A Double Dip of 20th-Century Anxiety

Roland Reiss makes plastic boxes containing miniaturized slices of his ruminations. There are mazes of mystery surrounding a dead naked girl, innocent dancing school studios where the ceiling fell in, starchy corporate suits terminally humiliated behind impassive faces. Here are morality plays and eschatological anxieties about Japanese dragon robots.

Peter Alexander has recently made sooty black drawings and paintings that release the demons of an imagination that stumbled into the L.A. night and saw its solace and evil.

Taken together they are two of the most revelatory exhibitions of work by ranking L.A. artists seen here all season. Neither man, although hardly ignored, has ever gotten quite the respect he deserves. Aside from that they could scarcely be more unlike.

Reiss is a fallen-away abstract painter who, since the ‘70s, has functioned as a thoughtful cultural archeologist prying artifacts from his gray matter and setting them forth dispassionately. He provides the evidence. We make up the story. He is probably a moralist.

His exhibition is a 17-year survey handsomely and overwhelmingly installed in the Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, under the sponsorship of the ever-admirable Fellows of Contemporary Art. Everything about it marks an event to be reckoned with. It will travel to three other venues and comes with a particularly handsome catalogue. It tells everything that needs knowing about art and artist except his age. He is 62.

The show includes 52 works, including several on ecological themes housed in the neighboring Junior Arts Center. It’s a lot to digest considering the visual and intellectual challenge posed by the work. Reiss was once a votary of Abstract Expressionist master Clyfford Still but was disenchanted after being unable to see his life in his abstract work.

He became an early Postmodernist, grafting assemblage to conceptualism. He made boxes full of realistic objects, miniaturized and mainly cast by his own hand, everything from collie dogs to hot dogs. Probably had something to do with early experience making dioramas. The tableaux are thus autobiographical.

The earliest are literally based on a murder that took place on campus when he taught at the University of Colorado in the mid-’70s. Then came “The Dancing Lessons” and “Morality Plays” suites. Both concern domestic life. Not too surprising from an artist who was then married with six kids.

The work is autobiographical but the intimate and anecdotal implications of that only scratch the surface. Reiss’ autobiography also includes what he reads and thinks about society and art, so a dancing lesson becomes a metaphor of the way we socialize and sexualize kids through polite coercion. The parlors of the “Morality Plays” become ego-theaters where absent antagonists bicker bitterly about ethical and material values.

It’s probably significant that his best life-size piece is “The Castle of Perseverance,” an entire living room where everything down to cake, furniture and TV dinners is made of particle board. Its starchy bourgeoise good taste is punctuated with little ritual messes made by birthday-party kids and parents who knock back a couple at the bar to try to rekindle romance by sharing a smoke.

Other big pieces seem to over-reach themselves, like a set of figures that seem to challenge Jon Borofsky. Despite his usual small scale, Reiss makes very ambitious art. Sometimes you can’t tell if he’s acting as a neutral seer of the Zeitgeist or shrewd spotter of trends. His “History Lessons” of the mid-’80s show that the limits of his temperament lie somewhere short of Neo-Expressionism.

Some of Robert Longo gets into Reiss’ “Adult Fairy Tales” but these contemplations of yuppie greed and crushing corporate cool seem like an authentic update of “The Dancing Lessons.” Reiss is good at superego matters.

He also does better with Expressionism in his most recent “FX” series. Involved with tiresomely current artistic fascination with the media, Reiss’ version has chilling distinction. Basically, it’s about special-effects movie sets with their lurid colors, mechanical monsters and changes in scale that make your reach for the Pepto-Bismol.

It’s about the world in a decade gone out of whack. Its concern with high-tech, artificiality and robotics echo lurking fears of the growing power of Japan, a miniature country that turned into a giant.

Reiss’ work can be pedantic and excessively gabby but there is not a section of it without mesmerizing engagement, wry wit and eventual insight.

If Reiss is a cultural analyst, Alexander is almost pure Romantic. His Corcoran Gallery show of new paintings and drawings of L.A. at night constitute a breakthrough gained by a fresh synthesis.

For several years, the Venice artist has made bird’s-eye views of the city’s myriad yellow lights converging on the purple distance. Now he’s brought it down to the street combining that vision with what he saw in some blue landscapes based on hallucinatory memories of a trip to India.

The result are black-and-white paintings and small pastels that are the lotus-land equivalent of Joyce’s “Daedalus in Night Town.”

We seem to see through the eyes of someone whose devils have driven him into deserted pre-dawn streets. In “Phillipe’s” vision is blurred, lights blob out of focus, signs are unreadable. Asphalt is liquefied into dirty drowning water. Everything is malevolent, unclear and magical.

You amble forward in a druggy haze guided only by receding lines of illumination and somehow wind up in the downtown hills near Mt. Washington. At first, the silhouetted hill is comforting and wise, like the apparition of a Chinese sage. Then a headlight appears, an evil eye, hunting you down. You move on and finally find yourself in a place called “Marcus” where you learn the terrified freedom of the homeless and derelict.

Only about six of these images actually work, but that’s good enough when you’re up to something new. Clearly, Alexander had Ed Ruscha’s black paintings on the brain as well as Ed Moses’ abstractions. He tried to bring the mythical qualities of the one together with the optical force of the other.

When he manages, the result is a blend that seems dreamed while remaining entirely true to visual fact. The result is a revelation of an evil, haunted L.A. no one has quite shown us before.

Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., to Jan. 19; closed Mondays (213) 485-4581. James Corcoran Gallery, 1327 5th St., Santa Monica, to Saturday, closed Mondays; (310) 451-4666.