ART REVIEWS : Every Litter Bit Helps to Understand ‘New West-Old West’

“New West-Old West,” a massive, five-room installation by New York artist Cady Noland at the Luring Augustine Hetzler Gallery, looks like the dregs of a fire sale at a Hollywood prop lot. Walking into the gallery your initial response is dapt to be, “Is this exhibition in the process of being installed?” In fact, one of the most interesting things about this sloppy piece is its vigorous sloppiness.

The art world attracts an unusually high quotient of anal retentive types and most galleries easily merit a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, so we’re not used to entering an art space and encountering the sort of mess Noland has whipped up for us. The gallery is littered with all manner of debris including boxes of junk, piles of raw lumber, a broom and dustpan full of trash, discarded beer cans, rubber chickens, flags and animals hides. Mind you, that’s just the filler stuff.

The entrance gallery, for instance, houses a massive facade of a log cabin, a theatrical prop Noland rented for this exhibition. Sharing space with the faux cabin is a huge metal structure designed for use on the bed of a big rig truck, a large stairway that dead ends into a wall, and several metal panels emblazoned with the image of Mary Todd Lincoln and text chronicling the history of the Colt gun, among other things. Organizing this baffling set of clues into a coherent pattern of thought is challenging to say the least, but there’s no arguing that Noland does a slick job of freeing art from its diminished function as a commodity; there’s nothing here anyone’s going to go into debt to take home.

Initially “New West--Old West” has a strong visceral power, but on close examination it loses intensity and focus in its attempt to do too much. Ostensibly an inquiry into the mythology of the West, car culture, advertising, sexism, the invasion of privacy as typified by the tabloid press, and movies, “New West--Old West” bites off more than it can chew. One could conceivably come up with a theory connecting these disparate threads, but it would be a fairly convoluted one, and Noland’s style is too raucous and free-wheeling to handle such conceptual subtitles. One does, however, come away understanding that this oddly violent piece is sending up a rowdy last hurrah for decaying American mythologies.

Existing at a weird juncture where amusement parks, shopping malls, industrial dumpsters and our collective past merge to form a highway leading to the belly of the American beast, this resolutely unsentimental work mocks our feelings of expectation and disappointment, our need to romanticize the past, our drive to consume. In using blow-ups of covers from the National Enquirer, one assumes Noland is making the point that just as the frontier of the Old West is dead and buried, the final frontier of privacy is being similarly ravaged and is receding into the past. Vaguely remembered as a quaint notion we all once agreed to respect, privacy is like the code of the Old West--an obsolete idea embalmed in museums for our inspection.

One room is given over to collaborations Noland did with seven graphic designers, each of which is an advertising sign involving a sales slogan with a dirty word. These pieces are pretty funny--a finance company, for instance, introduces itself with the snide sales pitch “Loans My Ass.” Also in this room: a barroom door, a new car bumper swathed in bubble wrap, carpentry tools, and a cow skull. Another room is dominated by an antique Western chuck wagon (also rented for this show), while the gallery office houses a weird metal structure.

The piece also addresses the intermingling of theater and life, and toward that end Noland rented Old West costumes which the gallery personnel wear. One gallery attendant sports a feather headdress, another clanks around in a pair of spurs and a holster with toy guns. They answer the phone with a folksy “howdy.” It makes you feel like you’re behind the scenes at Knott’s Berry Farm.

The gallery entrance houses yet another oddity--a work by Billy Al Bengston from 1961, on loan from the artist. The presence of work by Los Angeles’ most notoriously macho art cowboy makes a strange kind of sense here, and his “Gas Tank Tachometer” underscores the Road Warrior vibe that roars through the entire piece. Taking a wild ride through the junked landscape of America, “New West-Old West” suggests that our collective mind is like a hamster cage, padded with a thick, comforting layer of trash.

Luring Augustine Hetzler Gallery, 1330 4th St., Santa Monica, to Aug. 25.

America Revisited: When James David Thomas thinks of America, he sees something entirely different. Picking up where Frederick Edwin Church and Georgia O’Keeffe left off, he perceives it as a glorious symphony of light, space and color--a place where metaphysical mysteries abound, and there’s unlimited peace and quiet for whatever sort of soul searching one cares to engage in.

A landscape painter of the luminist persuasion, Thomas--like New York landscape hotshot Mark Innerst--paints very small, a technique that invests his images with a quality of intimacy. Working for the most part with a horizontal, rectangular format, Thomas draws you in close to examine images that occasionally get a bit fussy in their obsessive detail; moreover, the size and shape of his work sometimes makes you feel as though you’re glimpsing these landscapes through a mail slot. For the most part, however, his work exudes a peculiar blend of modesty and grandiosity that’s oddly moving.

Essentially, Thomas’ work is about light and the different ways it’s affected by weather. The varied landscapes of Southern California and Mexico provide him with wildly divergent scenery. We see Mt. Washington by night glimmering with the exotic beauty of Rio; San Miguel, Mexico, shrouded in morning fog; the Mojave at dawn. Thomas is an unabashed romantic in that these lyrical, idealized images are rooted in the idea that man’s relationship with nature is the same as it ever was--that there are still places in the world where one can escape the whooshing sound of freeways, that we’re capable of communing with our environment without feeling the drive to dominate it or convert it into cash. Thomas makes no allusion to the fact that our methods for aggressing against nature grow more diabolic with every passing year, and that the very mood he paints--the peaceful introspection that comes when one senses oneself as being in harmony with the universe--is on the endangered species list.

Tatistcheff Gallery, 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, to Sept. 1.

Compressed Time: Axel Hutte’s landscapes are equal parts artistic vision and technical feat. Massive Cibachrome prints of atmospheric European landscapes and architectural fragments, Hutte’s work is in the tradition of landscape photographers Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams in that it takes a grand view of nature that underscores the crushing weight of time and history.

In the most compelling piece in the show, an image titled “San Miniato,” we find ourselves in the courtyard of an ancient brick building. A low wall overlooks a vast, bizarre landscape that looks as though it could be a feeding ground for dinosaurs, or the surface of the moon. The sense of time and place in this scene is completed distorted, and consequently it has the effect of one of those time lines that make the Civil War seem a stone’s throw away from the cave dwellers of Altamira; it reminds us that man’s time on earth has been a mere blip on the radar screen.

Glenn-Dash Gallery, 962 N. La Brea Ave., to Aug. 11.