ART REVIEW : Merz’s Room Is More Than Four Walls

The new site-specific installation by German artist Gerhard Merz at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, reinterprets history through a wholly contemporary lens.

Handsome, austere, even cold in the frozen whiteness of the fluorescent expanse of space, “Archipittura” is based most obviously on such early 20th-Century styles of clean, spare, reductive painting and sculpture as Russian Constructivism and Dutch De Stijl, as well as on International Style architecture.

The installation, organized by curator Howard Fox, marks Merz’s American museum debut. It occupies one big ground-floor room in LACMA’s Anderson Building, and one smaller room to the side.

The big room is split by a wall. The little room is made by another wall that separates it from the big room. Each of these spaces and their defining walls, as well as the painted and sculptural components in and on them, has been extrapolated from the geometry of the architecture of the building.

For instance, the wall in the big room divides the space into two unequal sides, one considerably larger than the other. Yet, the division has not been randomly made. Scrutiny reveals that the wall that splits the big room has been located on an axis that matches a visible seam in the gallery ceiling--a divide that also marks a prominent structural element of the building itself. Merz’s wall makes that hidden structure visible, while setting the stage for further incident.

On each side of this wall a huge, horizontal rectangle has been painted. Each black rectangle is itself divided in two by a vertical, cubic rod of shiny stainless steel affixed to its surface. Like the wall, these sculptural elements have not been randomly placed. Each has been located on the painted rectangle at a position determined by the center point of a doorway opposite.

With logical and metered steps such as these, Merz draws your attention away from the typically scattered, distracted experience of architecture and toward the specificity of an interior gallery wall; then, he leads you to what is on the wall; finally, he sends you back out into the room. Perplexing information makes itself known, adds up, suddenly makes sense and, finally, gives you a gentle push into another area of the installation.

You find yourself repeatedly crisscrossing the terrain. In order to be fully seen, “Archipittura” demands your exploration of space. Along the way it records the accumulation of a certain kind of knowledge.

“For Mies Van Der Rohe” begins the legend starkly printed in large black letters along one wall of the main room; wittily, the homage to the builder of the Bauhaus temple then skips the gaping void of a doorway to declare Mies’s famous dictum, “Less is more. MCMXCII.” Modern Miesian classicism meets the ancient kind, its antiquity acknowledged by the use of Roman numerals to date the work in 1992. Merz’s rooms conjure a Western artistic tradition of rational geometry, which also winds back through the perspective systems of the Renaissance to ancient Greece.

The installation’s title is a fanciful conflation of two Italian words: architettura (architecture) and pittura (painting). What begins as architecture soon becomes painting, finally merging into “archipittura’--a “something else” whose closest historical precedent is likely to be found in the famous Proun paintings of the Russian avant-gardist El Lissitzky.

Trained, like Merz, as an architect, Lissitzky in the 1920s created abstract paintings utilizing rectilinear forms in subdued colors. Often, these pictures retain the suggestion of aerial views or projections of architectural structures hovering above open and limitless planes.

Lissitzky also translated several of these initially two-dimensional images into actual three-dimensional spaces, small environments he called Proun rooms. Merz’s rooms clearly recall those long-lost constructions. And, just as the printed text across one wall is a plain homage to Mies Van Der Rohe, it’s tempting to suspect that Merz’s small chamber is meant as a distant homage to El Lissitzky. Uniting tools of the painter and the architect, it contains a long, horizontal canvas, painted an earthy russet, on which rests a big, stainless steel T-square.

As nothing in Merz’s work can be taken for granted, this painting and T-square combination also suggests the abstract paintings of Barnett Newman, its single stripe or “zip” formed by the reflective steel bar of the T-square, which vertically bisects the painted field. And the width of the bar seems to have been used as the measure by which he determined the unusual depth of the painting’s stretcher bars, which constitute a picture’s “architectural” support.

Like its cousins in the larger room, this bar’s placement on the canvas is aligned with the doorway opposite, its reflective surface once again leading you away from the painting and back out into the next room. As always, Merz keeps you pinballing through the space.

Plainly, the abundant historical precedents encountered at every turn in his installation have been filtered through a sensibility that is distinctly contemporary in feeling. Minimalist art of the 1960s and 1970s--notably, the period when Merz was studying architecture at Germany’s Akademie der Bildenden Kunste (he was born in Munich in 1947)--is everywhere invoked.

American artists such as Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, whose work likewise blurred distinctions among hitherto discrete mediums like painting and sculpture, are recalled by prominent elements of Merz’s installation--the paired rows of stark, fluorescent ceiling lights that dominate the space, for example, or the long concrete bench that is composed from five horizontal planks atop six cubes.

“Archipittura” can be productively thought of as a Minimalist interpretation of an El Lissitzky Proun room. Unlike its predecessor, it’s not a dynamic space, meant to lift your mind and spirit to another plane. Instead, the Merz room seems meant to locate you firmly on this plane--to ground you. Merz looks back in order to remake tradition, bringing it to a place from which it is repeatedly led astray.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through May 17. Closed Mondays.