AROUND THE GALLERIES

Among the earliest work Walead Beshty produced after completing his MFA at Yale in 2002 was a series of photographs depicting his own body in various consumer settings -- shopping malls, department stores, supermarkets -- communing unceremoniously with the merchandise. He thrust his head into a miniature tent in the sporting goods aisle; pressed his torso into a wall of artificial flower leis; and draped himself limply across a frilly floral bedspread. Titled “The Phenomenology of Shopping,” it was a peculiar and awfully funny body of work that seemed to point to a quirky, satirical sensibility.

Such slapstick would prove only one of several dimensions to emerge in the artist’s impressively multiplicitous repertoire. “Passages,” his current exhibition at LAXART, encompasses several more.

In the last few years, Beshty has undergone a rapid ascendancy, with solo shows at P.S. 1 in New York, the Hammer Museum and numerous galleries, as well as a spot in last year’s Whitney Biennial, producing works that look nothing like the shopping series -- and often very little like one another. Indeed, stepping into one show while having previously encountered another, you may well have paused to wonder whether you were looking at the same artist.

Performative self-portraiture; straight documentation of vernacular architecture; abstract prints made through darkroom manipulations; unassuming portraits of art-world professionals; an installation mimicking the abandoned Iraqi Embassy in the former East Berlin; quasi-Minimalist sculpture that could also be classified as mail art -- Beshty clearly thinks across multiple registers, while remaining either within or roughly in dialogue with the boundaries of photography.

It is a fact that makes his work difficult to unravel in a glance but that clearly endears him to museum curators. It also lends itself to a sort of academic rhetoric that feels curiously out of keeping with the silliness of that first series. The news release for “Passages,” for instance, characterizes each of the show’s several components as “offer[ing] a distinct iteration of themes related to the traffic of images, hinging upon their spatial, representational and material functions in contexts defined by movement and transition.”

Such ponderous language, however, is misleading, belying not only the work’s intermittent humor but also its elegant conceptual economy. Each thread is the winnowed articulation of a single thought, one of several slender pathways into a sophisticated knot of ideas, observations and concerns.

The show is composed of four principal elements: a slide show involving dispassionate photographs of deserted shopping centers, accompanied (drolly) by the soundtrack to “Dawn of the Dead”; a series of large, abstract prints created by passing unexposed film through airport X-ray machines; a flooring of supposedly shatterproof glass that is nonetheless splintering gradually beneath visitors’ feet; and a billboard outside the gallery, featuring a black-and-white image titled “Dust” -- presumably much magnified -- that resembles a shot of the Milky Way. There are several notable through-lines. Each element reflects a transitory or intermediary space. Each involves an object that somehow registers the effects of its own use.

In each case, these effects are fundamentally destructive but also produce a certain beauty. (The X-ray prints, with their soft shades of turquoise, lavender, lemon yellow, rose and gray, are especially lovely.) Each could also be said to mimic in some way the fundamental process of photography: namely, the imprint of light or some other form of energy upon a sensitive surface (X-rays in the case of the prints, weight in the case of the glass, light in the case of the slides and time in the case of the crumbling buildings they depict).

Beshty is interested in images, as all photographers must be, but also in the state of materiality -- in the world that images reflect (the department stores, shopping centers, airports, embassies) as well as the physical form they take themselves (on film, on paper, in mirrors, in slides). All his various conceptual meanderings speak, in some way, to an ever more nuanced investigation of the intersection of the two.

LAXART, 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 559-0166, through May 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.laxart.org

Drawn to acts of resistance

Given the frequency with which one tends to see Robby Herbst’s name around town -- in conjunction with the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, which he co-founded, as well as in group shows, performances, discussions and presentations -- it is a little surprising that his current exhibition at David Patton Gallery is his first solo show.

He doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with the idea, judging from the show’s title -- “Blockades (with collaborators)” -- and the prominence with which those “collaborators” (presumably the subjects in his drawings) are listed in the show’s news release.

He is an artist working, by and large, in that fertile outer sphere of the art world, where aesthetics begin to overlap with other, more tangible practices and concerns, and who insists on maintaining the permeability of these divisions. The solo show seems less a goal than the incidental outgrowth of a larger project.

The show consists of seven mid-sized drawings depicting individuals engaged in acts of civil disobedience, as well as a small installation of cutout figures accompanied by the audio recording of a man fervently extolling the evils of fast food, corporate agriculture and other signs of social decline. The titles provide the basic circumstantial details: “Tom Blocks War Contractor Parsons in Pasadena,” “Nancy Stops Traffic at 2 Freeway Ramp,” “Charles Talks With Women at Recruiting Center About Suicide Rates Among Soldiers,” “Jen Knits in First Street.”

The drawings themselves are handsomely executed, with portions of each image rendered in skillful detail and the remainder left either in outline or blank.

More striking than their skill, however, is their air of humility. These are audacious acts by committed individuals, at a time when public sentiment tends to disparage all civic action as futile and nostalgic. In emphasizing the role of the body as a tool of conscientious resistance -- a potential blockade -- Herbst’s drawings honor (without unduly romanticizing) not only those individuals but also the spirit of the acts and the principles on which they are grounded.

David Patton Gallery, 932 Chung King Road, L.A., (213) 626-2524, through April 18. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays. www.davidpattonlosangeles.com

The jolting power of fairy tales

The drawings of Norwegian artist Martin Skauen at Mihai Nicodim Gallery remind one of the pleasure to be found in a good dose of alarmingly twisted Surrealism. Severed heads, impaled torsos, dead fish, rats, disembodied elephant trunks, pregnant women in precarious situations -- you name it, all presented with an air of deadpan gravity that suggests a mythological dimension.

There are five medium-to-large drawings on view, as well as a six-minute video that charts a frenetic path across the surface of another drawing, which is not on view. They’re rendered in a clean, minimally affected style and littered with deliciously perverse little jokes.

In one, “My Masters Plan (The Guard),” a mostly nude man kneels on the ground with a shield, impaled through the throat by a rod whose tip lifts the helmet from his head, as if doffing it for a king.

In another, “White Oak,” a shaman-like figure whose eyes are closed holds a severed head whose eyes are open and alert.

In my favorite, “White Tail Deer,” an old woman with a beguiling smirk presents the severed head of a deer on a platter. Look closer, however, and you see that she too has been decapitated, her head suspended an inch above her neck by the antlers of the deer, which plug like the ends of a stethoscope into her ears.

Curiously, what resonates in the end is not the gore but the poetry of the images. Like fairy tales, they illuminate the darker reaches of the human imagination so as to weaken the hold, ultimately, of demons who lurk there.

Mihai Nicodim Gallery, 944 Chung King Road, L.A., (213) 621-2786, through April 11. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays. www.nicodimgallery.com

Layer upon layer of technology

Since opening its doors in 2007, the Box has supplemented its thoughtful contemporary program with periodic exhibitions devoted to underexposed pockets of recent art history, particularly from the 1960s and ‘70s. Barbara T. Smith, Wally Hedrick and John Altoon have all been featured, as well as collaborative video artists David Lamelas and Hildegard Duane.

The current show presents the work of experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984).

Combining film, video, collage, drawing and several re-created multimedia installations, it is an ambitious undertaking -- apparently the first of its kind to appear in Los Angeles -- and a rousing tribute to the artist’s radically multifarious output.

Born at the dawn of mass culture and media, VanDerBeek had a ravenous appetite for images and a prescient fascination with the interlocking layers of technology that define and circumscribe contemporary cultural experience. He filmed images, drew them, painted them, cut them out, spliced them together, animated them, photocopied them, even faxed them in one case, all with a giddy rigor that makes the work feel as fresh as anything you’ll find in a gallery today.

The collages, which date from the mid-’50s through the early ‘80s, are especially enchanting.

Here one sees the artist literally churning through the mess of visual stimulus that modern culture had become, drawing connections, illuminating idiosyncrasies, crafting strains of visual poetry through an astute process of juxtaposition and layering. In turns playful, elegant, jarring and crass, they provide an intimate glimpse into joyously frenetic sensibility.

The Box, 977 Chung King Road, L.A., (213) 625-1747, through April 18. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.theboxla.com

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