Hints of a dark time in timeless aesthetics

That the career of German photographer and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl should have survived, however tenuously, the infamy of her involvement with Hitler’s ministry of propaganda says a great deal about both the tenacity of her personality and the potency of her images. Now 101 and apparently still working, she remains one of the most genuinely controversial artists of the 20th century -- as undeniably significant as her morals are questionable.

The exhibition of a vintage portfolio of Riefenstahl’s photographs at Griffin Contemporary, part of the L.A. International Biennial, offers a rare opportunity to view her work as it was intended to be distributed and evaluate the controversy for yourself. Released in 1937 and apparently never before exhibited in the United States, the portfolio contains 94 images documenting the previous year’s Olympic Games in Berlin, made simultaneously with Riefenstahl’s well-known film “Olympia” (released in 1938).

The tone of the work is fairly familiar, with images focusing primarily on the athletes -- alone and in teams, in motion and at rest, in triumph and defeat -- and emphasizing values more or less identical to those embodied in the Olympic profiles of today. Beneath this agreeable veneer, however, lurk hints of a darker agenda.

There are, for example, few nonwhites represented, save several Chinese and Japanese athletes. There are numerous shots devoted to the characteristically fascist spectacle of mass order (hundreds of men in identical white trunks, for example, doing push-ups in long, even rows). Many pointedly exalt the pale, chiseled, classical physique that became the Nazi ideal.

There is also the swastika, an icon that floats through the images like some deadly insect believed at the time to be innocuous. In one of the most haunting photographs, it rests on the chest of a young, dark-haired and decidedly non-Aryan-looking man on the German relay team. Frozen in a vague gesture of affection toward his two teammates -- perhaps they’ve just won -- his face is illuminated with a grin so open and honest, so beautifully human and so ignorant of all that is to come, that it’s downright difficult to take in.

To the extent that it’s possible to look beyond these undertones, the sheer aesthetic magnificence of the pictures is difficult to deny. Each is a gem unto itself -- masterfully composed, perfectly balanced in tone and full of drama. Assembled together here in compact rows and grids, they become a veritable symphony of form.

Whether capturing action (as in a spectacular image of Gisela Mauermayer, German gold medalist in the discus, silhouetted mid-throw against the sky), emotion (the Dutch swimmer Hendrika Mastenbroek weeping for joy after winning her third of four gold medals that year) or ceremony (the marathon champion Kitei Son, from Japanese-occupied Korea, proudly crowned in laurels), she hits the mark with extraordinary precision every time. In the end it would be unwise, if not impossible, to separate out these two aspects of Riefenstahl’s early work -- the exquisite aesthetics and the fascist ideology.

Far more productive would be to appreciate the intrinsic compatibility of the two, to understand how exciting images can be so useful to the operation of social control. Considering the number of such images generated in our own country every day, the question is one of continued relevance.

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Griffin Contemporary, 55 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 578-2280, through Aug. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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So much in a simple request

“Where We Come From,” Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s exhibition at Frumkin Duval Gallery -- her California debut, as part of the L.A. International Biennial -- began with a simple question, posed to several dozen fellow Palestinians across the globe: “If I could do something for you anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?”

With an American passport, she was uniquely qualified to make such a proposition. Born in 1970 to exiled parents, raised in various places around the world and currently living between New York and the West Bank city of Ramallah, she came to the project with the conviction of personal experience and carried it out with a heartfelt fervor.

Each undertaking is represented in the show by a text panel, which states the request in the recipient’s own words as well as the name, birthplace and residence of that recipient, the nationality on his or her passport and the birthplace of his or her parents. The information begins to outline the fractured, far-flung state of the Palestinian people as a whole.

The majority of works also include an unassuming snapshot referring to some aspect of the request, which serves to ground the event in a sense of physical reality. Humble in demeanor, the project is also remarkably shrewd. It fuses humanitarian and artistic impulses into one persuasive conceptual scheme.

Most requests are not dramatic or even political but rather heartbreakingly simple: pick oranges from a family’s orchard in Jericho; go to a particular sweet shop in Jerusalem; go on a date with a girl whom a Beit Jalla man has only spoken to on the phone; “spend a day enjoying Jerusalem freely.” In revealing desires that are so familiar, so basic, the requests illuminate with alarming precision the manner in which lines of political demarcation have been drawn by the Israeli occupation: not on maps, but through families, between homes and across bodies.

Frumkin Duval Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310)453-1850, through Aug. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Between abstract and the visceral

With their streamlined forms and immaculately polished surfaces, the sculptures of Brazilian artist Edgard de Souza, now at L.A. Louver Gallery for the International Biennial, appear at a glance to belong to that hyper-slick class of abstraction one appreciates with a detached eye and is likely to quickly forget. After a moment or two of contemplation, however, it becomes clear that the work is in fact almost embarrassingly visceral.

A pearly, tear-shaped sphere suggests sexual fluids. A vaguely ovary-like form covered in smooth black leather points toward some dark cavern of femininity. A stainless steel, horseshoe-shaped ring connecting two other forms calls to mind all the bodily locations in which it’s possible to plant a piercing.

Photographs hung alongside the sculptures offers a revealing glimpse into the origin of their forms. In each, a male figure crouches on a platform, his head consumed by a hole in the floor and his body contorted into a variety of positions. The motif is repeated in a bronze sculpture on the second floor, which -- figural but stylized -- functions as a bridge between the body and its abstract variations. The show is an exemplary exercise in refinement. With only a few materials (bronze, wood, acrylic, leather) and a slender spectrum of color (white, pearl, cream and near-black), De Souza exacts a stirring sensuality.

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Aug. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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The passing of time in Munich

Joachim Brohm’s “Areal” is a 10-year, 300-image project documenting the shift of a 23-acre site in northern Munich from ragged industrial zone to well-mannered urban development. A portion of the series, which has never been exhibited outside of Europe, is now on display at Gallery Luisotti for the L.A. International Biennial. Though decidedly unsentimental, the photographs convey a scrupulous familiarity with the area and, like much contemporary German photography, a rapt attention to the dynamics of architecture and space.

The images tend to hinge upon phases of mobility or transition, but the pace feels glacial. Some buildings are perpetually going up, some crumbling endlessly into decline. Cars and trucks seem parked indefinitely. Even the rare human being, whether on foot or bicycle, looks as if he is suspended in time.

With only a fraction of the entire series on display (16 photographs in all, plus two from another series), it is difficult to fully appreciate the chronological arc encompassed by the project and the nuances of Brohm’s attention to it. Instead, the show leaves one longing for a full tour.

Gallery Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310)453-0043, through Aug. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.