Monkey See, Monkey Do at Svenson Exhibition

All forms of portraiture are based on the idea that it’s possible to capture that certain something that makes each of us unique. For a painter or photographer, the goal is to make an image that comes alive when viewers stand before it. That’s also what happens when children play with toys. Entire worlds appear in their imaginations, where complex narratives unfold with the greatest of ease.

At Jan Kesner Gallery, a series of silver prints by New York photographer Arne Svenson links portraiture and playthings. Titled “Sock Monkey, Sock Monkey, Sock Monkey,” this terrifically silly exhibition triggers sympathies that embarrass the hard-hearted and cause sentimental viewers to gush.

Each of Svenson’s 33 photographs depicts the head and shoulders of a sock monkey from the 17-year-old collection of New Yorker Ron Warren. Posed against a black backdrop, no two look alike. Their range of facial features, physiques and postures is wide--and amazingly human.

With a furrowed brow, floppy hat and close-set eyes half-hidden by a bulbous nose, one resembles a grumpy chef whose beefy physique makes it hard to tell where his shoulders end and his neck begins. Another, with jingle bells for eyes, appears to be a dimwitted sidekick who always sees stars because he’s constantly knocking his head against things. A third looks like a motley middle-manager whose collar and tie are undone because it’s well past quitting time and his work is far from finished. And a fourth, whose ancestors could be Curious George and Casper the Friendly Ghost, seems to specialize in making a mess of things and then charming his way out of trouble.

A half-dozen wear the outfits and expressions of circus clowns. Their demeanors range from amiable, fun loving and wholesome to dark, sinister and menacing.

Like the best portraits of people, Svenson’s best portraits of sock monkeys focus on sitters that seem to have complicated inner lives. The standouts include a handful dolled up in garishly patterned dresses, over-the-top hairdos, extravagantly stitched eyelashes, and lips that never go out the front door without a thick coat of lipstick--the brighter the better. Pinwheel eyes, fuzzy earmuffs and larger-than-life smirks give them the presence of eccentric aunts who drive the whole family nuts while still endearing themselves.

As works of art, Svenson’s photographs fall between David Levinthal’s Polaroids of emotionally loaded toys and Cindy Sherman’s pictures of herself decked out as women whose self-images are profoundly out of sync with their physical features and social positions. They also recall Mike Kelley’s queasy installations, in which hundreds of homemade stuffed animals are laid out on long tables, as if for a bargain-basement sale or scientific study.

As historical documents, they catalog Warren’s 1,863 sock monkeys. All are made from red-heeled cotton work socks whose design was patented by Chicago manufacturer George Nelson in 1915. During the Depression, people who used all types of socks to make homemade toys preferred Nelson’s brand because the red heels made such good lips.

Svenson’s exhibition demonstrates that the ordinary folks who sewed sock monkeys were as adept at following directions as they were at bending the rules. His potent pictures of their customized monkeys pay homage to the thrift and ingenuity that once were an essential part of American identity but now seem to be memories from a bygone era.

Jan Kesner Gallery, 164. N. La Brea Ave., L.A., (323) 938-6834, through Aug. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The Art of Utility as Practiced by Sam Maloof

Sam Maloof’s carved wood furniture is so breathtakingly beautiful that it seems unreasonable not to call it art. But old habits die hard, and we’re not used to calling things we sit on, eat off of and store our clothes in sculptures. In the popular imagination, art and utility go together like oil and water. If something’s useful, we say it belongs to the world of craft.

At the Beverly Hills Municipal Gallery in City Hall, “The Furniture of Sam Maloof” brings together 24 gorgeously designed and fabulously crafted pieces that the 86-year-old woodworker has made over the last five decades. His user-friendly furniture makes no grandiose claims about art and how we define it. Instead, it invites viewers to redefine our ideas about usefulness.

A pragmatist to the core, Maloof doesn’t care if we define art too narrowly. The real problem is that our definition of use is too narrow to account for how we actually live with things.

In the center of the gallery stand a casually elegant drop-leaf dining room table and six upright chairs with leather upholstery, from the 1960s. To their left is a simple cork-topped desk and matching chair from the ‘50s. Maloof has softened their angular austerity by rounding their corners and tapering the ends of the desktop, which gives it the appearance of an aerodynamic wing. In contrast, the eight tapered legs look plump and sturdy, both down-to-earth and unpretentious. The marbleized pattern formed by the cork top is framed by honey-colored maple, which Maloof has set off with dark walnut highlights.

Across the gallery, a desk hutch from the ‘70s stands like a friendly sentinel, its doors, drawers and legs echoing one another to form complementary rhythms that are not interrupted by any metal hardware. Also made of dramatically grained walnut is a small, round table from the ‘90s, whose four sensuously curved legs dovetail into a single ribbed column.

A squat hall cabinet, which does double duty as a bench and an end table, suggests that utility means different things in different situations. A pair of rocking chairs, one designed for a child, makes you wonder where usefulness ends and relaxation begins. And two extraordinary music stands demonstrate that one man’s functional object is another’s luxurious indulgence.

Made of Brazilian rosewood and accompanied by a sleek little chair that looks light on its feet, a double music stand from 1972 is profoundly anthropomorphic. Its outstretched arms hold two flanged shelves for two musicians to set their sheet music on as they perform side by side. The other one, made of maple, ebony and purple-heart, has adjustable music rests that allow the singers to face one another.

Like all of Maloof’s works, these serve a purpose. It just happens to be one of pleasure rather than strict necessity. More important, his pieces require participation on the part of the people who use them. With built-in sociability, they aren’t all that different from sculptures or paintings, which also stimulate social intercourse by bringing people together to experience--and argue about--all forms of civilized refinement.

Beverly Hills Municipal Gallery, City Hall, 450 N. Crescent Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 285-1045, through Sept. 30. Closed Saturdays and Sundays.

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Intimate Portraits From Bygone Era of Celebrity

In 1966, when singer Robert Goulet showed up in Lancaster, Pa., for a United Way fund-raiser, 15-year-old Gary Lee Boas snapped his photograph. An obsession was born.

Over the next 35 years, the painfully shy fan took more than 50,000 snapshots of stars and celebrities, with a few hundred politicians, athletes and intellectuals thrown in for good measure. At Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 540 of these candid pictures are mounted in tidy grids on six plain white panels. An exhibition checklist (which is about the size of a small-town phonebook) identifies everyone pictured and provides the date and location of the photograph. Many are faded, slightly out of focus and less than perfectly exposed. The result is a fascinating portrait of the changing face of American fame and one man’s undying obsession with the glamour of celebrity.

Arranged in loose chronological order, Boas’ little square photos begin in 1968 and end in 1980, the year Mark David Chapman assassinated John Lennon and the golden age of fandom came to a close. One of the most amazing aspects of the old-fashioned fan’s awe-inspiring collection is the goodwill and trust embodied by the vast majority of its pictures.

In shot after shot, movie stars, Broadway legends, musicians and TV heroes greet their fans with more gracious equanimity than we see today. Nearly every celebrity patiently puts up with throngs of autograph seekers whose hastily aimed cameras flash continuously. Many smile politely, but more do so warmly. Others chat amiably, while a good number go above and beyond the call of duty, hamming it up for their fans as if they were actually enjoying themselves.

Boas’ pictures are not airbrushed fantasies or approved releases. They occupy the real world, giving viewers a glimpse of the unrehearsed sentiments and unplanned expressions that lie behind a star’s public image. Fatigue, trepidation, kindness, curiosity and playfulness can be read on the faces of Boas’ celebrities. So too can confusion, amusement, arrogance and vulnerability. The distance between stars and ordinary folks shrinks--but never disappears--in these unadorned shots of those rare moments when fame and facelessness come into contact.

Although it would be foolish to describe Boas’ portraits as innocent--they depict, after all, publicity-conscious celebrities just outside the backdoors of theaters, restaurants and studios--they have nothing in common with the intrusive pictures shot by professional paparazzi or the slick promotional fare churned out by publicists. Their amateur charm is palpable and touching--and no longer a part of public life in this country. Heightened security and the corporate marketing of celebrity have closed the gap in which Boas lived out his fantasies.

A testament to a time when an ordinary guy (with an ordinary Brownie Bullseye camera) could come face-to-face with fame, his gigantic scrapbook is a piece of history that makes the present look cold and heartless.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 525-1755, through Aug. 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Nick Lowe’s Collages: The Look of Disorder

Manic activity meets a strange sort of discipline in the rambunctious collages and mural-size drawing that make up Nick Lowe’s solo debut at the Black Dragon Society on Chinatown’s Chung King Road. Each of the young artist’s four collages, which range in size from 20 to 50 square feet, looks like an elaborate mandala that has crash-landed.

An impressive inventory of oddly shaped and variously textured bits of fabric, chunks of cardboard and scraps of paper form out-of-whack patterns. These spindly shapes, which include passages of lacy openness and tangled density, transform the symmetry of Rorschach blots into chaotic free-for-alls filled with whiplash scale shifts and jarring collisions of solid color. Sparks fly as Lowe’s high-octane cutouts fuse madcap animation and hard-edge abstraction.

Yet all is not chaos amid the riot of mangled forms. Out of the mix-and-match messiness emerges an order all the more poetic for being unexpected. Loose, slippery and forgiving, the underlying structure of Lowe’s deliberately engineered compositions allows for freewheeling improvisations that come close to spinning out of control but never go over the edge.

His colored pencil drawing is a fantastic dreamscape in which a rock band plays a concert around Stonehenge-like ruins. A pyramid of oversize human skulls, interspersed with glowing vocalists, stands to the right. In the star-studded sky, electric zips, gaseous bubbles, labyrinthine lines and upside-down snowmen provide the visual complexity of the collages.

Traditionally, ornamental works such as Lowe’s were meant to overwhelm a viewer’s eyes with patterns so elaborate that contemplating them induced a sense of serene well-being. In contrast, his discombobulated images take your eyes on herky-jerky rides that deliver anything but tranquillity. To look at them is to know that there’s no rest for the wicked--and even less for the virtuous.

Black Dragon Society, 961 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 620-0030, through Saturday.