THE Magazine - Los Angeles

There is unintentional irony in both the title and installation of Franz West's West Coast debut retrospective. Despite the large selection of works in many media from 1972 until 2008, this show, in its sterile superficiality, lacks the structure necessary for a true appreciation of the Austrian artist, whose primary contribution to the cultural scene has been to thumb his nose simultaneously at both the conservative, consumer-oriented art establishment and the flagrant provocateurs and poseurs reacting to it.

Coming of age in the wake of the taboo-breaking Viennese Actionists, West found that he could "either be depressed or make a joke out of it." Deciding on the latter, he launched into a mischievous critique of life, using junk-mail advertisements as raw material for his explicit yet lighthearted scatological and sexual imagery. With sausages as stand-ins for phalluses and slabs of raw meat symbolizing gluttony and lust, West's collages poke fun at the angst-ridden Actionists, who made the functions of the human body the stuff of Freudian nightmares and social protest. A Viennese version of arte povera, West's "Refreshers" are nothing more than papier-mâché-covered liquor bottles attesting to the artist's hard-living hedonism, while his signature biomorphic wire and papier-mâché "Adaptives" challenge the self-important, noli-me-tangere attitudes that render art sacred. They invite the viewer to abandon all inhibition and wantonly handle them (often in mirror-lined cabins, reminiscent of those in Vienna's red-light district). In his awkwardly elegant furniture, West deliberately blurs the distinction between form and function, comfort and discomfort, attraction and repulsion.

Crowded into extremely small galleries with low ceilings, hospital-like floors, and fiercely protective security guards, the works have little chance to fulfill the artist's intention for the viewer/co-participant: "sitting in the art consuming life." West's compelling epicurean existentialism, proffered in a poignant spirit of collaboration, is effectively annihilated by a distancing, didactic presentation that merely acknowledges the artist's prolific output as well as his attainment of international acclaim. One could call it the taming of the wild West . . .

This exhibition ambushes unsuspecting museumgoers with full-throttled moments of terror and seduction to the point of redeeming every profane remark ever lodged against the medium. Here's a thought: gut the newly finished Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) and permanently display all 3,500 prints that Marjorie and Leonard Vernon spent the last thirty years harvesting from the prosaic millions they tirelessly swam through. It's not that everything currently at the BCAM is deserving of a fire sale (circle the wagons around the Rauschenbergs and Lichtensteins); the fact of the matter is that unparalleled photography collections like this one demand to see the light of day, every day, for as long as silver holds to paper and viewers who crave inexplicable imagery care to stand before them. Obviously intrepid swimmers (six days at Art 40 Basel, anyone?), the Vernons seemed not only blessed with rare endurance that discriminate collecting demands but with an uncanny and enviable instinct for locating the unimpeachable image again and again.

Take Joseph Sudek's White Flask and Egg, circa 1950. This is a deceptively simple still life from the Czech master that the uninitiated viewer might dismiss as just another hackneyed version of the everyday-objects-on-a-table formula that somehow still persists in leading would-be artists down the road to affected sublimation. But take another look. The magic's in what's not there, or in what only insinuates: if the pitcher and egg are the figure/ground equation, then the accompanying "sky" above and behind weave a chilling tale of horror, an emergent haunting that threatens to relocate these modest artifacts to some dark otherworld where all domestic civility is to be unmasked, revealing true terror's howling face. Robert Howlett's Brunel aboard the Aphrodite, Liverpool 1857, is steeped in biographical tragedy (Howlett died at the tender age of twenty-seven, a victim of the early and highly toxic darkroom chemistry), this equally unassuming photograph of the famous ship builder I.K. Brunel and unidentified companions who stand casually on the Aphrodite's deck pitches suddenly forward into the viewer's calm sanity. If you were looking for a well-behaved, nautical-themed historical photograph that gently sails the captain's mantel, look again as a ghastly chill drains inexorably into your psyche.

But the Vernons also shopped for those explicit aphrodisiacs: Edward Weston's Nude on Dunes -- Oceano, 1936 transfigures erotic yearning into a cosmic Rock of Gibraltar, via Weston's wife's (Charis) well-anchored left buttock. Here sand becomes proxy to immense galactic tides that ripple symbiotically around the persistent female body, which in turn answers these grainy currents with allocations of anthropomorphic meaning and carnal substance. Near the gallery entrance, Zaclona by Frantisek Drtikol relocates the unguarded female to interior studio theatricality; a patterned, shear curtain never hung with such unambiguous sexual desire, with such wanton invitation. It feels like Leonard and Marjorie had a healthy marriage.

Sadly, only seventy-five black-and-white prints from this powerhouse collection are currently available for viewing. How Charlotte Cotton, the Museum's photography curator, and her assistant, Eve Schillo, ever managed to chop 3,500 immeasurable photographs down to a scant seventy-five is testament either to their surgical skill or their masochistic desire to reenact Sophie's Choice. For now, make the pilgrimage to the downstairs level of the Ahmanson Building where Tony Smith's equally unimpeachable sculpture Smoke stands guard just outside the show's entrance: a towering black sentinel whose geometric musings on the infinite share a certain time/space distortion, a Twilight Zone warping, with her interim Vernon companions.

This exhibition, commissioned by Dia and curated by Lynne Cooke, marks the West Coast premier of Belgian artist Francis Alÿs's more than three hundred portraits of the Christian Saint Fabiola -- all of them copies of a famed lost original. While most of the portraits are paintings, several versions in needlepoint, wood relief, and other materials will be included. Born in Belgium in 1959 and originally trained as an architect, Francis Alÿs first turned to a visual-arts-based practice in the early 1990s as a more immediate, direct, and effective way of exploring issues related to urbanization. Over the past two decades, hehasassembled a significant collection of nearly identical paintings and other depictions of fourth-century Saint Fabiola, all of them based on a renowned portrait rendered by nineteenth-century, French academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner. This much-venerated image has been so assiduously copied by amateurs and professionals alike that it has become a popular icon, a phenomenon that, as the artist states, "indicates a different criterion of what a masterwork could be." Gathered from flea markets, antique shops, and private collections throughout Europe and the Americas, Alÿs's collection offers a window onto aesthetic, sociological, and theological values over the past century. Alÿs's collection was first installed at the Hispanic Society of America's Beaux-Arts facility in Manhattan from September 2007 to April 2008. The current coordinating curator at LACMA is J. Patrice Marandel. The exhibition will be accompanied by a hardcover book that will include background material on Saint Fabiola as well as essays by art historians, theological historians, and Dia curator Lynne Cooke. The publication will also catalog each Fabiola, including detailed descriptions and photographs, many of them reproduced in full color.

We begin our brief survey of Philip-Lorca diCorcia's LACMA retrospective with Head #23, a photograph that startles and seduces in a very classical, very film-noir way. The photo makes me fall in love with this young girl, yet I am also afraid for her. I want to tell her about Gary Winogrand and how he was always falling in love, thru his camera, with women in the urban streets.

All photography, but especially street reportage-type photography, is predatory in nature. The photographer rarely takes responsibility for this intrusion, for this addiction, by way of maintaining a miraculous empathy for the subject. (Mexican photojournalist Enrique Metinides endlessly documents disaster/murder/catastrophe scenes, but in them you will also discover a profound humanity -- previously thought extinct -- ringing throughout). Where Winogrand is a humanitarian, diCorcia is not, so that a conspicuous lack of humanity, a vague and insidious imperative, and a dark urge grows with every contemporary photography-considered minute.

This leads us to the Lucky 13 series, where naked and semi-naked pole dancers perform in an otherwise empty club (diCorcia needs his privacy, you see). Ironically, the photographs are not sexual. There is a shocking disaffection for these nightclub sirens that would make Jim Morrison roll over in his grave. The photographer treats these lost angels the way Bernd and Hilla Becher treated industrial architecture. DiCorcia lacks real interest in these strippers because they have nothing to show him, nothing to hide. The same is true of diCorcia's series Hustlers. It's a Larry Clark voyeur routine, but diCorcia is unable to really penetrate into his male prostitutes' characters the way Clark did and continues to do. Yes, diCorcia offers dramatic treatments of these tragic, wayward youths through sexy lighting and considered compositions, but there is nothing more to these emblems (human figures, lighting, scenery) than their staging.