Wilshire Center

Here comes another of Joel-Peter Witkin’s freak shows. See the hermaphrodites posed as classical artworks, the tubby dwarf done up in lace undies, the masked Siamese twins, the winged woman with claw feet growing out of her breasts, the man wired to a testicle stretcher. See the people lined up on La Brea Avenue, waiting to get into the opening of Los Angeles’ first solo show by one of the art world’s favorite weirdos.

To the uninitiated, Witkin’s photographs--represented here in a 10-year survey--look rather like pages torn from a 19th-Century sadist’s memory book. Setting up grotesque fantasies in theatrical tableaux and “aging� black-and-white prints with scratches, chemicals and tissue overlays, he creates photographs that probe the horrific depths of romanticism.

These pictures are crawling with more deranged visions that Hieronymus Bosch ever imagined. Flesh looks dead, and sometimes it is--in the case of fetuses and cadavers that turn up as models. Fatty protuberances of live people are about to be punctured by nails and sharpened sticks, while mechanical contraptions seem to be doing excruciating damage to genitals.

Some of these dangers are more in the viewer’s eye than in the actual set-ups. Witkin, who styles himself as a participant and not a voyeur, engages in a degree of visual trickery, but there’s enough reality to turn the stomach. The “unique� individuals that he solicits for his work are said to be willing subjects, however, and most of them don’t suffer the extreme indignities that some of the “normal� models put up with.

The usual line of critical support for Witkin’s work holds that he brilliantly and courageously exposes our darkest fears. Maybe so. He surely has a netherworld vision and a genius for turning it into pictures. And his timing isn’t bad either; there seems to be a big audience and market for photographic erotica. What makes his work fascinating is not so much its shock value as its compulsive artistry. The most amazing thing about Witkin is not that he has bizarre fantasies but that he goes to such lengths to make them visual. (Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 30.)