boat, packed with real tourists, passes by in the background. While the younger boy is too absorbed in the spectacle to pay any attention to the photographer, the older one glares back at the camera, conveying a sense of world-weary disdain all the more potent for his tender age. His facial expression and body language seem to say: Buzz off mister, quit wasting your film on us when you could get a better picture by dropping your pretense of critical superiority and stepping up to the railing to take a close-up.

Other prints do exactly that, bringing viewers face to face with some of our country’s most famous cultural sites, including the Capitol, White House, Smithsonian Institution, Hollywood Bowl and New Orleans’ French Quarter. San Francisco fares very well in Minick’s pictures because its mall-like piers, dolled-up Victorian homes, charming cable cars and picturesque skyline are perfectly suited to Legoland’s status as a model city--a 3-D facade that looks great in postcards and makes for great visits.

In many photographs, the illusionism is incomplete: Snack bars, signs, railings, walkways and other tourists often intrude. But this doesn’t prevent visitors from getting lost in the details of the fabulous dioramas. Nor does it stop Minick from making pictures sufficiently multilayered to match the complexity of their subject: America’s love of artifice and the complicated satisfactions that grow naturally from that fact.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-6834, through May 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.