Avoiding Voyeurism, Provoking Unease

The photographs on view in Reagan Louie’s current exhibition at Gallery Luisotti represent a six-year documentary journey through the underworld of the Asian sex industry.

A Chinese American photographer whose last series (10 years in the making) was an epic exploration of his ancestral homeland, Louie covered nearly a dozen countries for this project, encountering hundreds of women and girls in nearly every conceivable level of the trade. (Men appear only occasionally, primarily as clients.) It is a fascinating body of work.

Louie’s style is frank but thoughtful, and the landscape through which he leads the viewer--one that few ever see--is intrinsically, if uncomfortably, enthralling. It is also a subject strewn with ethical land mines. The camera is never a neutral observer when it comes to the commerce of women’s bodies, even when it belongs to a well-meaning documentarian rather than a pornographer.

There are several instances in which Louie appears to be standing alongside one of the latter, photographing women as they are being photographed, and one must acknowledge that the effect is essentially the same: an erotic body is an erotic body, in whatever context it appears.

Considering the youth and presumably low economic status of most of these women, it would be a shame to see this eroticism exploited in the name of art.

The most impressive thing about the work, therefore, is not that it piques one’s curiosity, but that it ultimately constructs such a nuanced and well-rounded portrayal.

Louie’s approach is neither sensational nor moralistic, neither judgmental nor voyeuristic. Rather, he treats his subjects as he would probably treat workers in any other industry.

In some images, the women are sexy, showy, alluring or playful; in others they’re bored or indifferent. In some, they’re entertaining men or giving massages (there is no explicit sexual activity), but in many others, they’re checking their beepers, eating takeout or just sitting around. In a large percentage of the pictures, in fact, they hardly look like sex workers.

There is certainly tragedy in this world--most of the women are shockingly young, for example--and Louie doesn’t attempt to elide it. Nor does he depersonalize that tragedy with sentimental propriety.

The selection of works included here is commendably balanced and manages to carry the significant complexity of the project despite the relatively small scale of the venue. Still, one can’t help but wonder about the hundreds of images that must have been cut in the selection process and the many more stories they contain.

Gallery Luisotti, 2525 Michigan Ave., A2, Santa Monica, (310) 453-0043, through July 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Paintings That Force Us to Examine Our Conscience

In a statement on his current body of work, Ruprecht von Kaufmann includes a quotation by German writer Martin Walser: “A dream that’s forced into the light of a different language will only reveal what we ask. Like a tortured man, it will say anything we want it to say. So does the past.”

The German-born, Art Center-trained Von Kaufmann tests Walser’s theory--challenging viewers to interrogate the past--in an unusual series of historical portraits that makes up about half of the exhibition. His subjects are notorious figures, all of whom are responsible for large quantities of death and destruction in the service of a political or religious ideal.

Among them are some of the usual suspects, such as Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot, as well as less familiar ones, like Jean Kambanda, the prime minister of Rwanda during the Hutu slaughter of Tutsi refugees in 1994, and Carl Clauberg, a Nazi gynecologist who spent much of WWII conducting gruesome experiments in concentration camps in search of “cheap and efficient” methods for mass sterilization.

Rather than granting these figures their standard historical regalia, however, Von Kaufmann portrays each in a particularly vulnerable (albeit imaginary) situation: in utero.

Each of these visually striking paintings is a diptych: on the left, a fetus floats in a painterly swirl of soft, eerily illuminated color; on the right, a portion of the fetus’ skeleton appears as a realistically rendered electric-blue X-ray. Laying commonly held notions of evil across the archetypal icon of innocence, then subjecting that icon to a pseudoscientific mode of examination, Von Kaufmann seems to be demanding from the past a new response--an explanation that more adequately accounts for the persistent phenomenon of atrocity--as well as challenging viewers to interrogate their own assumptions.

Also included in the exhibition are four large paintings depicting dozens of nude figures crammed closely together, as though in a subway car or other tight container, and pressed forward against the surface of the canvas, which Von Kaufmann has painted to resemble a wall of glass.

Very subtle reflections, masterfully conveyed across the paintings’ surfaces, suggest another world on our side of that wall, populated with faintly glimpsed onlookers much like us. Although somewhat less pointed than the smaller paintings--the people trapped in these works are nameless, their predicament enigmatic and our position ambiguous--they’re equally unsettling in their demands on our conscience.

Koplin Gallery, 464 N. Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 657-9843, through July 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Self-Portraits Reveal

the Mind’s Workings

Daniela Steinfeld’s photographs read like self-portraits turned inside out. Although photographically objective--each image is a straightforward, unaltered depiction of Steinfeld, posing in a plain, white-walled studio--the works present an array of subjective states enacted prosthetically on the surface of the body with only a few simple props.

In several, the German-based artist seems to be playing with a sort of barnyard fantasy--exploring that elemental longing to reject civilized behavior and live close to the ground. In one image, “Soulsafari” (2000), she wallows in a shallow crate of hay; in “Animal Shelter” (2000), she crouches under a cardboard box, her body hidden but for her feet, disguised in a pair of monster claw slippers.

In several other images, Steinfeld appears with lumpy, globular forms (made from foam-stuffed nylon stockings) bulging from various parts her body. Think of a hard-boiled egg that’s leaked slightly during the boiling process and acquired a bubbly growth of white along the crack in its shell: This is how Steinfeld’s body appears in these pictures, as though internal matter were oozing out and subsuming her external form.

The work--which seeks to blend aspects of photography, sculpture and performance--is very funny but also unnervingly intimate. The surreal creatures that Steinfeld has assembled here are like visitors from a dream world in which the contours of the flesh are not static but shift according to the dictates of one’s imagination. Though her face is hidden in every image, her body conveys the mind’s internal workings.

Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5363 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 933-2117, through June 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Nothing Complex

in These ‘Signs’

Charlie Bidwell’s first solo exhibition at Jan Kesner Gallery, “Signs and Signifiers,” is more forthright than one might expect from its rather academic-sounding title. The 10 works on display are indeed photographs of signs--cool, old metallic and neon signs, the rapidly disappearing remnants of roadside Americana. Bidwell has found interesting ones and made them into handsome photographs: large black-and-white prints that are sparely composed and elegant in tone. Each depicts a single sign viewed from street level and silhouetted against a smoothly gradated gray-to-black sky like some sort of linguistic constellation advertising from the heavens: “Norms,” “Gulf,” “Pure” or “Tropicana” (“Adult Hotel Hourly Room Rates”).

The meaning of the title’s “signifiers” is also plain enough--perhaps too much so. The work means to imply that these signs, though disembodied from their original referents (the motels, gas stations and restaurants they were intended to advertise), continue to convey an array of nostalgic associations in the mind of 21st century American viewers. This is true--indeed, the advertising industry depends on similar logic every day--but it’s not especially revealing, and one finds oneself longing for a little more conceptual reach.

Self-consciously patterned in the roving-American-observer tradition of Walker Evans and Ed Ruscha, this work succeeds in only half of the equation that gave their work potency: It’s smart on visual appeal but short on depth.

Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 938-6834, through June 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.