ART REVIEW : Cohesive Show Looks at Life From ‘Distance’

Ever since the Museum of Contemporary Art became a gleam in Los Angeles’ cultural eye, we have been waiting to see how it will shape up. A mixed bag of exhibitions lodged in superior architecture has provided some answers during the institution’s first years of operation, but the whole enterprise is still young and shaky enough to prompt continuing questions about MOCA’s direction and ultimate identity.

“Striking Distance,” a show of recent acquisitions at the Temporary Contemporary (to June 19), demonstrates one way the museum is spending its money and using its influence. The exhibition of 15 works by eight Los Angeles artists, purchased with money from the El Paso Natural Gas Co. Fund for California Art, indicates a preference for conceptual art concerned with aesthetic context, language and mass communication.

Instead of “self-expression” that springs from emotion or internalized experience, this work is inclined to stand back and comment on such matters as art’s place in society, the futility of trying to do anything original or the deadening effect of proliferating images and information.

This is not an exclusive preference, of course. MOCA has exhibited and acquired a great variety of art, but--in an art community that accords cosmic significance to every MOCA move--this particular assembly will be interpreted as a good omen for CalArts, which has spawned five of the artists and fostered the line of questioning that dominates the exhibition.

Though displayed as eight solo shows, the works in “Striking Distance” have enough in common to suggest a fairly coherent curatorial vision. It’s a view that veers away from traditional modes of painting and sculpture--and toward newer, multimedia forms, including video, recorded sound and commercially reproduced images.

There is a painter, Lari Pittman, but his immense, highly detailed canvases are rather like diagrams of a fantasy world steeped in decadence but hitched to a utopian promise. Rotting organic forms, nostalgic references to journeys and a crisp assortment of personal symbols populate the vast terrain of invented places that connect life and death or serve as futuristic respites from contemporary discontent.

Working with metal, concrete and fiberglass to make forms related to the human figure, Peter Shelton can be seen as a relatively traditional sculptor. He stands nearly alone here, showing visually appealing objects in the round, but his work is as concerned with ideas as with pure form. He sets viewers to thinking about the meaning, feel, function and look of bodily parts in works called “Femurs” or “Gut,” then abstracts an entire, elongated figure in “Misterleaner.”

Jill Giegerich also mines traditional fields of art in wall-mounted constructions of common building materials. But the figures and ordinary objects that she builds are rather like discussions of how to represent volumes and substances--from flesh and metal to steam. They are forms in a state of transition from idea to matter.

A group of drawings related to Mike Kelley’s “Monkey Island” performance acknowledges the importance of performance art and the views of an artist who delights in letting the air out of elitist pretensions. His work has its own pretensions as it dishes out scatological shocks with adolescent fervor, but it survives on devilish wit and nervous energy.

Mitchell Syrop, Alexis Smith and Stephen Prina appear as soul mates in “Striking Distance” because they all use printed text and commercial images. The show’s title is a conceptual artwork by Syrop. He also juxtaposes stock images and phrases, needling viewers to reconsider banal pictures and such familiar terms as “controlled substance” or “meaningful relationship” in artworks that resemble corporate advertisements or turn mural wallpaper into a cliched greeting card.

In “Aristotle-Plato-Socrates,” an installation of printed and recorded text and art reproductions, Prina dissects intellectual and cultural sacred cows, reducing them to bits of over-processed information.

Smith takes a more poetic tack with materials rescued from pulp novels, movie posters and other bits of thrift-shop popular culture. Her work draws viewers into a web of charming nostalgia, then delivers a punch on such substantive issues as urban violence or the trivialization of women.

Meanwhile, a roar entices visitors into Bill Viola’s video/sound installation, called “Room for St. John of the Cross.” In the center of a darkened room is a square structure, re-creating the claustrophobic room where a 16th-Century Spanish mystic was incarcerated for nine months. According to posted text, he survived the ordeal in part by writing poetry.

The lighted room, filled with the sound of chanting, contains a little table holding a pitcher, a glass of water and a tiny video monitor. A mountainous landscape on the postage-stamp screen seems to puncture the stifling atmosphere with a memory of nature. Outside a big picture of a mountain range projected on the back wall of the gallery undulates with the ferocity of an earthquake, accompanied by the din that brought us into the installation. Contrived though it is, the piece functions as a metaphor for the power of imagination.

Viola’s work may seem out of step with the rest of the show simply because it is imbued with moral purpose, but it actually points out an interesting subtext in exhibition that wasn’t meant to be a theme show. The intense intellectual questioning and the streak of cynicism that unite most of the works in “Striking Distance” don’t preclude a stern moral judgment of a society blanded by commerce.