Scribes of Precision and Obsession

High concept has its place in the terrifically engaging “furor scribendi” show at Angles Gallery, but what dominates this selection of works on paper is simply a tremendous amount of nitty-gritty labor, some of it deliciously obsessive.

There is no capitalizing on accidents here, and little in the way of spontaneous gestures or random marks. All 13 artists--from California, New York and Europe--favor precision, whether in the form of carefully aligned, floating architectural planes (Kevin Appel), chromatically intense stripes (Linda Besemer) or, most memorably, meticulous scenes of quiet violence (Kelly McLane).

McLane’s five striking images can be read independently or sequentially, the recurrence of key elements pressing the mind into narrative service. Drawn in soft, silvery middle grays, they use formal restraint to counter the extremity of the action depicted. On each page, a semi-natural disaster of some kind is playing out, a final reckoning between what the Earth has provided and what we’ve forced upon it. An avalanche of tires buries a car in one drawing; in another, a raging fire consumes the tires; and in another, tires and mobile homes are cast adrift in a tempestuous sea. Animals witness the destruction: A pair of deer watch mutely in one scene, a few rabbits peek out from inside tires in another. Curious and wonderful, McLane’s drawings whisper of doom.

Lisa Yuskavage and Aaron Romine focus on immediate pleasures of the flesh in their contributions; Simone Adels and Kathy Prendergast map space through repetitive abstract marks. Ewan Gibbs and M.E. Carroll render architectural plans or facades through minute, orderly notations--grids of tiny circles in Gibbs’ case and, in Carroll’s, continuous lines of tiny, tiny text from “Alice in Wonderland” and the Greek drama “Lysistrata.”

David Bunn applies a rigorous system, also to lyrical, poetic ends. His darkly humorous, multipart work weaves together notations on a medical anomaly, references to Freudian theory and classic catchphrases from horror literature. Bunn’s brilliance lies in his manipulation of found material--junked library card catalogs--to spin complex commentary on the currency and obsolescence of objects and ideas alike.

Tom LaDuke set for himself the banal goal of using all of the ink in a four-color ballpoint pen, and the product of his conceptual exercise is the charming “Blossom,” in which a single delicate, shimmering firework of a flower hovers within a densely inked page. Rebecca Bollinger draws sheets of diminutive images culled from Internet keyword searches. Amusing and strangely intimate, her drawings function as visual indices to everything from personal memory to furniture styles.

Julie Roberts’ two interior dollhouse views prompt a double take that reveals them to be less illustrations of toys than tenderly considered studies in social anthropology.

Although many of the efforts here are diminutive in scale, all of the drawings have assured presence. Furor, or “inspired frenzy,” is indeed the name of the game with these marvelously consuming commitments to paper.

Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019, through Jan. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Narratives of Loss: Either William Eggleston has been stepping up the pathos in his legendarily dispassionate work or the art world’s traditional conventions of beauty have expanded so that his work no longer seems so aggressively cold and ugly.

Both, it seems, have occurred since the ‘70s, when the Museum of Modern Art presumptuously canonized Eggleston as the first color photographer of any importance. It wasn’t just his use of color that challenged the existing canon but his fixation on the nondescript, the common and the banal.

The success of his work has given legions of artists permission to tread in his wake, shunning the picturesque in favor of the overlooked. In abundant company now, he no longer occupies a position on the aesthetic fringe; the center has come to him.

At the same time, as his recent photographs at Rose Gallery illustrate, Eggleston’s vision has gradually softened. These Iris prints have none of the brashness and harsh intensity of his dye transfers, and the imagery feels more tender, more keyed to abandoned souls than simply overlooked places.

In one image, a plush gold upholstered chair turns its back to us, while a small suitcase beside it opens to reveal lavender satin pockets sagging like aged breasts, a sweater and some rusted cans and sand from the scrappy ground it sits on.

Many of the pictures here--all were shot during the last few years in California and Arizona--suggest a similar narrative of loss.

Eggleston, like his closest predecessor, Walker Evans, relishes the discarded and obsolete. Signs fascinated them both--for what they said, for how they looked and for the canny way the words and image, context and texture fused into something poignant, poetic: the irony of the convenience store sign in the semi-wilderness; an arrow advertising something yet pointing to nothing but the desert’s endless scrub; the punning shop sign that announces and suggests “Open/Gifts.”

Eggleston says he tries to photograph democratically, but there is really no such thing as a democratic eye. Choice is all in photography, and hierarchies assert themselves in every frame.

What Eggleston’s pictures illuminate for us is that, in photography, meaning adheres to all things democratically, that framing engenders significance and not the other way around.

Rose Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-8440, through Jan. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

A Matter of Interpretation: There’s no easy way to look at Marlene McCarty’s large portrait drawings at Sandroni Rey, no simple way of categorizing them as good or bad. Vexed by contradictions, they feel at once tender and exploitative. They seem to sympathize with their subjects while at the same time sensationalizing them.

McCarty’s “Young Americans” are teenage girls, drawn in pencil and ballpoint pen in a casual, illustrative style. One sits in profile, with slightly hunched back, her head turned toward us. Another sits on the ground, her arms dangling between raised knees. With one exception, they are pretty young women with clear, open faces framed by lush, shampoo-ad hair. Their scale just slightly exceeds our own, so their space and ours feel fairly continuous. What, then, to make of our easy identification with these girls, who happen to be convicted murderers?

One, according to texts hung separately from the drawings, beat her mother to death with a crystal candlestick after the mother disapproved of her boyfriend. Another killed her parents and brother so that she could collect an inheritance and settle in with her older, married lover. Nowhere in the girls’ calm expressions does McCarty hint of their capacity for such brutality, but she does expose them in another way, which suggests something about the impetus for their crimes. She draws their clothes as transparent, allowing unencumbered views of their budding breasts and vulvas. The girls appear as overtly sexualized beings, victims, perhaps, of their bodies and beauty or, alternately, in fierce command of them, prepared to defend to the death their sexual freedom.

McCarty has toyed with tough material before. In the early ‘90s, she made word paintings, filling canvases with in-your-face sexual slang. Those works, like the drawings here, trade on easy gestures and their uneasy responses. McCarty forces us to assume a prurient view of these young women, announces their horrific deeds and yet still manages to convey something of their innocence.

There is no easy way to regard these portraits, and--more to McCarty’s point--no single way to characterize the young women they represent.

Sandroni Rey, 1224 Abbot Kinney, Venice, (310) 392-3404, through Jan. 19. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

In Search of Subversion: You may have seen Jason Middlebrook’s installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and not known it--a sign that it’s either extremely coy or inconsequential.

Subversive, but not nearly enough, the installation is in the Project Room near the museum entrance, a space that’s raw to begin with and that Middlebrook has made to look neglected as well. A ladder leans against the exposed concrete-block wall, near a paint bucket filled with trash. Wood scraps clutter the floor beneath a window that’s been boarded shut. In the center of the room, a pallet of plywood sheets receives the steady drip of an overhead leak.

Calling his installation “Museum Storage,” Middlebrook conjures not just the image of the institution’s backroom but the concept of its history, its past. He includes old blueprints of a never-realized modification of the museum among the clutter here, along with a lot of dusty old notices indicating the museum’s closure on a holiday or warning visitors of controversial content within.

Middlebrook, who is based in New York, gets a bit more theatrical with an old donations box, which he’s turned into a scruffy terrarium, and with the cracked concrete floor, which he’s planted with a few plastic weeds.

Wrapped objects on the storage racks sprout green stuff too, as if left there inordinately long. One large painting, however, is fresh and visible, presenting an image of a dilapidated shed with a facade just like the Santa Monica Museum’s. It’s rendered as a facility in decline but also, with debris flying around it, like the epicenter of a geologic convulsion.

Using a museum’s public space to expose its private workings is certainly not a new strategy but one with great potential for provocation. Chris Burden’s subterranean excavation at the Geffen Contemporary in the late ‘80s allowed glimpses of the institution’s physical underbelly. More recently, Michael Asher enacted a radical exposure of another sort for a show at the Museum of Modern Art, printing a free-for-the-asking brochure listing works by major artists that the museum had deaccessioned over the years.

Middlebrook’s installation extends the cynical notion of the museum as a place where things go to die, but the gesture is neither incisive nor terribly clever. As one visiting child commented upon entering the room, voicing, no doubt, many an adult visitor’s impatient befuddlement, “Is something going to happen here?”

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 586-6488, through Jan. 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.