Cuba’s Spirit Resounds in Decaying Spaces

Andrew Moore’s stunning photographs of once-grand buildings and interior spaces in Havana read easily as metaphors for the exhausted condition of Cuba’s revolution, its ideals more than a little worn around the edges. But Moore’s photographs at Craig Krull Gallery are sensed more than they are read. Though filled with visual information--and by extension, economic, political and social cues--they make their appeal to the mind only after their rich color and exquisite texture enrapture the senses.

In “Marisol” (1999), a young girl, barefoot, sits in a fraying chair reading a book. Her presence in the lower right corner of the image anchors a vast and spare space. The floor is cool stone tile, the wall a symphony of decay, its paint and decorative plaster work peeling, buckling, crumbling, growing green and slick with mold. Young and beautiful, the girl is not just anchor in the space but antidote to its decline. Her skin is smooth and new; her face glows with a warm light cast, it seems, by the pages of her leather-bound book.

In another image, this time an exterior, the New York-based Moore again sets the freshness of youth against architecture that has grown overripe. “El Centro de Oro” (2000) shows two children, each holding the end of a jump rope and standing on a balcony of a lovely Art Nouveau building. Its elegant lines and sinuous ironwork remain, but its surface has grown slack with age.

Moore is a practical preservationist with a romantic soul. His photographs document a spirit of resourcefulness and graceful persistence beneath a veneer of loss and nostalgia. The spectacular interior of the “Campo Amor” (1999) speaks simultaneously of its glorious past as a theater and its present function as a parking lot for motorbikes and pedicab taxis. A makeshift laundry line hangs behind the balcony seats. A crusty layer of rubble on the ground acts as a corresponding bookend to the frail roof, a skeletal web of beams no longer dense enough even to shade the interior, much less shelter it. Like sustained echoes, Moore’s photographs keep the bold music of these spaces alive and resonating.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Saturday.

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Tearing Into History: Beyond being amusing, Enrique Chagoya’s irreverence is absolutely necessary. His art is wildly exaggerated and utterly truthful, at once coy, scathing and instructive.

Track 16’s sampling of Chagoya’s paintings, altered prints and books includes work from 1994 to the present, and faces as familiar as Mickey Mouse’s and Sen. Jesse Helms’. Chagoya assumes a certain continuity among the realms of comics, religion, politics, history and myth. He takes this genre-busting freedom and runs with it, creating images whose outrageousness is matched only by the strength of their underlying appeals to justice and a more accurate understanding of the historical record.

Conquest is the enemy here--conquest through force or abuse of power, the takeover of land, culture and consciousness. Cannibalism is one of its central metaphors--the consuming or subsuming of like by like. Whether Chagoya is targeting the Spanish conquerors of Mexico or Helms’ stranglehold on government funding of the arts, he has impeccable aim. He jabs and tickles, tweaking the funny bone and disrupting the veneer of conventionally accepted history.

“Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol” (2000), a collaboration with Guillermo Gomez-Pen~a, is a prime example of Chagoya’s brilliant wit. An accordion-folded book dense with multi-font texts and images lifted from an array of popular and historical sources, the codex is wickedly funny. It reads as comic strip, monologue and history lesson, drawing links and parallels involving the genocide of Native Americans, the crimes of the Third Reich, Columbus and his cronies, and the tactics of the Border Patrol and the art police.

Mickey Mouse serves as the mascot of the New World Order, though Superman also makes regular appearances alongside Aztec gods and goddesses. Born in Mexico, Chagoya has lived in the U.S. since 1977 (he teaches at Stanford), and he draws deeply from the cultural archives of both nations, as well as from a broader art historical pool.

For one series, he has taken pages from a Spanish-language book of 19th century European art and painted over them, twisting the dynamic of the pictures by adding incongruous elements. Chagoya amends a German image of a girl praying in the forest so that the object of her prayer is a sculpture suggestive of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, adorned with skulls, serpents and claws. It’s a small gesture of revenge from the “pagan” side of the colonialist equation, but satisfying nonetheless.

Several paintings extend the theme and give the brown-skinned people a chance to feast on the white folk--a play on the savage stereotype, but even more so a symbolization of the tables being turned, advantage on the indigenous side for a change. The image of native men and women munching on the roasted limbs of a white man, his businessman-gray socks still on his feet, is both horrific and hilarious.

One of the many visual styles that Chagoya adopts is that of early European explorers and ethnographers who illustrated their journeys to faraway lands. Chagoya’s work feels like a distant, more enlightened relative to those journals. It’s a record of his travels through time, an account of what he has encountered--in short, his take, mock-legitimized by historical style, of how contact between the tribes has really played out. Hip, disjunctive, rude and terrifically self-aware, Chagoya’s work is visual activism of the most compelling kind, prompting laughter through the tears.

* Track 16 Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4678, through Jan. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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So Near, Yet So Far Away: Maureen Gallace’s small landscape paintings at Kohn Turner Gallery are hard to dislike, but they’re equally difficult to love. Eminently pleasant, they take a middle-distance view of their subjects--New England houses, barns and lighthouses--that results in a middling emotional response.

Gallace never gets close enough to nurture a feeling of intimacy, nor far enough away to invite any broader contextualizing or globalizing interpretation. Restraint is the operative term here.

With economical use of color and brush stroke, Gallace paints a single white house against ivory sand and an aquamarine stripe of sea, or a bridge arching over a wedge of road. Using muted tones within a narrow spectrum, she creates scenes of quiet, controlled beauty. Snow distills the landscape to its essential forms in several of the small paintings, and in the rest, Gallace reduces land, architecture, sea and sky to planar simplicity.

Although the paintings seem stingy with sentiment, Gallace, who lives in New York, titles several with personal notations like “Visiting My Brother” or “New Year’s Eve,” giving them the suggestion of journal entries, visual cues to specific memories. The nature of those memories is kept closely guarded.

The houses that Gallace paints might have a window or two, but never a door. There is no way in. They are closed vessels, unyielding of their secrets.

Despite Gallace’s stoic distance, the images do have a vague melancholy about them, as if they are glances back at sites of personal resonance, long stares at places of private significance. But Gallace avoids intimations of any deeper meaning and fixes her attention solely on the surface. It remains a lovely surface, thoroughly consistent with the imagery she showed here two years ago and no less appealing--but also, unfortunately, given the hope that her style might continue to evolve, no more so.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 854-5400, through Jan. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Wrestling With a Dilemma: The young backyard wrestlers in Greg Fiering and Mat Luem’s new video and photo installations aren’t the only ones subjecting themselves to pain. The show itself, at Low Gallery, is punishing, a two-pronged assault on the senses: tediously bland in style, deeply disturbing in content.

Like the more “professional” activities of the adult wrestling community--such as the World Wrestling Federation--teenage backyard wrestling is a pseudo-sport, a perverse spectacle grounded in the solid, disheartening premise that violence entertains. To play or compete, boys (all across the country and to some extent internationally) adopt fighting pseudonyms and confront their opponents on trampolines or makeshift mats of plastic sheeting. Rules, if they exist, are gratuitous, and most of the props or weapons come from the garage: metal folding chairs, fluorescent tubes. Barbed wire, sheet metal and fire lend an extra edge to the proceedings, which consist of the combatants yelling and trouncing one another as their friends capture it all on video.

Self-conscious theatricality runs high, and artifice is clearly a key part of the game, but the blood trickling down the face and arms of a boy thrown onto a sheet of broken glass is all too convincingly real. In their photographs and three-channel video projection (shown simultaneously on two adjacent walls and the gallery ceiling), Fiering and Luem mimic the careless/reckless attitude of the wrestlers themselves.

Disjointed and cacophonous, the video installation chronicles this bizarre social phenomenon, but provides neither documentary clarity nor editorial insight. The backyard wrestling scene reveals itself as a vehicle for casual aggression, a dismaying answer to teenage anomie, affirmation even of a deeper societal crisis.

But Fiering and Luem come closer to celebrating this scene than condemning it. They never transcend the gritty material itself, but only open a window onto it. And the view is ugly, through and through.

* Low Gallery, 9052 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 281-2691, through Jan. 27. Closed Sunday and Monday.