Minstrels’ messages on society

“Post Minstrel� is what we ought to be but aren’t yet. It’s a condition toward which Mark Steven Greenfield prods us in his haunting show by that name at the Steve Turner Gallery. Where we are instead is a markedly lower stage of human evolution, a prolonged phase of racial inequity once epitomized by the minstrel show.

Greenfield uses old photographic portraits of minstrel players as the starting point of this work, and it’s immediately clear why. The images (from the mid-19th century to the early 20th) have a repulsive, gripping power, not to be believed and yet not to be denied. The performers, white men with faces blackened by greasepaint or burnt cork, pose as outlandishly dressed caricatures: banjo-playing dandies, female domestics, shuffling dancers.

Greenfield reproduces these portraits as large iris prints (about 3 feet by 2 feet) with text in the form of an eye chart superimposed over the image. The use of vision tests has become something of a routine conceit in art addressing race. Kerry James Marshall’s recent show at the Koplin Del Rio Gallery included paintings with loaded phrases spelled out in the colored dots of color blindness tests. Last year at the Iturralde Gallery, Marcos Ramirez (“Erre�) showed eye charts with quotes from Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu and others on the subject of justice and coexistence.

In Greenfield’s work too, the eye chart, with its rows of letters of diminishing size, does double duty. Its format refers to clarity of vision in optical terms, while its contents poke at the presumption that seeing is believing or even understanding. “You can’t judge a look by itz color,� reads one. Most of the others read as direct challenges to the viewer, raw enough to be unprintable here. They’re sharp jabs delivered at an unnerving crawl.

So here we are, looking at images of blatant masquerade -- whites costumed as blacks or, more accurately, as stereotypes of blacks, either dimwitted plantation slaves or self-important urban types. And Greenfield adds a twist of ventriloquism, inserting voices that belong, if to anybody in particular, to the denigrated African Americans portrayed, the black characters trapped in a white parody.

This kind of layering gives Greenfield’s work a sneaky, insistent power. His drawings on Clayboard have the potential to do the same but are less consistently interesting. The medium is, itself, preloaded with the symbolism of blackface masquerade. It’s a white surface coated with black, which the artist scratches away to create images or patterns with the exposed areas. The most potent of these is “Okeh,� a mirage-like scene of a classic minstrel line, an ensemble of blackface players in a semicircle onstage. A white “interlocutor� sits on a raised chair at the center, with the ends anchored by a clownish tambourine player and his counterpart on “bones.� Rendered with a scratchy penumbra all around, the players suggest a daunting tribunal out of a disturbing dream.

The remaining works in the show -- blackface cartoons painted on tambourines, among others -- are infused with the same dense history, but their impact feels more confined to the surface. They push the same hot buttons but deliver less of that rich, complex unease.

Some historians argue that minstrelsy had its positive side, that it eventually afforded blacks a place in the entertainment industry (some, perversely, appearing in blackface themselves). The genre, these commentators say, was not a straightforward example of condescension toward African American culture but a more complicated mix of “love and loathing,� an embrace of black music, dance and humor cloaked in white fear and superiority. It was, in any event, white mainstream culture’s first substantial appropriation of black culture, and it proved so successful (minstrelsy being the most popular form of live entertainment for decades) that white entertainers, from Elvis to Eminem, have kept at it.

At what cost? “Appropriation� has become a buzzword in art over the last few decades, devolving into a lightweight aesthetic strategy. But there are forms of it that aren’t so benign, and this is one. Minstrelsy’s odious racial stereotypes seeped into the cultural groundwater more than a century and a half ago, and there they remain. Greenfield’s jolt of a show urges us past them, toward the “Post Minstrel� age.

Steve Turner Gallery, 275 S. Beverly Drive, No.200, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-3721, through May 15. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

*

The richness of the everyday

In photographic terms, Young Kyun Lim has an old soul. He’s not yet 50, but his personal, poetic style feels rooted in an earlier generation. His first show in L.A., at the Andrewshire Gallery, brings to mind Andre Kertesz at times, Lee Friedlander at others. The pictures were made over the last 27 years in Lim’s native South Korea (where he lives and teaches) and in other countries he’s visited, including the U.S., where he did graduate work.

These images read as journal entries, sketches, impressions. Lim often fixes upon a single object of beauty or poignancy. A recent picture made in Kyoto, Japan, shows a lovely blossoming cherry branch behind a glass storefront. The window reflects the photographer as well as the bold stripes of a crosswalk and the overall bustle of a city street. The organic harmony on one side of the window and the citified geometry on the other merge, montage style, in the camera’s lens. In another image, shot in 1977 in the South Korean city of Gangneung, Lim shoots downward into a nearly empty bowl of rice. By isolating such a familiar, ordinary sight and filling most of the frame with it, he invests the bowl and its staple contents with iconic significance.

Lim did related work in portraiture in a series (not shown here) from the 1990s called “Face of Our Time.� The large, black-and-white, insistently neutral bust portraits of young Koreans claimed both the legacy of August Sander and the currency of Thomas Ruff. The work on view here is far more intimate than those larger-than-life close-ups. These photographs are grounded in the inexhaustible richness of the everyday -- its contradictions, surprises and moments of grace. Like other such chronicles, whether written or visual, Lim’s reads as a dialogue between the ever-evolving individual and a continually shifting culture. His photographs feel like small acts of ennoblement -- of the moment and of the process of observation that went into recognizing it.

Andrewshire Gallery, 3850 Wilshire Blvd. No.107, (213) 389-2601, through May 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.

*

Relegated to tourist status

Photographer Alexey Titarenko made his stirring L.A. debut nearly three years ago showing blurred, brooding pictures of his native St. Petersburg, Russia. He’s back now with images of Paris and Venice, Italy, that are pleasant enough but far less distinctive.

Titarenko continues to blur some of the figures in his photographs, a practice used to poignant effect in the Russian scenes, often setting off an individual from a crowd. In these newer pictures, though, the technique feels cliched. The crowds that Titarenko focuses on in Paris and Venice are primarily tourists -- lined up under the Eiffel Tower, for instance, or amusing themselves with the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco.

Unfortunately, what Titarenko reveals, over and over again in this work, is that he’s a tourist there too. His deep connection to St. Petersburg helped elevate that work, particularize it. In Paris and Venice, he seems to travel only the well-trodden path from one landmark to another, never rising above a state of sentimental enchantment. The prints are a beautiful glinty gray, at once both flat and luminous, but still no more than glorified postcards.

Apex Fine Art, 152 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 634-7887, through May 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

*

Bursting with youthful energy

Claire Browne’s enchanting new works at the Newspace Gallery exude vitality -- youthful vitality coming from a mature artist. Browne, who lives in L.A., received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1959 and earned a master of fine arts from the Claremont Graduate School in 1978. Her drawings on canvas (“drawn paintings,� according to the press release) feel fresh and alive, charmingly casual yet thoughtful.

There’s some playful friction right from the start in Browne’s choice of media. She draws in pencil on gessoed canvas, sort of a T-shirt and tux combination, the informal doodle sprawled over the formally prepared surface. Her marks are simple circles, outlined, filled in and often with a smaller dot within. Some are as small as the head of a pin and others the size of a fingerprint. They cluster and form chains, seemingly organically, accreting into dense, vibrant fields that often extend over the edges and onto the sides of the canvases.

The markings pulse with energy, at once microcosmic and macrocosmic. The images read equally well as either multiplying cells or celestial phenomena -- or as neither, but rather as pure pattern and motion and color. The larger works (4 to 5 feet per side) are particularly radiant. “Crown,� drawn in warm orange, pale pink, fuchsia and gray, gives the impression of a diaphanous blossom -- perhaps the aurora borealis, perhaps the luminous veins of a jellyfish. “Ring� presents a garland of golden circles laced in pink and framed by a broader, irregular border of dots. Against the neutral, bright white surface, Browne’s patterns float freely, unencumbered by definition, gravity, context. They hint of transcendent nature, in the way the luminous paintings of Sharon Ellis do, through the physical immediacy of extravagant beauty.

Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (323) 469-9353, through May 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.