For people of a certain age, much of the imagery of photographer Herb Ritts is ubiquitous, if not iconic. From album covers (Madonna, with her head thrown back in rapture on 1986’s True Blue) to music videos (Chris Isaak crooning into a smoky cloud abyss and embracing a mermaid-like, sand-specked Helena Christensen as the waves wash over them in Wicked Game) to celebrity portraiture (k.d. lang in a barber’s chair being mounted by a negligee-clad Cindy Crawford, playing the dom) to countless print ads and magazine spreads—for a while in the late 80s and early 90s it seemed that Ritts was the go-to for a specific version of elegance and sultriness that, in its time, infused and informed the popular culture’s picture of desire.

And whether you’re on the side of the spectrum that wrote off the above as little more than glorified perfume ads (of which Ritts shot many), trading on beautiful bodies and schmaltzy seduction, or embraced them with every artery of your prepubescent, gushing heart, it’s interesting to see Ritts’s work now, these many years later, after the fact. His extremely satisfying retrospective at the Getty Center, Herb Ritts: L.A. Style, includes selections from Ritts’s best-known commercial and editorial work, as well as personal pictures with eighty-seven images in all.

What’s perhaps most apparent here is the seamless quality between the commercial and so-called “fine art” side of things. No matter the realm, Ritts’s style was cohesive with a tendency towards high contrast, sparse compositions and a limited range of emotion. The emphasis on contrast breaks down not only the designer clothes, but also skin tone and background into a bold, diametric palette. (The blacks are black; the whites, white.) In the photograph Tatjana in Swimsuit, Hollywood, 1989, the bikini that the model wears is so bright, it seems to virtually lift off her skin and float towards the surface of the frame. After all, Ritts's was a top fashion photographer; he knew how to sell a swimsuit. The oily perspiration on Tatjana’s skin, the shadow on the backdrop, the reach of her ecstatic face towards an imagined sun, gives the strong illusion she is not just in a studio in Hollywood, though, that’s exactly what good lighting in a studio in Hollywood can do.

Ritts, a Los Angeles native, favored the desert and the beach for locations, no doubt in part for their natural source of potent light and shadow, as well as for their “eternal” quality. Maybe because of this and the general retro-chic of the day, in most photographs, the sense of time is ambiguous. Ritts’s spirit decade was most likely the 1940s for his connection to the glamour and bold lighting of Hollywood studio portraiture, but he also seems to share an affinity with photographers like Man Ray and Edward Weston; the body against landscape or often, melding into a landscape, is a reoccurring motif. In Male Nude with Shell II, Hawaii, 1988, a man lays in a fetal position on volcanic sand against the ocean. His face is hidden deep inside a giant mollusk shell and the ripples of his muscular abdomen and buttocks are mirrored in the rippling of the waves-on-water’s surface. In another photo, a man holds a conch shell up in front of his face, connecting his body to the sky.  And in another, a nude man appears crouching under a crown of thorns, his face again obscured in the brush.

The ease and emphasis on the nude, and on the natural form of the body is what’s most striking in looking at Ritts’s photography now. As well as the fact that there is next to no irony, dread, deformity, grotesqueness or self-consciousness in his work (or much humor for that matter, either). Instead, strength, sensuality, self-confidence and abandon, pervade. Ritts was openly gay but closeted about his HIV positive status until his death from AIDS in 2002. While his pictures don’t speak to this directly, the plea for pleasure in and of the body seems a subtle form of reference and protest. Despite their limited range, these photographs evoke much of what was evolving in our understanding of gender, race and sexuality in the past decades and still have much potency, as it continues to evolve now.

—Kate Wolf

(Top Image: Herb Ritts, Djimon with Octopus, Hollywood, 1989. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Getty and the Herb Ritts Foundation.)

I’m not sure if it’s legal. In fact, I’m pretty sure it won’t be. It’s definitely disturbing and highly problematic—beyond sketchy at the same time that it stands out as the most incredibly soul-shaking and thrillingly provocative art proposition I can remember. Or, I should say, that I can’t remember because memory itself (in the actual neurological, chemical sense, not some vague loosey-goosey thematic) is the medium with which this art boldly fucks.

I’m talking about Meghan Shalimar’s instantly notorious though uniquely secret show, “Negative Spaces,” at an annex of New York’s Morgan Library where viewers are first stalled by the artist before entering the gallery in order to sign a waiver and take a pill. In art, as in life, one proceeds at one’s own risk. Unnamed, the pill is purportedly “natural” and derived from “essential plant-based and mineral oils.” Once ingested, the drug’s effect is short-lived and extreme, catastrophic even: temporarily but completely disabling the brain’s short-term memory function to effectively wipe out the subsequent ten to fifteen minutes of experience from the person’s consciousness. Only after taking the pill are viewers allowed inside to see Shalimar’s paintings and then only for the duration of the drug’s ten minute potency, at the end of which they are ushered out of the room before the impairment wears off, leaving them impossibly blank, baffled, and unaware of what they had seen. Emotions linger—ones I could only call "heightened"—but they are untethered and jumbled, incommunicable to the self nearly as much as to others.

Neither I nor anyone other than the artist could tell you what we saw. Not that it was necessarily earth-shattering stuff but, thankfully, I’ll never know. As absent and foggy and aporetic as the cognitive lapse remains, the point emerged crystal clear: this art is only viewed in the present, now. It is not to be remembered. It is not to be reflected upon other than as a thing that is woefully and ecstatically missing, which is as good a reflection as any and better than most. It is about an experience of viewing art, which is almost exactly like not viewing art while getting ten minutes older. It is about the trauma of not knowing and the Pandora’s box of possibility unknowing unleashes. It’s about, as Bruce Hainley once phrased another rupture, date-raping art. Or Frederick Seidel’s inspired line, “I want to date-rape life.” Or about art date-raping mind and misapplying the right tools to do it. And, being about the frisson between consent and non-consent, Shalimar is also about minimalism—let’s call it mental minimalism—taken to such numbingly absurd and invasive extremes that what you see is most certainly not what you get. You get nothing, which everyone knows is a lot to deal with.

I scribbled these words in the aftershock of my Shalimarian black out: Art slips past the threshold of awareness like a bandit. Who knows where or when or in what form its booty may resurface. You’re invisible, you’ve got too many secrets—Bob Dylan said that or something like that. I’ll let you be in my dream if you let me be in yours. A butterfly bats its wings. A hint of Shalimar bats you in the head. I don’t think that true love leaves no traces.

—Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Jeff Hassay

(Image on top right: Promotional image for Meghan Shalimar's "Negative Spaces" at the annex of New York's Morgan Library; Courtesy the artist)

Having established himself in LA during the sixties as a highly successful and award-winning graphic designer with credits for huge companies like IBM, CBS, Boeing, and MGM (as well as LACMA), it wasn’t until 1969, in his mid-thirties, that Robert Overby switched gears away from advertising and decided to become an artist. When the switch happened it happened fast and opened a floodgate of parallel outpourings. The trigger was actually a job for CBS in which Overby was hired as an art-buyer. He immersed himself in the challenge but the budget was prohibitive for the kind and size of works he was after, so his solution was to paint the paintings himself. That lit a fire inside that launched him on his way into the artist’s life.

Reacting to the range of work he was looking at and researching, Overby cultivated a deliberate diversity of approaches, subjects, and media early on, rejecting the expectations and convenience of signature style in favor of an exuberant multiplicity. The surprising range of his production over the subsequent years, until his early death at the age of fifty-eight, remains the most profound quality of his practice, mostly for the underlying connectedness it paradoxically describes.

Perhaps his most enduring single achievement embodies this notion best, bringing together his art and design practices in what’s referred to as his “red book,” Robert Overby: 336 to 1, August 1973 – July 1969, which he self-published in 1974 and which included, in reverse chronological order, images of every work he made during the four-year period indicated in its title.

Still relatively obscure, he continues to be something of an artist’s artist. Any opportunity to see his work in person is exciting. The current show of Overby’s paintings presents a relatively narrow group and should be considered as only one through-line within the contemporaneously produced scope of the artist’s work, ranging from latex and concrete castings to abstract and figurative paintings. As a painter, he is probably best known for works like those shown here that include explicit, sometimes pornographic depictions of naked women and often converge with his amazing, sustained interest in S&M and bondage figures.

There is an X-rated Rosenquist, Pop-thing happening in a couple of the more pastiche-y, collage-logic, mash-up paintings and drawings, but these are less interesting and less jarring—less utterly gripping than the more spatially straightforward paintings of single figures.

Stroke II, 1973, is a truncated frontal view from shoulders to knees of a topless woman, hands (tied?) behind her back, wearing reflective black briefs—i.e. fetish rubber wear—that concentrates contrast in the center like a fist or black hole with great gravitational pull. The two strokes of the title seem to me to refer to the two central highlights daubed on her crotch. The background yellow is acrid in a caution-I-can’t-get-enough kind of way. The soft swells of breast and belly and thigh are perfect, exactly as you hope they’d feel. (Not quite as much can be said for another, larger torso from the same year that is strangely pocked and mottled with cloud formations.)

The whole body glows, golden, and I wouldn’t be able to look away if it weren’t for Black Hands, 1977, to its right, a view from breast to hip of a woman’s naked, yellow torso with jet black hands and arms catching pale blue highlights that should indicate long-sleeve gloves (latex, leather, silk?) but hug anatomy so tight (you can see the curve of cuticles) to appear more integrated like skin. What the hands are doing is notational, left unpainted and ambiguous: the right hand holds a long, thick needle, I think, from which a cord extends down and into a pointed iron-like object held in the other hand. (Maybe my inability to decipher the activity betrays my innocence in these matters.) The cord is like a rat’s tail. The surgery would be sinister if it weren’t so gingerly suspended and graceful. Again with the jolt of yellow, this time warmer and less biting, rubbed nearly completely over the body.

In general, Overby’s paint is thin and dry, seemingly rubbed and blended not unlike chalk pastel. Pencil under drawings show through. There is Vaseline on the lens and there may as well be on the latex.

The placement of nipples, lightly sketched underneath in graphite, is important and economically descriptive of volume, as are the ripples along the axial seam of a flesh-colored latex rubber face mask that is depicted in Pink Head, 1974-77, the most disarming and aggressive fetish emblem, but also the most iconic image of the group. Pink Head has no nose. Its lips are generic and painted red onto the rubber, wrinkles catching the light where breath suctions it in. Its narrow eye-holes are crooked and unaligned; only one eyeball peers through but so much is contained there. The neck ends abruptly, or else it pokes out of a hole in the ground.

S&M, bondage, fetish, protective chemical gear, Halloween costume, and skintight superhero apparel all factor in, with their attendant vectors of association. But so too does the otherwise unsexy knowledge of Overby’s concurrent sculptural experiments with latex in which he cast the relief surfaces of architectures by painting coats of liquid latex on the exterior and interiors of houses and then peeling them off when dry.  The two parallel projects in painting and sculpture come to bear on each other in an idiosyncratic way that gets at the heart of Overby’s rubberized sensibility.

—Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

(Image on top right: Robert Overby, Black Hands, 1977 , oil on canvas, 48 x 61 1/2 inches; Courtesy of the Artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art)