LOS ANGELES—Our correspondent in Southern California takes us through some of the best museum and gallery exhibitions on view in Los Angeles this month, including a major feminist art show at MOCA, a gathering of the beautiful drawings of Vija Celmins, and an exhibition about one man’s crusade to improve the conditions of a sycamore tree.

MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

Hammer Museum
“Vija Celmins: A Drawings Retrospective”
Through April 22, 2007

The Hammer Museum is the only American venue for this major traveling exhibition of Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins’ drawings, spanning the artist’s output from the mid-1960s to the present. The full sweep of her major artistic subjects and concerns are present, including exquisite lunar, desert, ocean and cloudscapes, spider webs and starry skies, rendered with the grainy, immediate photorealism that is her trademark style. These are drawings of photographs, and Celmins never lets you forget it.

The works on display subvert the viewer’s expectations. One looks like a black-and-white halftone photo of bombed Hiroshima, torn from a magazine. On closer inspection, it proves to be a meticulously rendered drawing. The “photo” bears creases, creating the impression that it was kept in a drawer or pocket for some time, imbuing it with a mysterious history of its own. The viewer is made acutely aware that they stand at several removes from the subject, with intervening layers of representation and time creating a distance that makes the subject almost abstract.

Celmins takes the abstraction further with her seascapes. Multiple drawings of the same small, photographed piece of ocean yield different moods and emotions. Yet, when viewed more closely, they begin to resemble Japanese watercolors and then, at the shortest distances, sublime charcoal gestures. Again, we are drawn in by what seems photographic, only to be ultimately seduced by mastery of the medium and a persistent reminder that what we are seeing isn’t “real.”

Celmins’s brilliance isn’t merely a function of technique or skill; rather, it lies in the way she makes us question the nature of representation by showing us those things we consider most familiar in entirely unexpected ways.

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Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
“WACK! Art and the Feminism Revolution”
Through July 16, 2007

This multi-artist show at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary bills itself as “the first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art.” It focuses on the period from 1965 to 1980 and features 450 works of 119 artists in a wide range of media, from photography to painting to sculpture to performance art.

While the breadth of the exhibition is impressive, the paucity of annotation or context—aside from a loose arrangement by theme (“Body as Medium,” “Labor,” “Gender Performance”)—is a hindrance to those not intimately familiar with the personalities and issues. This is a shame considering the important roles some of the displayed works played in shaking up attitudes and challenging preconceptions. In many cases, viewers are left scratching their heads before some decontextualized piece of agitprop, not really understanding the full story behind its creation.

Thankfully, some exhibits are arranged or named in such a way as to be self-explanatory, as in the case of Mary Kelly’s series of works Post-Partum Document, which includes painstaking analysis of her baby’s fecal stains and attempts to decipher its babblings using linguistic theory, and Ana Mendieta’s shocking photo Untitled (Rape Scene).

This is an important exhibition, but if you’re unfamiliar with the political and social context of the works, it may leave you cold. If you’re serious about finding out more about the artists and the era, consider investing in the accompanying catalog ($59.95).

GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

Susanne Vielmetter (Los Angeles Projects)
“Joel Tauber: Sick-Amour”
Through April 28, 2007

Most people use the term “tree hugger” in the metaphorical sense, but when it comes to Joel Tauber, the phrase takes a very real form. In a yearlong project, Tauber devoted himself to a lonely sycamore tree stuck in the middle of parking lot K at the Pasadena Rose Bowl.