ART REVIEWS : Visions of the Body as Erotic Provocation

Andre Breton, the father of Surrealism, did not shock easily. Yet, even as stubborn a champion of moral and aesthetic vertigo as Breton found Hans Bellmer’s work to be perverse--and even alarmingly pedophilic.

At Jan Turner Gallery, a fascinating show of Bellmer’s drawings, paintings, sculpture and photographs from the 1930s through the 1960s suggests that Breton was as clear-eyed and as short-sighted as usual. However perverse the German artist’s work indeed was, it was also deeply engaged with issues beyond Surrealism’s stylized titillations.

For Bellmer, the twisted, truncated, tortured body was first an erotic provocation. It was last a microcosm of the twisted, truncated and tortured body-politic.

In 1933, the year the Nazi Party came to power, Bellmer created and photographed the first of his “Dolls.” A hollow wooden torso and head, two jointed legs and a jointed arm made out of broom handles, nuts and bolts, the doll could be rotated, fractured and permutated at will--the sadist’s dream-body, sum of disembodied parts, site of infinitely reversible libidinal fantasies.

A second doll was photographed in 1936-37 and later published as a book, “The Games of the Doll,” with a suite of poems by Paul Eluard. On view is one of the original 1949 books, and several exquisite, hand-colored images.

These comprise a catalogue of fetishistic mises-en-scene: the doll dismembered and strung up in a tree; cowering in a stairwell, bathed in lurid, pink light; heaped in a chair, hiding behind a blond wig; sprawled across an unmade bed, a pair of unclad, female legs extending from one end of the stomach, a pair of trouser clad male legs dangling from the other.

The female merges with the male, the self meets the other, the figure becomes one with the shadow. This image recurs in a number of paintings and drawings.

In a 1950 painting, two nudes are fused at the head like a pair of cephalopods, one in bare feet, the other in stilettos. In an untitled 1963 etching, it is impossible to distinguish one body from another, or even one organ from another; feet, breasts, hands and buttocks dissolve into an endless series of interlocking curves, a self-sustaining desiring-machine.

Whose desire is being enacted? Whose is being sustained? These questions continue to resonate, especially today, a moment marked by the re-emergence of art engaged with the politics, pragmatics and pleasures of the body.

Featured along with Bellmer’s art is a small group of more contemporary works said to represent his legacy. Though images by Francis Bacon, Frederick Sommer and Bruce Nauman are rather oblique choices, Cindy Sherman’s latest photographs of scrambled grotesques pieced together from disjointed mannequin parts from a medical supply house are indeed unimaginable without Bellmer’s example.

* Jan Turner Gallery, 9006 Melrose Ave., (310) 271-4453, through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Dreamy: Jim Shaw has been dreaming about a man in a loincloth and with bulging muscles fighting with menacing tree roots; a horse running behind Billy Dee Williams in a derelict hotel lobby; a robot dressed as a college freshman; Ursula Andress tied to a primitive, sacrificial altar; an effeminate, mustachioed prisoner talking to Jackie Gleason in a jail cell. Maybe.

Dreams are funny things. Only the dreamer knows if he or she really dreamed them. And even the dreamer can’t tell what--or if--they mean.

Writing them down is a start. Shaw writes his down in pencil, in neat lines, each tale accompanied by a beautifully precise drawing of something that is absolutely irrelevant: a larvae group, a cluster of Brach’s nougat candies, a brain with cysts, a chair and ottoman.

We fall all over ourselves to analyze these dream-images at Linda Cathcart Gallery.

Psychoanalyzing artists is always a great temptation. We tend to latch onto them and suck their very blood dry.

Shaw makes such theft a non-issue. He gives his dreams away. But are they his? By the time you get to No. 16 of 43, the game is up.

“A young man of indeterminate age, race and gender is talking to a large, African-American woman about his (?) allergies and troubled family history. . . . He walks backward and compares himself to Jesus and turns into a werewolf. News anchors interview his parents, skin specialists, and the large woman and talk about his changing appearance.”

Why, it’s Michael Jackson’s epochal interview with Oprah Winfrey!

Shaw’s dreams are, in fact, not dreams, but descriptions of things the artist saw on television. Not only has TV cannibalized our imagination, it’s cannibalized our art. You only get this work if you watch TV--and the more you watch, the more you get it.

* Linda Cathcart Gallery, 1643 12th St., Santa Monica, (310) 392-8578; through May 29. Open Thursdays through Sundays.

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Breaking Rules: Oil and water don’t mix. Caren Furbeyre doesn’t care. She makes sculpture out of both.

Sculpture and painting don’t mix. Furbeyre is uninterested. In the inaugural exhibition at Mark Moore Gallery--her solo debut--her sculpture plays by painting’s rules, then breaks them to indulge her own pleasure in looking.

Here, looking doesn’t mean looking at. It means looking across a chain of glasses filled with equal parts colored water and oil, and seeing the spectrum splinter into a thousand intermediary hues. Or, looking down a liquid-filled, acrylic column, only to find another column inside it, and a third inside that, the lines of demarcation multiplying, then disappearing. Or, looking into a vat in which three glass plates slice through the layers of oil and water, their formless contours interpenetrating one another like the rings circling Saturn.

In Op Art, colors shift, lines are distorted, space oscillates, forms converge, depth segues into depthlessness. Furbeyre reclaims that debased style, and moves it into three dimensions. With its see-through acrylic drums, space-age colors and vision-bending effects, the work indeed plays into a taste for all things retro. It seems like a ‘60s vision of art in the year 2000.

But Furbeyre is too canny to let things hang on nostalgia. More than memories of a future long past, there is the broader question of perception, and an exploration of the ways in which the mind races ahead of the eye, and the body races to catch up. It is an auspicious debut.

* Mark Moore Gallery, 2032 - A Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453 3031 , through May 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Arresting Images: With the historic 1967 “New Documents” show, Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski crowned Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander heirs to the Walker Evans/Robert Frank throne of street photography.

If the voracious Winogrand and the macabre Arbus went on to greater glory, it was only because Friedlander was more difficult to peg--part wiseacre and part Surrealist, prone to matter-of-fact statements and ambiguous angles, hypnotized by a vision of the world as kaleidoscope of conflicting signs and galvanized by a sense of the world as deadpan joke.

Currently on view at Paul Kopeikin Gallery is a not-to-be-missed collection of some of Friedlander’s most arresting images--the early jazz photographs, the shop windows of the mid-to-late ‘60s, the public monuments of the 1970s. The best come from a series of self-portraits made during the first 10 years of his career--street shots in which Friedlander’s reflection or shadow intrudes into the frame.

These superb photographs remind us that before self-reflexivity could become an artistic cliche, somebody had to make it an art.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 170 S. La Brea, (213) 937-0765 , through July 3. Closed Sundays and Mondays.