For Koons, It’s All About Packaging and Marketing

Why do we still bother with Jeff Koons? Hasn’t that attention junkie gotten enough, with his 40-foot-high topiary puppy and his more-than-we-ever-wanted-to-know photographic sex diary? His big and brassy new paintings at Gagosian Gallery pull out all the stops again and are fairly panting for another adulation fix, but it’s time instead to practice a little tough love.

Forget--as Koons seemingly has--the old notions about artists answering an inner call, like prophets heeding a vision. Koons epitomizes a new breed of artist as savvy salesman, more attuned to market research on consumer spending habits than to the currents of meaning that course beneath such phenomena. Sex and spectacle sell. Koons takes it from there, setting up shop, hiring assistants to work production and enacting his business plan without disturbing his manicure.

The six products on view here bring to mind those grade school cut-and-paste collages that turned magazines around the house into lace. Koons ratchets up the scale and technique, turning out canvases measuring from 7 to 13 feet per side. They are painted with exacting precision, based on advertisements and other pictures that had been computer-scanned.

Thematically, Koons sticks to familiar-feeling images--women, food and the landscape all prepped and packaged for consumption--which he then fragments and recombines. In “Stream,” a pair of large, luscious and slightly parted lips floats near a horse’s bridle, a nubile young woman shown from shoulder to thigh and a hand with glossy red fingernails. Blond tresses ribbon through the picture, which, like the others in the “Easyfun” series, reeks of prefab sex appeal.

In the other paintings, the eye flits from bikini to cheese-dipped pretzel, from elephants to rhinestone body jewelry, from a waterfall to frozen mixed vegetables. All is larger than life, brighter than life, slicker and more transient, tailored to the short attention span and high dazzle-threshold of our quick-cut age.

This new body of work is being hailed as something of a comeback for the artist (whose career and personal life dipped in the late 1990s); but it’s also a throwback to James Rosenquist and his billboard-sized paintings of the 1960s. And it recalls the ‘80s, when the art of appropriating imagery from popular culture took on new momentum and some conceptual weight with artists like Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman. For all their physical vibrancy, these paintings feel vacant, exhausted--like technically slick exercises in self-indulgence.

As for content, what’s there is thoroughly noxious--the sexism, the consumerism and, worse, the conflation of the two. Koons has taken to ascribing a spiritual value to his work, which is about as preposterous as claiming that the pita fajita revolutionized haute cuisine.

Why do we still bother with Koons? He’s a nasty reminder of our culture’s basest instincts, its self-satisfaction, materialism and puerile drive for attention. Those are instincts we all need to confront, but they’re better resisted than celebrated.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through May 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Time Flies: Loss has its seductive side. Consider the romantic appeal of architectural ruins, or the crooner’s tale of heartbreak. Consider the paintings of William Smith at Jan Baum Gallery. Nostalgia permeates his work as if it were part of the painting medium itself, the linseed oil that eases the pigment’s way.

The Philadelphia-based painter’s second solo show here feels continuous with the first (in 1999) in both tone and format. Smith paints lush, unpeopled landscapes on canvas, paper and books, umber-tinged scenes suggestive of a prior, purer era. The canvases are the most straightforward and least entrancing, though several where the landscape merges with its reflection in water elicit a slight frisson of disorientation.

In those scenes, Smith introduces a tendency toward flattening and abstraction that he sees through with more potency in his paintings on paper. Moody and austere, the images consist simply of silhouetted trees against sky, but the trees double as monumental shapes and more precise descriptions, for Smith articulates leaves and branches by incising into the solid, tar-like darkness of their forms. The sky behind them is a gorgeous blue, warm and dusky, the color of gloaming or evening twilight.

Dusk, that fleeting span between the obvious of day and the unknowable of night, emblematizes the general sense of loss elicited by time’s passage. Smith reinforces that poignancy in his altered books by overlaying small landscape paintings onto pages of an old poetry anthology. The page headings--”Ruins,” “Grief,” “Parting,” “Forgetfulness”--and occasional fragments of text left uncovered resonate quietly with the images themselves, precious and melancholic. In these books, intimate objects scaled to the hand and private meditation, Smith identifies beauty as an ally to the erosive power of time.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 932-0170, through April 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Rebirth: In late 1997, a lightning fire struck Vermont Canyon in Griffith Park, where photographer and CalArts professor Kaucyila Brooke walks her dog. In January of the following year, she started bringing her camera there to record the evolution of the landscape, the irrepressible new growth that emerged from the scorched earth. The resulting suite of 35 photographs, at Michael Dawson Gallery, is a wondrous meditation on regeneration.

Young plants sprout among the dead, colorful blossoms burst around the gnarled, skeletal remains of burned trees. Buoyant green leaves surround dark, crusty branches. Beauty and vigor persist.

That, in itself, is hardly startling news. The cycle of decay or destruction and rebirth outdates (and includes) us all. But it is startling to see such unabashedly sensual, reverential work coming from Brooke, whose reputation rests on sharp-edged photo-text narratives skewering conventions of gender and sexuality, especially pertaining to lesbian culture. Insistently visual, the images in the series “Burned . . . “ defy theoretical analysis. They celebrate renewal with plain-spoken eloquence.

Several additional works on view, from a different series, also muse on how traces of the past assume form in the present. Framed in icy white, the square studies of “328 Museum Drive” (1999) show picture-hanging nails absent their pictures, and walls stained with moisture and age. A quiet, charged air of loss permeates the images, salvaging them from their otherwise banal Minimalism.

Though the “Museum Drive” series records Brooke’s autobiographical imprint on a space, the Griffith Park pictures end up feeling more intimate. Only five large prints are on view, but the entire suite, printed in a smaller size, can be (and should be) seen by request.

* Michael Dawson Gallery, 535 N. Larchmont Blvd., (323) 469-2186, through May 12. Closed Sundaysthrough Tuesdays.

Dualities: Violence, beauty, absence, luck, memory, faith--each of these forces appears in concentrated, synecdochical form in “Roots of Paradise,” the stunning centerpiece of Luis Gonzalez Palma’s show at Peter Fetterman Gallery. The 15 small images (13 ambrotypes and two tintypes) nest like jewels in a display case, each framed by the ornately stamped metal of an antique photo case lined with embossed velvet.

One simply pictures a pair of dice, another a gun tucked at a man’s waist, others an empty chair, a woman’s face shrouded with black lace, a hand with a small photograph resting on its open palm. Each image is precious and irrefutable, representing a universal current of power to be reckoned with.

But each also comes across like an interdependent letter of the alphabet, a facet of the whole’s larger meaning, a vehicle with its own seductive properties and its own potential to cause grief. Gonzalez Palma, who lives in Guatemala City, attributes his inspiration to the mysticism and violence that conspire to make up his native land.

His photographs--the rest of them here large, printed on paper and hung on the wall--don’t document the grittier realities of Guatemala’s political strife, but aim at a broader assessment of the vexed human condition--its pain, its transcendent beauty and its essential myths. Most often he makes portraits, of young women in crowns, small boys with feathered wings, men wearing wreaths of leaves.

Toned in a warm brown, suggestive of both blood and rust, they operate on the plane of the symbolic and metaphorical. This is dark poetry, laced with danger and the sacred. In “Roots of Paradise” Gonzalez Palma conveys the utter synchronousness of good and evil through small visual clues, icons of worship and taxonomic realities, soft dreams and hard facts.

* Peter Fetterman Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-6463, through May 26. Closed Sundays and Mondays.