Different Worlds Intersect as They Set Sail Together in Takamori’s ‘Boat’

For those Japanese like Akio Takamori, born just after World War II, American military presence loomed large on the visual horizon. In the decades since then, American influence has, for better or worse, altered the surface and texture of Japanese life. In “Boat,” a quietly stunning installation at Frank Lloyd Gallery, Takamori meditates on contact between the two cultures by invoking the faces, postures and modes of dress he remembers from his early years in Japan.

“Boat” is a tender group portrait, consisting of an assembly of glazed stoneware figures, roughly half life-size, standing on a large oval platform painted to resemble the rusting steel of a ship’s deck. The figures, sturdy in mass, are gracefully animated by Takamori’s brush, which articulates their features and clothing with the fluidity and immediacy of ink drawings. They are nearly monochrome, all black, gray and white on eggshell but for a diluted red that blushes their cheeks.

Standing alone or in pairs, slightly apart and focused on the middle distance, the figures feel almost as disunited as Giacometti’s attenuated forms crossing a town square, their shoulders practically brushing, but their worlds separate, discrete. A pig-tailed, thick-legged girl slings a baby on her back. A pair of women in manly work clothes stands just behind a mother and daughter in full kimono. An American soldier in uniform stands with hands on his hips as if holding his ground.

Another soldier holds a small book, which a Japanese man seems to be reading with him. A third uniformed American, in the center of the small crowd, dances with a diminutive, traditionally dressed Japanese woman. In the front of the boat stands the “General,” and in the rear, the “Emperor”--not facing off, but facing soberly in the same direction.

All in Takamori’s microcosmic community face in that same direction, with similar stoicism. The space they share is charged, a symbolic site of transition and passage, and perhaps even of shared destiny. Boats, Takamori points out, have always been central to the dramas played out between his native country and the U.S., where he’s lived since the 1970s--from Commodore Perry using his fleet of “Black Ships” to persuade Japan to sign diplomatic agreements in 1854, to the accidental sinking of a Japanese fishing craft by an American submarine earlier this year.

No overt friction mars this metaphorical cruise. The atmosphere is instead subdued, sublimated within these palpable drawings of men, women and children. With the boat-like platform raising them nearly to eye level, the figures seem not just to share a common destiny with each other, but with us as well.

* Frank Lloyd Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through Saturday.

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Pop Violence: Sue de Beer’s new photographs at Sandroni Rey Gallery are obviously exercises in artifice, but they still pinch a real nerve. Though their violence feels a step or two removed from real physical pain, for the viewer the distinction is gratuitous. Violent imagery and imagery “about” violence both trigger the visceral reflex of unease.

The key difference is that the former has an organic link to the world and the latter is a product contrived to manipulate an audience. Down a theory-bedecked hall of mirrors we can continue and claim that pictures like De Beer’s are not merely manipulative but “about” manipulation, “about” the appeal of the macabre and its exploitation by filmmakers, television producers and . . . well, artists. At the end of the hall, though, that last mirror reflects our culture’s own sorry visage, grown soulless and desensitized.

The how and why of photographs like De Beer’s makes for compelling discussion, because the images themselves beg for justification. Why, after all, would a photographer stage an image of a young woman whose body wedges into the cracked torso of another, so that her head peeks out from the crotch of the other’s jeans as if a full-grown stillbirth?

Why a picture of a young man casually laughing, as his fingers poke into the wet, gaping, crimson wound at his waist? And why a photograph of a seated young woman, cigarette in hand, her face a mask of indifference, and her midsection a skinned mound of blood and innards, perhaps even a fetus?

What intrigues De Beer are the internal contradictions within such scenes, the same tangy miscegenation of horror and humor, the grotesque and the giddy that drives Paul McCarthy’s work. McCarthy didn’t invent abjection, but he helped popularize it and fetishize it to the point where young artists like De Beer can trade on its currency.

A few of her pictures look like slasher-flick stage sets, with their rumpled beds and blood-stained ceilings. These, at least, leave something to the imagination other than the piercing question of how violation and degradation got to be so cool.

* Sandroni Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through June 23. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Layered References: In “Points of Departure III: Twentieth Century Limited,” Peter Milton stages a dark parody of Modern art history, set beneath the grand steel arches of the original Penn Station. The train labeled the 20th Century Limited has just crashed, and works by De Kooning, Warhol, Picasso, Mondrian and others scatter beside the crinkled wreckage. Chugging in to replace it, with a fresh billow of steam, is the “Post Edge and Retro Express,” the 21st century’s iron(y) horse.

Clever details, wry jokes and broad-based references are so abundant in this 1998 print that Milton even provides a printed key to the image’s sources and figures. Many of the prints in Milton’s 25-year survey at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts are equally dense with history and speculation, memory, fantasy and fiction.

Throughout the years covered in the show, Milton has remained fairly consistent in the way he regards time as fluid rather than linear, and space as similarly resistant to boundaries of logic or architecture. His images, as a result, are seamless, slightly jarring montages, where inside and outside space converge, past and present overlap, and real objects and representations engage each other as equals.

Milton sets Proust down in one image, Duchamp in another, as a way of paying homage to the minds he’s learned from and incorporating within each image the family tree that led to its own creation. This works better in some images than others, and generally more evocatively in the 1990s work than in prints from the 1970s and 1980s. The surfaces of the recent prints are velvety rich with nuance and detail, and the references dense with both personal and cultural history.

In “Interiors VII: The Train From Munich” (1991), for instance, a train station merges seamlessly with a hotel and cafe, in whose window stands Otto Frank, Anne’s father, from a familiar Arnold Newman photograph of the Holocaust survivor standing pensively, as an old man, in the Amsterdam attic where his family hid. In Milton’s print, a young girl sits at the table across from him and looks out the window toward us.

The first assumption is that she must be Anne, the precocious diarist of human goodness and evil, but it turns out to be an image of Edith, Milton’s wife and a child survivor of the war. Milton has folded her past into his own on-going visual diary, just as he has internalized both the grim and glorious episodes of the 20th century, made an editorial scrapbook of its writings, dances, photographs and paintings, its innovations and insights, and turned it over to us, page by page.

* Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 938-5222, through June 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Ironing Out the Interest: “Smoother,” the title of Leslie Wilkes’ L.A. debut at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, refers to the idealizing power of paint to iron out the bumps and wrinkles of life. Her desire “to create a place where even the unsettling is pleasing and safe” results in a visual realm so bland that one comes away from her show craving something spicy and flawed, just to break up the sensual monotony.

Flowers or floral patterns dominate all five of the paintings here. Three set oversized blossoms alongside the figure of a young woman in modest underclothes. The pairing of half-naked girls and luscious flowers buzzes with obvious sexual energy, but Wilkes muffles the impact to that of a dull hum. She sets a bland tone by favoring plaid backgrounds and a palette of muted tones--taupe, gold, ivory and chalky green. The bodies of the young women in the paintings lack the vitality and latent complexity that would seem to come from their ripening sexuality. Their eyes appear dull and emotionless.

What is most alive in these paintings are the flowers. Five large magnolias with golden, nipple-like centers hover around a camisole-clad girl on one canvas. Another centers on the unabashed sensuality of three huge, pink lady-slippers. Their labia-like blossoms flaunt an edgy beauty that is all too rare in Wilkes’ work.

* Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (323) 957-1777, through June 30. Closed Sunday through Tuesday.