ART REVIEWS : Teasing Sample Shows Beuys’ Influence on Trockel

Like nearly every German artist of the past 20 years, Cologne-based Rosemarie Trockel is very much a child of Joseph Beuys. The subject of an exhibition at the Stuart Regen Gallery in West Hollywood, Trockel is frequently described as feminist, largely because she executed a series of knitted “paintings” (knitting, of course, is widely regarded as women’s work). She’s also made art involving kitchen utensils, perfume bottles and haircuts, so it’s easy to pigeonhole her as feminist.

In fact, the thematic content of her work stretches far beyond issues of gender and has clear links with the late Beuys. That connection can be seen in the overtly political nature of Trockel’s art--she often refers to recent German history in her work, and has said of her knitwear art, “we must understand fashion not only as an adornment of the body, but as acting for the body of society.”

Citing “love and grief” as the most important creative resources for her, she is further like Beuys in the poetic view she takes of her subject matter, as well as in the wide net she casts when it comes to materials and technique. Trockel is one of those artists who reinvent the wheel every time they go to bat, and the subject of each of her pieces dictates materials and how she handles them.

This Conceptualist approach has led her into drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, Duchampian ready-mades, and Appropriationist simulations. Regardless of the materials she works with, Trockel returns repeatedly to the issues of the function and controls of social systems, codes of behavior and sexual identity.

Presently the subject of a retrospective at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, Trockel continues to be best known for her knit pieces featuring serial imagery of Playboy bunnies, product logos, swastikas, and hammers and sickles, despite the fact that she stopped making them a few years ago.

She revives the style here with a series of new knit works based on Rorschach ink blots. Executed on computerized knitting machines, the pieces feature abstract splotches rendered in blue on a gray field. Visually, these pieces are rather drab--they lack the kitsch pizazz that informed previous knit works--and thematically they’re frustratingly abstruse.

This show is ultimately a bit of a tease in that it’s difficult to get a grip on exactly what Trockel is up to here--the pieces feel like one small piece in a much larger puzzle. One comes away hungry to see the retrospective in Berkeley.

* Stuart Regen Gallery: 619 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood; to July 31; (213) 276-5424. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Picture Perfect: Beuys’ presence can also be felt in the exhibition across the street from Stuart Regen at the Asher-Faure Gallery. Beuys is one of 400 artists Heinz-Gunter Mebusch has photographed as part of a series of black-and-white portraits of artists that he’s been working on for 12 years.

Mebusch has 220 portraits in this show, which centers for the most part on German artists (white, male German artists to be specific) of varying degrees of fame. Mebusch says he selects his subjects purely on instinct, and that the only change in the work over the past decade is that he’s now shooting the portraits from a closer distance.

Mebusch’s photographic recipe is extremely simple: He shoots his subjects straight on from the shoulders up, and asks his sitters to stare into the camera lens. Central to every picture is the nakedly open gaze of the sitter--it invests the photos with the intense, unadorned power of mug shots. It makes sense that Mebusch calls the series “In The Eyes of Artists,” as that’s where the heart of these pictures resides.

The most remarkable thing about this series, however, is the huge amount of variation Mebusch achieves while working within the narrow parameters.

No two pictures in this rogue’s gallery look remotely alike--and rogue’s gallery is an apt description too, as the majority of the people Mebusch has photographed are rather eccentric in appearance.

* Asher-Faure: 612 N. Almont Drive. To July 26; (213) 271-3665. Closed Sun.-Mon.