Santa Monica

A selection of recent works by Robert Longo complements a survey at LACMA and offers no surprises. This is quintessential Longo, exerting the same zany hypnotic power over our visual experience that the artist has long accused the media of exerting over the American consciousness.

“Freud Was (Machine Virus)” is a huge photo image of a hand tightly squeezing a man’s hat. The image is forcefully invaded by a neon-bright 3-D stake that sends cartoon vectors of force jutting into the viewer’s space. The work is weirdly erotic and ridiculous, full of the schizy narcissism in one of those commercials for Calvin Klein perfume.

The excellent “Gameface” is a big green shouting profile, painted to show straining tendons and popping veins of anger. It has an ominous wood propeller for a nose (reflexively, one thinks of Spielberg’s favorite trick of having out-of-control propellers vivisect Indiana Jones’ tormentors) and embedded in the face are sculptural half-spheres that suggest acne, facial scarring or planets floating in the face of a shrill and threatening Cecil B. DeMille god.

As we’ve come to expect, all the works are ludicrous, scary, histrionic, beautifully seductive and ultimately undecipherable--just like the Hollywood scripts and Madison Avenue ads whose psychological fascism Longo decries. (Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., to Nov. 4.)