A Really Big Show From Two Large-Scale Artists

Michael C. McMillen often likes to work big. A recent installation took up two rooms, one filled with a full-scale replica of a house boat--floating on water.

Red Grooms shares the fancy, making nearly life-size subway cars with life-like riders, and a 50-seat, Egyptian-style theater, for example.

Now the two artists have teamed up. The result, an installation on view Tuesday to Jan. 10, demands all 10,000 square feet of the Municipal Art Gallery in Hollywood.

“Red Grooms, Michael C. McMillen, a Collaboration” comprises a labyrinth with about a dozen doors that leads viewers to the installation’s room-size centerpiece, says McMillen, a Los Angeles-based artist who, with Grooms, a New Yorker, spent more than a year preparing the work by correspondence.

The maze contains a series of tableaux, McMillen says, most of which he and Grooms made independently of one another before meeting at the Municipal Art Gallery this week to finish the work.

“My tableaux are made out of strange and curious materials,” such as an automobile carburetor, a spaghetti colander and a vacuum cleaner, says McMillen. Known for installations filled with similar found objects, particularly society’s detritus, the artist has created a spider-web covered garage, inner-city scenes and a desert rat’s retreat.

“I’ve used a number of doors I’ve collected over the years which will be used to connect chambers in the maze,” McMillen continues. “It’s a metaphor for the mind: As you unlock a door or go through a passage, you are confronted with another situation you have to deal with.”

The installation’s centerpiece will contain metaphoric imagery “dealing with our cultural values and perhaps where we’re headed,” McMillen says, but that’s all he’ll say, preferring that viewers encounter his work without too many expectations.

The artist had his own expectations, however, about working with Grooms, whom he invited to collaborate.

“I met Red when he had his (25-year) retrospective show at the Museum of Contemporary Art,” in March, ’86. “I like him and I like his work, and I like the idea of collaboration.”

The Grooms/McMillen installation, the Municipal Art Gallery’s holiday offering, replaces gallery’s annual “Magical Mystery Tour.” That exhibition was discontinued after about 10 years, gallery curator Marie de Alcuaz says, when Josine Ianco-Starrels, her predecessor, left the post last year.

“I wanted to do one large installation,” De Alcuaz says, “the “Magical Mystery Tour” was a series of installations.” In a prepared statement, she adds: “Grooms uses overt satire and humor to give his installations a cartoon-type humanization . . . McMillen’s work is usually associated with current trends where things appear as they aren’t.”

“I think there will be a lot of curiosity about what a collaboration will be like,” McMillen says, “especially from people who know both of our work individually.”

MANNERIST DRAWINGS: During the high Renaissance, the role of the artist changed from mere artisan or craftsman to divine creator. The first effects of this evolution are seen in 16th-Century Mannerist drawings, such as those on view in a 25-piece exhibition running Tuesday through Feb. 14 at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

“If we think of high Renaissance art as a balance between the observation of nature and the creativity of the artists or the use of artist’s imagination, in the generation following the Renaissance (beginning with Mannerism), the artist tipped the balance in favor of his creative or imaginative powers,” explains Lee Hendrix, assistant curator of drawings at the Getty.

And the result was often drawings that depict humans in “unnatural poses,” Hendrix says.

“The center of the high Renaissance was the depiction of the human figure,” she says. “This continued to be the case in the period of Mannerism that followed, but artists rejected balanced composition in favor of intentionally complicated poses of the human figure that in turn exhibited the creative powers of the artists and displayed their virtuoso handling of the human figure.”

“Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan,” a work in the exhibit by Dutch master Hendrick Goltzius, is a fine example of this, Hendrix says.

“It’s a very elaborate figural composition with many nudes and the nudes are striking very complicated, twisted poses with a great deal of perspective for shortening, so they are seen from dramatic angles,” she says.

ON THE BLOCK: The Roberts Art Gallery, on the campus of Santa Monica High School, will hold its ninth annual art auction next month to benefit the gallery. Works by Laddie John Dill, Peter Alexander, Kent Twitchell, Jim Morphesis, Francine Matarazzo, Mim Spertus, Gilbert Lujan and others will be auctioned. Bids may be placed Dec. 7-17, 8:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Information: (213) 395-3204.