ART REVIEW : San Diego Exhibit Adds to an L.A. Gallery All Torn Up Over Its 10th Birthday

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions is celebrating its 10th birthday with an orgy of self-congratulation under the guise of self-criticism. What could be more fun? What could be more predictable? What could be more safe?

Navel-gazing criticism is the correct posture for “alternative spaces” such as LACE and even for individual artists these days. No one is thought to be smarter than artists who bite the hand that feeds them or institutions that invite them to do exactly that.

The trouble is that the art world’s self-criticism has become so institutionalized since Hans Haacke’s heyday that it has lost its bite. And when the theme is run up the flagpole one more time at LACE, in the current show called “Re: Placement” (to April 17), it begins to feel like a shtick. Here is an institution that prides itself on being the perpetually rebellious adolescent of the local exhibition scene.

That said, the birthday party is still quite a kick. Its most spectacular elements are works by artists who attack the building itself. In Liz Larner’s lethal “Corner Basher,” a motor-driven ball and chain flails out from a tall metal post, swinging wildly and knocking off wallboard as it bangs into gallery walls. Visitors can control the action--and vent their own destructive urges--by turning a dial on a wall panel. If LACE’s staff looks a little frazzled by the time you visit, chalk it up to the unnerving din and shuddering walls in the building.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Vallance has done a marvelously baroque variation of Chris Burden’s recent attempt to “expose the foundations” of the Museum of Contemporary Art. While Burden dug up the floor of the Temporary Contemporary, Vallance has cut four holes in LACE’s gallery walls and covered them with glass in gilded frames. Peering into these window/pictures, we see LACE’s dirty underwear: an elevator shaft, a janitor’s closet, a dark storage area and a room of electrical equipment. Vallance shows us what makes the building run behind its public face, but he also pulls off a wry commentary on the Renaissance notion of painting as a window on the world. Instead of pristine views, neatly conforming to scientific perspective, we find grungy, three-dimensional realism.

Except for Larner’s onslaught and Vallance’s expose, most of the criticism in “Re: Placement” is not directed at LACE--which so sanctimoniously displays it. Instead, the assembly of unorthodox works needles commercial and Establishment organizations that control what art gets shown and promoted. Rather than presenting art as a series of autonomous objects, the artists examine the power and influence of the odious “structures” that display it.

The Mothers of Medusa, an anonymous group of feminist artists who engage in trenchant guerrilla activities, has painted a border just under the gallery ceiling listing male artists who “allow their work to be shown in Los Angeles galleries that represent less than 20% women or none at all,” plus quotes from dealers and others on the status of women artists.

Videotapes by Andrea Fraser and Louise Lawler, Tony Oursler and Constance de Jong and Antonio Muntadas tackle the trappings of modern museums--from gift-shop souvenirs and docent tours to museum design and crowd control--often with a droll sense of humor.

Peter Nagy trains a critical eye on museums as real estate. In a laminated photostat of floor plans for condominiums in the Museum of Modern Art’s tower, living quarters are sprinkled throughout galleries, implying that you too can live among masterpieces of modern art if you have enough money.

A large section of the gallery deals with a recent controversy in San Diego over a publicly financed bus poster that charged the city with exploiting its population of illegal aliens. The poster says “Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation” and shows Mexican workers’ hands scraping restaurant dishes, carrying hotel towels or shackled at the border.

As we see in books of clippings, quotes painted on the gallery wall and tapes of television coverage, artists David Avalos, Louis Hock and Elizabeth Sisco set off a stormy reaction and were, of course, accused of staging a publicity stunt.

They were savvy, all right--putting the posters on the road during San Diego’s publicity season for the Super Bowl--but they were also courageous in tackling a pressing social issue. Their presence in “Re: Placement” undermines the exhibition, however, by reminding us that art-world carping tends to be rather insignificant if not petty and hypocritical. The “America’s Finest” poster and its attendant uproar is political art at its finest--the sort of project that renews the long-debased hope that art can make a difference.