“Out-of- . . . . . . . . . ”

MICHAEL BENEVENTO
7578 & 7556 Sunset Boulevard
January 18–February 25

View of “Out-of- . . . . . . . . . ,” 2012.

In a midnight-blue room at the back of this gallery hangs a lonesome work (Untitled [XIX L], 2007) by James Turrell: a small reflective hologram of two polygons, joined along one edge, though both are never visible at once. Light from the doorway bounces off the piece and casts a trapezoid onto the floor, which is flecked with glitter. “Out-of- . . . . . . . . . ,” curated by Leila Khastoo, is so multifaceted, so compressed, that even in this inner sanctum, the eye darts between dozens of glinting surfaces.

Crammed facing the entrance are fifteen monitors of various sizes, fed by tangles of cables. The ceiling has been lowered to around seven feet with black WeedBlock fabric. This aggressive display further fractures one’s distracted attention. The videos themselves deal with legacy (Francesco Vezzoli’s The Return of Bruce Nauman’s Bouncing Balls, 2006, for example, which presents a view of shaved testicles jostling above a snowcapped mountain); distance from history (Kerry Tribe’s casting call for actors to play her own family in an experimental documentary); appropriation (an Oliver Laric video of slow-motion stock footage); and artistic process (Packing Fountain, 1996, by Simon Leung, in which an art handler crates Duchamp’s fountain in real time). Yet the setup layers these more or less subtle meditations into a frantic, Internet-style jumble of associative overlap, itself foregrounding the push-pull of time, or the difficulty of attention to time. Leung’s video is angled toward a mirror on the wall in yet another level of reflexivity in a room crowded with deflections. The running commentary of A Video Portrait: Chris Burden, 1989, often overpowers the other audio.

The second half of the room contains just three large photos, each on its own wall and lit by assorted lamps. Zoe Leonard’s black-and-white prints of a mortared-over window (Wall, 2002) and cinder-blocked door (Untitled, 2000/2003) contrast with David Gilbert’s The Flea Circus, 2011, which depicts a messy artist’s studio. These images yield some floor space, but remain visually confining. The false ceiling stops as one enters the back room with Turrell’s piece, which, far from being meditative or phenomenologically musing in the way one might expect, now feels positively schizophrenic. As one exits the gallery, back through the crush of plinths and equipment, the black backs of the monitors seem almost serene.

— Travis Diehl

Brian Bress

CHERRY AND MARTIN
2712 S. La Cienega Boulevard
January 7–February 25

Brian Bress, Cowboy (Brian led by Peter Kirby), 2012, color video, high definition monitor and player, wall mount, frame, 28 x 22 3/4 x 4”.

Slowed to near stillness, the eight video portraits on view in Brian Bress’s latest exhibition, “Under Performing,” show their subjects in various states of physical duress. In Beadman (Parker), 2012, a figure decked in thousands of tiny wooden beads jumps on a trampoline. While his colorful getup suggests a clownish whimsy, his leaden hops betray the tremendous burden of his weighty wardrobe. Janus (Max), 2012, shows a two-faced figure rotating before a lakeside scene; he wears a bodysuit and mask painted to match the brushstrokes and color of the background. Though he sits quietly, trying to merge with his surroundings, the sitter continually trembles—and thus bodily reaction causes efforts to fuse with aesthetics to go in vain. Further exploiting the tension between three-dimensional bodies and two-dimensional portraiture is Fancy Dress Ball (Brian), 2012, which features a performer amid a shifting ground that looks part Lichtenstein abstraction and part Art Deco ceramic motifs, trying to contort his camouflaged limbs to blend in.

These are performances that, as the show’s title indicates, are meant to fall short—all are acts that are impossible to complete or sustain for very long. Sometimes the roles imperil the actor more dramatically, as with Cowboy (Brian led by Peter Kirby), 2012, where the artist, dressed in a cartoonish foam cowboy suit, unsuccessfully attempts to draw various figures on a glass plane. His misplaced scribblings show how the thick, airless suit has also blinded him.

In Creative Ideas for Every Season, 2010, an offbeat road movie, a cardboard car passes through a desolate collaged landscape. The driver, speaking in words appropriated from Agnes Martin, considers with her puppet passengers the impulse that precedes any artistic production, before the assignation of failure or success. Like the astronaut in Bress’s Status Report, 2009, currently on view at the New Museum, she presses along the endless, video-looped road. “We do not ever stop,” she says, “because there’s no way to stop.”

— Genevieve Yue

Emilie Halpern

PEPIN MOORE
933 Chung King Road
January 14–February 18

Emilie Halpern, Mysticeti, 2012, silver gelatin print, 26 1/2 x 39 1/2”.

The key to Emilie Halpern’s second solo exhibition at this gallery turns upon the relationship of what one encounters on the floor to that on the walls. On the floors of two separate downstairs rooms lie two entirely irregular objects: on one side, a smattering of twenty-nine empty emu eggs, some of which have been smashed, and on the other, a large puddle containing four liters of ocean water, freshly poured each morning. The presence of these thoroughly corporeal materials—the one invoking Halpern’s own recent experience with pregnancy, the other the measure of water required to fill human lungs––brings physical traction to to the artist’s larger body of work on show.

Like many emerging artists in the tradition of Conceptualism, Halpern works with a combination of sculpture and photography. Her elegant sculptures include understated objects such as Lightning Rod, 2012, a slender, thoroughly oxidized shaft, and non-objects such as Octopus, 2012, three inch-wide holes cut in a straight line through a door, a half-wall, and then a window, receding from front to back of the gallery. Her photographs are similarly restrained. Solar Delay, 2012, for instance, is a “white” silver gelatin print created by exposing the negative to eight minutes of sunlight, and Mysticeti, 2012, is an expansive, horizontal seascape interrupted only by a faint spray of water erupting at an indeterminate distance.

Such works flirt with the insular universes called forth in their formal correspondence with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s still seascapes or even Joseph Beuys’s rugged Blitzschlag mit Lichtschein auf Hirsch (Lightning with Stag in Its Glare), 1958–85. But Halpern’s work does not seek to inhabit or fashion its own inner worlds, whether meditative or social, respectively. As evinced by the very range of her stoic vertical works and more affective horizontal ones on the gallery floor, Halpern’s art nestles into the productive fissures between experience and imagination, unfixing object and viewer alike in the matrix between life and death.

— James Nisbet

David von Schlegell

CHINA ART OBJECTS
6086 Comey Ave
January 7–February 4

View of “David von Schlegell,” 2012.

Though David von Schlegell is better known (to those who know) for his numerous large-scale public sculptures of the 1970s and ’80s sited in the urban and natural landscape, the Park Place Gallery–adjacent artist was also a painter of considerable consequence and enduring vision. Beyond a selection of drawings, models, and maquettes related to his sculptural practice, this exhibition presents a rare opportunity to view von Schlegell’s late series of four-foot-square monochromes from the early 1990s. Poured over with a wash, each panel is a gradient field of darkly pooled pigment with a concentrated opacity that simulates surprising depth. Space recedes elusively along the work’s internal diagonal axis, suggesting the perspective of rectilinear architectures even as subtle modulations of tone and ghostly trails of pigment on the matte surface project some other, more ethereal and cosmic sense of liquid or gaseous space occasionally pocked with specks of dust like streaking meteors and galactic clusters. Von Schlegell used paint for its fluid chemical possibilities in a way that anticipated the now very contemporary look of abstract Color Field photography.

Four smaller and denser monochromes emanate a restrained radiance that proves even more gripping for the works’ intimacy. Bookended by vertical bars of wood, these more domestic objects contain an aged warmth and worn craft that ties them to a previous utopian moment in which the converging proximities of modernism and Minimalism determined von Schlegell’s formative historical context and pinned ideological stakes to each of his aesthetic constructions.

— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer