Creed’s work delivers a shock

Martin Creed’s shocking and absurd work puts a critic to the test. If the job of criticism, in a nutshell, is to mediate between art and audience, to insert an educated, impassioned voice into the mix, what happens in a case like this, in which learned response and instinctual reaction are so at odds with each other?

The intellectual and emotional poles of Creed’s work are miles apart. To contextualize the work and assess its merits based on its location within the realm of ideas is to suppress the visceral dismay it evokes. To favor the raw, physical reaction is to declare the work’s supporting scaffold of concepts a rickety mess. There is no middle ground. You either buy in or walk out.

Creed’s status exerts pressure toward staying and justifying. Creed, after all, is a big deal. Winner of the 2001 Turner Prize, which declared him the most significant British artist of the moment, he has been widely exhibited and acclaimed for the last decade.

There are five works in Creed’s show at MC, four of them skimpy but benign. One consists of having two dogs in the gallery during open hours. Another consists of six cacti in black plastic nursery containers, aligned in a row according to height. Creed specializes in framing the ordinary, calling attention to the invisibly mundane. (For his now infamous Turner Prize exhibition, he programmed the lights in a Tate Museum gallery to turn on and off at five-second intervals.)

Precedent for such gestures stretches back through Bruce Nauman to Marcel Duchamp. Artists have flooded through the door that Duchamp opened in his recognition of the primacy of the artistic act. These lazy, random gestures of Creed’s don’t violate any norms of art, those norms at present being unusually fluid and permissive. But in the final piece on view, the artist does some serious chipping away at taboos of privacy and personal decorum.

“Work No. 600” (all of Creed’s creations are untitled but numbered) is a short, single-channel video installation. A young woman enters from the right and stands, facing away from the camera, in neutral white space. She pulls her jeans down to her knees, squats and urinates. Then she defecates. She pauses, stands, pulls up her pants and saunters away. The image of her deposit remains for a while, then the loop repeats.

The title of Creed’s show is “Big Dogs.” One of the two live canines in the gallery, a soggy-jowled Irish wolfhound, is indeed large. The other is a skittish little Chihuahua. Perhaps the juxtaposition of the video and the pets is Creed’s way of leveling the playing field. He has the human actor eliminate as publicly as a dog while allowing the dogs the courtesy of off-site facilities. A tenuous conceit, at best. More likely, Creed is after the shock value of presenting a natural and ordinary bodily function in an unexpected setting. According to the gallery, this is the premiere of the first of 14 such films employing different actors. Also this year, Creed made a series of “Sick Films,” in which people vomit in a similar white studio space.

Creed’s presentation is deadpan but quietly sensationalistic. The Young British Artists of the ‘90s set the stage for this: bad boy Damien Hirst, with his formaldehyde-dunked animal specimens, and Tracey Emin, with her intensely autobiographical installation of her unmade bed strewn with used condoms and bloodstained underwear.

Creed started out as a painter, and painting still has a place within his work, but as the one unremarkable canvas and tediously self-indulgent series of marker drawings in the show attest, filming people’s private acts is a surer route to the headlines.

Creed, disingenuously, resists being labeled an artist, but he operates exclusively within the art establishment, which has built a cushy nest of jargon in which to rest his work. The film at MC could easily be read as an aggressive, contemptuous response to his absorption into the current pantheon -- mooning the experts (as well as the rest of us) times 10. In interviews, Creed is self-effacing and professes to being confused much of the time. But he’s smarter than he acts, and shrewder, for he’s figured out, through relatively cheap spectacle, how to exploit our own confusion about whether this work matters and why.

MC, 6086 Comey Ave., (323) 939-3777, through Sept. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.mckunst.com.

Suburbia through a booster’s lens

Bill Owens was working as a photographer for a local paper in the Northern California town of Livermore when he determined that the characters, landscape and lifestyle of suburbia were worth chronicling. He started his documentary project in 1970, and in 1973 “Suburbia” was published, 128 black-and-white photographs, most accompanied by brief snippets of text in the subjects’ own words. In 1999, the book was reissued with some new images as well as a handful of color pictures not seen before. MOCA’s Pacific Design Center show is drawn from a portfolio (in the museum’s collection) printed to coincide with the book’s reissue.

“Suburbia” is a visual time capsule. The informational value will probably increase over time, but so will awareness of the glaring absence of critical perspective. Owens’ take on suburban life has a boosterish quality that reads as both endearing and ironic, though irony was not his intent.

Suburbs swelled to unprecedented size in the decades after World War II. Optimism for a better life enticed families to the city fringes, and self-satisfaction anchored them there. The men and women in Owens’ photographs fairly gloat over their material comfort and familial unity. Only a tiny proportion of the pictures scrapes beneath the surface of homogenized happiness to examine private doubts, whether about the racial uniformity of suburbia or the pettiness of household chores in light of casualty reports from Vietnam.

A few of Owens’ photographs have become icons of the era -- the one of the couple expressing their glee as they feed their baby in their model, spacious kitchen; another of a toddler vigilante cruising the neighborhood in his plastic Big Wheel, rifle at the ready. What may look reassuring or amusing in these scenes is also, to more cynical eyes, downright frightening.

Museum of Contemporary Art -- Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (213) 626-6222, through Oct. 15. Closed Mondays. www.moca.org.

Merging styles with intensity

“Amalgam” is the name of Kent Williams’ show at Merry Karnowsky, the title of one of the paintings in it and an apt term to describe the artist’s syncretic style. An instructor at Art Center College of Design, and before that at CalArts, Williams has a well-skilled hand and a roving, hungry eye. He paints with compelling intensity and theatricality, even when overreaching.

In the title painting, a nude man sits with arms upraised behind his head, as if held captive. A thick snake vanishes into his chest. A trio of dopey cats rendered in Japanese comic-book style hangs out along the bottom edge of the panel, while a human couple above appears lifted from a Japanese woodblock print. Faint figures haunt the margins, along with vaguely scrawled words.

Williams sets the figure in shallow, stage-like space and immerses his lower body in a dense wash of blood-red paint. As in many of these recent works, the narrative remains ambiguous, but undercurrents of violence, power and sexuality run strong.

A large selection of drawings, many of them preparatory to the paintings, shows Williams’ debt to Egon Schiele. The images of single figures, some in slightly contorted poses, carry an erotic charge, their firmly incised lines taut with energy.

Williams’ show also features a lush, diaphanous landscape, built up in oil, encaustic and resin, and several portraits where character, refreshingly, provides its own drama and mystery, without the need for cloying special effects.

Merry Karnowsky Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 933-4408, through Sept. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.mkgallery.com

Photos capture universality

In Edouard Boubat’s career-launching 1946 photograph, a girl stands in a clearing in the Luxembourg Gardens. Waif or sprite, she seems to have emerged from the woods beyond; dead, curling leaves cling to and merge with her clothing.

The poignant picture made it into the legendary “Family of Man” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art a decade later. By then, Boubat (1923-99) was well established within the stable of postwar French photojournalists working in the wake of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Most, Boubat included, practiced a Family of Man sensibility, delivering glimpse after glimpse of evidence of humanity’s universality.

Fourteen of Boubat’s pictures (including a later print of the girl with leaves) are hanging at Duncan Miller, paired with an equal number by his lesser-known contemporary Jean-Philippe Charbonnier (1921-2004). Both distill the prose of everyday life into poetic fragments, sometimes sentimental and romantic, other times rich with the texture of foreign cultures. Boubat’s pensive 1947 portrait of “Lella, Paris” is a standout, as is Charbonnier’s framing of the lively choreography of divers at a pool in Arles. A different edit would reveal different -- and in some cases more striking -- facets of each man’s work, but this grouping still generates plenty of humanistic warmth.

Duncan Miller Gallery, 10959 Venice Blvd., (310) 838-2440, through Sept. 30. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. www.duncanmillergallery.com.