Dan Finsel

PARKER JONES
510 Bernard Street
December 12–January 24

Dan Finsel, I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah (I), 2009, color video, 20 minutes 24 seconds. Installation view.

Dan Finsel’s solo debut features “Finsel,” an evolving character the artist invented in 2008, now at the center of his practice. In the video I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah (I), 2009, the charming, infantile maladroit wears an oversize shirt and red glasses while rehearsing lines borrowed from the late Farrah Fawcett and the Beverly Hills, 90210 character Brenda Walsh in a range of affectations, mostly shades of discomfort. Finsel’s hilariously pathetic monologue, captivatingly performed, is both a means of working through childhood trauma and a screen test for the character’s unfolding life drama. After self-counseling through breakups and a near-death experience, it culminates in the apotheosis of Finsel as Fawcett, coyly grinning.

Although Fawcett and Walsh play the roles of Finsel’s pop-culture mother and sister, his fathers are art historical, as invoked by a highly considered installation. White vinyl flooring extends into the gallery office in a nod to the architectural interventions of Michael Asher. Opposite the video monitor, a Flavinesque horizontal swath of fluorescent lights implicates the beholder in Finsel’s identification game by making the video legible only within the body’s shadow when viewed straight on. Framed tightly against a green screen, Finsel himself awaits the viewer’s psychic projections.

While Finsel’s quirky mannerisms and identity mutations resonate with Ryan Trecartin’s madcap characters, this exhibition is distinguished in its commitment to the evolution of a singular, complex figure. If indeed the artist’s millennial generation oscillates between irony and sincerity, Finsel’s appropriated melodrama strives in a one-way direction toward seriousness in its characterization of the means and stakes of identity formation today.

— Natilee Harren

Drew Heitzler

BLUM & POE
2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard
December 10–January 30

Drew Heitzler, for Sailors, Mermaids, Mystics. for Kustomizers, Grinders, Fender-men. for Fools, Addicts, Woodworkers and Hustlers. (Doubled), 2009, color video, 53 minutes. Installation view.

The analysis of Hollywood film as legitimate historical material is a relatively recent phenomenon, which has led to extensive methodological overhauls throughout the social sciences. Drew Heitzler’s interrogative look at the Babylonian underside of Hollywood, and its associations with the American oil industry, contributes to this approach. Perhaps more important, however, it also reflects an artistic shift from the handling of cultural material as a ready-made system of signifiers that can be emptied out and evacuated of their meanings at will.

For this exhibition, Heitzler has rearranged the footage of three 1960s classics—The Wild Ride (1960), Night Tide (1961), and Lilith (1964)—into an airy three-channel montage of doubled images and suspended sound. The three films—featuring Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, and Peter Fonda, respectively, in their first significant roles in major motion pictures—have been condensed and interwoven with one another to construct unfamiliar and contradictory narratives that foreshadow the countercultural movement the three actors later came to embody.

Heitzler’s treatment of this material speaks to both the evidentiary nature of cinematic images and the inherent truths such images belie. In the adjoining galleries, Heitzler has installed a series of two hundred photographic works, which serve as analytic road maps, or visual arguments, related to the various seedy and unsightly moments in the history of Los Angeles. More often than not, the tragic deaths, the natural disasters, and the inexplicable moments of desperation that these images capture bear witness to the city’s proximity to a pervasive entertainment industry and the business of oil underlying it. Installed within the context of this expansive accumulation, the reedited films draw us closer to the visual product of history’s invisible forces.

— Aram Moshayedi

Joe Sola

THE HAPPY LION
963 Chung King Road
January 9–February 13

Joe Sola, Me’n Kippenberger, 2010, watercolor and pencil on paper, 30 x 22".

As Joe Sola would have it, art is a culture industry that is simultaneously ridiculous and totally irresistible. His works relate to the field like an overenthusiastic child who squeezes the cute kitten to death. An LA art-world veteran, Sola’s first solo exhibition at this gallery features six watercolors and a short video, each presenting weighty humor about the politics of looking and posturing.

The watercolors depict phalluses and fallacies while embracing and chiding the mechanisms of visual culture. Yes Missile and No Missile (all works 2010) are succinct summaries of power. The positive missile points upward as it is being sent. The negative heads downward as it’s about to be received. In Me’n Kippenberger, the penises of two men in lederhosen are entangled in a square knot, while in the video A Short Film About Looking, two men embody familiar artistic antinomies––producer and consumer, artist and collector, subject and object, culture and nature––through catenary visual metaphors. A bohemian, artsy character, placed in the compositional foreground, is accompanied by scantily clad models in a messy studio while rectilinear objects perpetually catch his attention. His counterpart is more formally dressed and appears alone in the backgrounds of modernist architectural spaces, captivated by the spherical shapes around him. There is a whole lot of looking going on, as the protagonists’s primary actions are to gaze deeply and contemplatively at their respective objects, the classic Lacanian objet petit a. The climax of the video is a tête-à-tête in a gallery (the Happy Lion itself), an intense staring match that culminates in Scanners-esque head explosions. I can relate––I often feel like art makes my head explode. At least the smart stuff does.

— Micol Hebron