Armed forces
Adi Nes taps the insidious allure of military maneuvers.

By Glen Helfand

TODAY'S ARMY HAS undergone a major style upgrade. You can see it in those extended commercials shown in multiplex preshows, not to mention the military's sponsorship of MTV hormone-enhanced spring-break beach parties. These are youth-pitched recruitment campaigns that come to us courtesy of high-powered advertising agencies and exude the same sheen used to peddle vodka coolers. Here the product, the U.S. military, is masked in the musk of power, patriotism, and exotic locales, in heavily stylized action, faux-grime makeup, and sophisticated editing tricks. Like Hollywood blockbusters, these spots are media constructs, as expensively choreographed as Bush's aircraft carrier photo op. It's propaganda, plain and simple, with applied designer finish.

Similarly, Israeli artist Adi Nes deals in alluring, incendiary photographs rooted in his country's mandatory military service. He began making his carefully crafted, sexually charged images of soldiers, police, and prisoners in the early 1990s, but they have a particularly provocative presence at this crucial time, as Israel's actions against Palestinians become ever more problematic. How does media play a role in downplaying the harshness of Israel's actions and romanticizing its military culture?

Twenty of Nes's lush images make up the unexpectedly contemporary "Between Promise and Possibility: The Photographs of Adi Nes" at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and in them he offers a sophisticated, seductive answer. Using major production values, the artist taps into cinematic conventions, art historical sources, and the tantalizing attractiveness of high fashion to lure viewers to ponder a minefield of difficult issues, most camouflaged under hegemonic male power.

While Nes's images are glossy and oversize, here consciously presented to evoke the crispness of a plasma screen display, they are as tapped into art history as they are the persuasiveness of cinema. His version of da Vinci's Last Supper is prominently visible at the end of a long corridorlike vista through galleries of religious icons and Renaissance paintings. Because of its placement in the gallery, where angled, freestanding walls block an immediate view, when the horizontal picture finally reveals itself, it's with extra theatricality. Nes has restaged the painting with a cast of dark-haired soldiers eating a simple meal and engaging in male camaraderie. They light a buddy's cigarette, laugh, and talk. Tastefully blurred images of desert are seen through the window, but it's quite likely this is rear-screen projection, a production trope that befits the scale of this print, which approximates that of a large painting or movie screen. As this is the Holy Land, and currently the site of holy wars, the irony taps into an epic's worth of conflict.

The conflation of high art and movie artifice is nailed down in a nearby photograph of a wounded soldier resting, Pietà-like, in the lap of a fellow soldier. The convention of battlefield honor reads immediately, but the trope here, which reveals itself slowly, is that the tending soldier dusts the injured man's chest with a poufy makeup brush. The point is brash, but the artist's mission is expertly concealed beneath its stylization.

A little more than half of the show is devoted to a recent series of fashion pictures commissioned for Vogue Hommes International, and Nes responds with images that cast another range of male characters, in this case prisoners, police, and suspects. Nes exploits the idea that guilt, not to mention mystery, is sexy. In one, a young man in a leather jacket defiantly looks at a handsome policeman wearing dark aviator glasses that mask the vulnerability of his eyes. Nes relishes this zone of charged ambiguity and suspicion.

In others in this 2003 series, a lineup of men, in designer duds by the likes of Kenzo, Vivienne Westwood, and Paul Smith, are paraded in prison environments, below barred windows, against barbed wire-topped walls or chain-link fences. Are they terrorists or undercover agents at a casting call? The duplicitous nature of the story is also suggested in a shot of a muscular, stubbled guy in a black tank top standing in front of a dramatically lit jail cell, calling into question the scenario and this man's role in it.

There's no missing the homoerotic subtext of Nes's pictures. He nods to Jean Genet's hothouse, prison-set writings and the 1950 film Un chant d'amour. (It's even more fitting that Genet came out in support of the PLO.) The photographs less explicitly allude to Tom of Finland's male muscle gods, infamously inspired by that artist's acknowledged youthful attraction to men in Nazi uniform. Nes similarly lingers on masculine forms, stubbly faces, and bulging brown biceps, exploiting how firm flesh attests to the primal sensuality of aggression. Is victory the prize to those with the greatest command of their image? In Nes's work, the answer is a discomfitting affirmative.

'Between Promise and Possibility: The Photographs of Adi Nes' runs through July 18. Tues.-Sun., 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m., California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, near 34th Avenue and Clement Street, S.F. $5-8. (415) 863-3330, www.thinker.org. Nes speaks about his work Thurs/8, 1-3 p.m.; and Dr. Tirza True Latimer gives a lecture titled "Adi Ness and Vogue: Invisibility on Display" April 17, 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Both events are at the museum's Gould Theater.