TAKING PHOTOS FURTHER HAMMER EXHIBIT FEATURES ARTISTS WHO USED PICTURES AS A MEANS TO SOMETHING ELSE.

Byline: Steven Rosen Correspondent

So far, 2004 has established itself in Los Angeles as the year of the museum photo exhibition.

Four important ones have been on display this year at four major museums. The Getty Center has its ``Photographers of Genius'' show, Los Angeles County Museum of Art offers its rigorously thorough Diane Arbus retrospective, MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary features ``Street Credibility,'' and UCLA Hammer Museum is presenting ``The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photographs, 1960-1982.''

This last exhibit, which is on display through May 9, has some substantial differences from the others. The first three, for instance, all feature the work of Arbus. ``The Last Picture Show'' does not. But several of its participants are in another concurrent museum exhibition that has virtually nothing to do with photography - the minimalism retrospective currently at MOCA at California Plaza.

That's fitting because both are about visual artists who, during the same rebellious and soul-searching period, rejected traditional notions of art in order to find new ways to create. To them, an artwork was as much about the idea behind it as about an object we see and touch.

In ``Last Picture Show,'' the participating artists use photography as a tool toward something else. They are not photographers in the way Ansel Adams or Walker Evans or even the edgy Arbus were.

They apply photographic images to the surfaces of such unusual objects as walking sticks, re-photograph existing photos to make ironic statements on banality, or use photos to document their ``real'' one-time artistic act, such as the late Gordon Matta-Clark's slicing up of an old New Jersey house. For instance, this show features Robert Watts' 1965 ``Portrait Dress,'' pretty much what its title suggests - the artist has sewn transparencies into the pockets of a see-through vinyl dress.

This show has a strong intellectual component. The works are often theoretical, with artists revealing symbolic meanings that you must learn to ``read'' to understand. In her ``After Walker Evans'' photos, Sherrie Levine rephotographs prints that Evans made famous while chronicling Depression-era poverty. She calls the work her own.

Similarly, Christian Boltanski, a French installation artist whose ongoing theme is the melancholy nature of memory, has rephotographed the publicity head shots of the 62 Mickey Mouse Club members of 1955. The images become grainy, faded and old - a compelling and haunted metaphor for the impermanence of youth.

In both cases, the work itself is simple to an outrageous degree - they're taking a picture of a picture. But the ideas contained within both about authorship and appropriation are complex. Looking at them is like examining a novel - and yourself - for a deeper meaning.

At the same time, there is work here that has an unquestioned immediate beauty. For instance, the Italian artist Giovanni Anselmo has a massive piece called ``Entering the Work.'' It is a woozily focused black-and-white image, produced by placing photo emulsion on canvas, of a man walking down a mountainside. The size renders the horizon infinite and the ground abstract, as if the man is walking into the universe.

The photos that English artist Richard Long took of his quixotic Earth- art projects, such as his 1970 ``A Sculpture Left by the Tide'' (a spiral form in the sand reminiscent of Robert Smithson's much larger ``Spiral Jetty'') and 1967's ``A Line Made by Walking,'' give permanent witness to the sweet fragility of Long's otherwise-fleeting projects.

Bruce Conner's 1975 ``Angel'' is a remarkably successful experimental work. As the concurrent exhibition at the Getty Museum reveals, some of photography's first great works were camera-less photograms created by placing an object on light-sensitive paper.

Conner here takes it one fearless step beyond with a large photogram of himself. And in what is either carefully planned or a fortuitous accident, the result looks like a blurred, ghostly angel with a beam of light shining forth from one extended hand.

This exhibit comes to the Hammer directly from Minneapolis' Walker Art Center, where it was curated by that museum's Douglas Fogle. Containing 57 works by 100 artists, it is being promoted as the first major show featuring artists who use elements of photography in their work.

It has an international thrust, featuring such artists as Switzerland's Peter Fischli and David Weiss, the Netherlands' Jan Dibbets, Germany's Joseph Beuys, France's Yves Klein and England's Gilbert and George. But some of the United States' biggest names in contemporary art also are represented - Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha and more. Andy Warhol is even here, in some rarely seen snapshots of himself in drag.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but ``The Last Picture Show'' doesn't look like a traditional photography show. Many of the pieces are primarily sculpture-like wall installations, such as Dibbets' 1973 ``Comet Horizon.'' Assembling 12 color landscape photographs together on a wall so that he jumbles up the spatial relationships, he has created a montage that is like a portal into space. That it actually is a series of rearranged photos of land and sea seems secondary.

Also, a number of works are in glass cases, as if they were precious artifacts from a history museum. Los Angeles artist Ruscha's seminal photo-offset-printed books about this city's spread-out nature and abstracted sense of identity - 1962's ``Twentysix Gasoline Stations'' and 1966's ``Every Building on the Sunset Strip'' - are laid out in cases so your head swirls from the repetition of images. That seems to be Ruscha's point. It's like driving in L.A.

Identity and self-image also are important issues for several of the artists, who want to remind us that advertising lies when it pretends that photos of handsome, glamorous models represent us. As a result, a work like American photographer Hannah Wilkie's 1974-82 ``S.O.S. - Satisfaction Object Series'' flirts with the grotesque to get at a corrected ``truth.'' It features her covered with chewing gum. An accompanying statement informs us that the representation reflects the way she feels about being used up and discarded.

Overall, ``Last Picture Show'' is a fierce conceptual show. These artists don't want to be perceived as making comfortable or reassuring work. They shake up the way we think about photography and the way we look at the world.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW: ARTISTS USING PHOTOGRAPHS, 1960-1982.

Where: The UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd.

When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Through May 9.

Tickets: Admission is $5 adults; $3 seniors 65 and over; free for students and visitors 17 and under. Free for everyone on Thursdays. For more information, call [phone] or go to www.hammer.ucla.edu.

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The 11 photographs from Bruce Nauman's ``Bound to Fail'' portfolio (1966-67/1970), one of which is seen above, join other artists' unconventional photographic works in ``The Last Picture Show'' at the UCLA Hammer Museum.