Chilling, Illuminating ’36 Olympic Images

“Olympia,” the masterful propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl, used Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Games as an opportunity to manufacture a mesmerizing image of Aryan superiority. The film is one of many examples throughout history of exceptional artistic skill being put to heinous ends. For grotesque purposes, Riefenstahl’s movie celebrates physical power and beauty in a physically powerful, beautiful way.

So do the 47 independent but related Olympic photographs by Riefenstahl at Fahey/Klein Gallery. These pictures are modern prints, made last year from a set of vintage prints whose existence was not widely known. Shown last year in Berlin, they are having their American debut here in what the gallery says is Riefenstahl’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

It is an illuminating show. As a videotape of “Olympia” plays on a monitor in the corner, the still photographs offer an opportunity to examine Riefenstahl’s remarkable technique. One element is obvious: Men outnumber women by more than 2 to 1 in her pictures. Masculine sensuality and eroticism are italicized in ways that remain surprising.

Typically, Riefenstahl’s athletes are portrayed as disengaged from the ordinary world, cavorting instead like deities in a Tiepolo ceiling. Shot in extreme close-up or from below, so that an infinite expanse of sky removes them from earthly bonds, the figures occupy an abstract universe of time and space.

Riefenstahl dispenses with old pictorialist conventions of photography in favor of a starkly modern, industrially precise style. Dynamic, streamlined geometry is emphasized. An athlete flies over a pommel horse like a figurative version of today’s Nike swoosh logo. Another does a handstand on the parallel bars, rising up in the composition as a visual extension of the mechanical apparatus.

This accentuation of modernity coincides with tropes from classical antiquity, which are often made explicit. An Olympic torchbearer is shown at Delphi, suggesting an idealized oracle for Nazi ideology. Ruins at the Greek Acropolis appear. A figure is shown descending from the pedestal of a broken Doric column. A discus thrower’s jagged pose quotes Myron’s famous Roman “Discobolus,” while also recalling the broken contour of a swastika.

Even Jesse Owens, the great African American track star who made hash of Hitler’s fantasies of racial hierarchy, is shown with all the heroic, chiseled presence of an antique statue.

Riefenstahl’s Modernist abstraction allows for a seamless linkage between the industrial present and a mythologized past. In an aerial view of 16 diagonal rows of hundreds of male athletes, stripped to the waist and stretched out doing push-ups on a contrasting diagonal, she creates a neatly crosshatched composition. A tightly woven fabric of humanity covers the earth, spreading out in all directions behind a fluttering Olympic flag. This picture, like others in the show, is a visual embodiment of the German Reich that is as seductive as it is chilling.

* Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 934-2250, through March 24. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Visual Flips: In the back hallway at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, a large color photograph (almost 4 feet high and 6 feet wide) focuses in tight on a small clearing in the woods. Dappled sunlight plays off leaves and tangled plants that cluster around the periphery of the scene, while the center remains dark, shadowy and visually obscure. Peering in, you can’t quite make out what is there.

This recent photograph by Kelly Nipper performs a conceptual reversal of something like Durer’s famous monumental drawing of a clump of dirt, in which the entire universe and all the stars seem to bristle within a few densely concentrated square inches of lowly grass and weeds. An unfathomable black hole lurks instead at the center of Nipper’s landscape space, while light and life dance around the edges.

Nipper’s photograph is one of 10 in an enigmatic group collectively titled “shotgun and figure 8.” Neither a weapon nor a double loop-the-loop is anywhere to be seen, but the random dispersal of energy (shotgun) and the tightly controlled infinity formation (figure 8) create opposing poles by which her work is organized.

Four photographs depict Bosc pears standing on end on a wood-grained tabletop, placed before a white background. Three pears, one pear, four pears, two pears--the sequence of groupings seems random, until you notice that one of the pears is exactly repeated in three pictures. In the fourth, it might be shown from a different side. Your eye and mind scan back and forth among the images, turning the objects around in your head and shifting them in mental space, much the way an image of virtual reality can be manipulated on a computer screen.

Suddenly, these still lifes have been animated. The sense of fabrication immediately makes you distrust what you’re seeing. Are the pears really balanced on end? Or have they been manipulated, perhaps digitally inserted into the scene? Is the wood grain real? Was a table even there?

In these and other works in this subtle, eccentric and provocative show, Nipper takes advantage of a crucial feature of photography. There are visual inventions we immediately accept in painting, knowing as we do from the outset that the picture is an invention. Not so with camera images. Because they keep one foot in transcription of the world before the lens, our grounding is different. Nipper makes photographs that generate disturbing little earthquakes.

* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-7535, through March 24. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Above It All: In drawing clouds in the sky, Hilary Brace assumes a feet-off-the-ground, free-floating perspective. She isn’t standing on terra firma looking up, like Constable or Stieglitz. Instead she’s above the clouds looking down, or in the clouds looking across, as if gazing out the window of an airplane. The feeling is less one of romantic yearning for something up there, out of reach, than it is full immersion in something stunning, primordial and elusive but immediately at hand.

The 15 marvelous cloudscapes at Craig Krull Gallery are meticulously drawn with charcoal on Mylar, which diffuses the light. No drawing is more than 5 or 6 inches on a side. Required concentration in viewing matches necessary concentration in their fabrication. The effect is one of elegant softness and intense clarity, in equal measure.

Brace’s gray clouds are as various as any earthbound natural landscape, from the Sahara Desert to the Rockies. But look for a while and an unexpected set of references floats into consciousness. Her sky-views can seem like microscopic analyses of human tissue, pulsing heart valves, cranial excavations and alimentary canals.

The daydreaming pastime of reading pictures into passing clouds keeps turning inward, discovering bodily interiors. The limitless enormity of the sky is set against the contained intimacy of an inner universe, establishing a subtle tension.

Like a Vija Celmins drawing made Baroque, Brace’s work conjures an ephemeral poetics of light and space. It is not the explosive light of spiritual revelation that bursts from behind the cloud banks in her exquisite drawings, but the quiet celebration of mystery that glows from within.

* Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 828-6410, through Saturday.

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Culture of Punishment: The death penalty is the starkest measure of America’s immaturity as a civilization. To establish the ultimate judicial penalty on a principle of revenge is to champion violence as a palliative for a violent society.

At Track 16 Gallery, “Capital Art: A Group Show on the Culture of Punishment” assembles paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos and drawings by nearly 40 artists to protest police brutality, the current prison system and especially the death penalty. (The show is dedicated to death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal.)

It is a show of mostly cathartic expressions. A few are scathingly self-aware history lessons, like Enrique Chagoya’s caution-yellow painting of modern devices for state-sanctioned murder (guillotine, electric chair, lethal-injection table) layered over an elegant ground of historical engravings that depict assorted brutal mayhem. Others, like Judi Russell’s photograph of dog poop formed into the presidential initial, W, are sophomoric.

Most fall somewhere into the wide and woolly territory in between. Sandow Birk, for example, employs the 19th century visual language of golden optimism that characterized landscape paintings of the American West and that still informs popular sentimental imagery like the paintings of kitschmeister Thomas Kinkade. Lurking in the distance behind Birk’s placid forest and across a peaceful bay is the hulking edifice of San Quentin.

Despite the crushing urgency of the subject, a handout demonstrates what makes the show feel musty and out-of-date. “In this time of unparalleled national prosperity and lack of government support for the arts,” it reads, “the art world tends to favor the production of marketable rather than socially minded (much less politically critical) work.” This will come as news to any number of artists whose highly marketable work is also socially minded and politically critical. The statement’s antiquated assertion of dubious polarities represents the kind of thinking that keeps us stuck where we are.

* Track 16 Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 264-4678, through March 31. Closed Sunday and Monday.