ART REVIEWS : ‘Silent Bidding’ Underscores How High a Price Is Paid

When you walk into Tamara Fites’ installation at Dan Bernier Gallery, you feel as if you’ve stepped into a 1950s farmhouse that’s also a barn. Straw is scattered all over the carpeting, linoleum and wood floors. Feed bins and watering troughs stand next to a rundown kitchen, bedroom, den and bathroom.

It’s impossible to know whether you’ve stumbled into a pen where animals live in luxury or entered a home where people live like beasts.

Your confusion intensifies when the lone inhabitant, Lambi Kins, greets you. Made up to look like a gentle little lamb, Fites is dressed as a stereotypical farmer’s daughter. With sheepish eyes and brazenly flirtatious gestures, she looks and acts like a poor man’s version of a Playboy bunny.

While I was there, Lambi Kins ignored female visitors, instead lavishing attention on men by waving coyly, eyeballing us lasciviously and then stroking cheeks, ruffling hair, pawing at chests and pulling on lapels. She fed one guy candy as he sat on her bed.

The sexuality Lambi Kins aggressively projects is more down-home and barnyard than that of the glitzy professionals she mimics. If women dressed as bunnies elicit a straight male fantasy of mute, cuddly creatures who love to reproduce, the overeager antics of Fites’ character push this cliched dream uncomfortably close to bestiality. The artist’s cunning performance suggests that this run-of-the-mill American fantasy is closely related to the desire to have sex with pets.

Titled “Silent Bidding,” Fites’ twisted piece of theater simultaneously refers to her character’s speechless entreaty of male visitors and to a type of art auction, where clients protect their anonymity by writing their bids on lists rather than communicating them to the auctioneer, in front of the crowd.

“Silent Bidding” also mocks art dealers who, like tawdry pickup artists in sleazy bars, insistently hit on collectors and critics. The indiscriminate, insincere affection of Lambi Kins is a hilariously overblown version of the ritualized song-and-dance pushy dealers perform each month in their desperate attempts to garner sales and recognition.

By playing up art’s sexual side, Fites emphasizes that its objects work best when they--not dealers--solicit the attention of viewers, seducing us to go along with their propositions, which are sometimes outlandish, often risky and, when successful, always demanding of more than cursory engagement.

* Dan Bernier Gallery, 3026 1/2 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-4882, through March 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Noteworthy: “Rove” is a noteworthy little show that’s as interesting for the individual paintings included as for the group they form. At ACME, four snappy abstractions by Bob Zoell and one each by John Zarcone, Kent Young and Jim Richards add up to a solid exhibition that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

At first, none of the works seem to belong together. Zoell’s pristine images of perfect circles appear to share nothing with Zarcone’s mottled, three-dimensional glob of foam, plywood and pigment. Richards’ see-through web of erratically twisted string can be seen as a comic, emaciated painting, but Young’s taut array of rectangular pieces of cloth stapled to the wall stretches even the loosest definition of painting to the breaking point.

As your eyes wander, or rove, across the surfaces of these discordant works, curious connections slowly emerge. Unanticipated formal links float into focus, holding the diverse paintings together in a flexible confederation. Powerful contrasts, rather than obvious similarities, give “Rove” its edgy resonance.

* ACME, 1800-B Berkeley St., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5818, through March 11. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.