ART REVIEW : L.A.’s Passion for Privacy: Five Disparate Views

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently opened a brace of bracing solo exhibitions by five contemporary L.A. artists. The shows conspire, surely unintentionally, to address one of Los Angeles’ most salient, least noticed characteristics--its passion for privacy.

Los Angeles is famous as a media capital full of publicity-hungry exhibitionists aching to see their fantasies realized before an audience of countless voyeurs who trek to cineplexes or vegetate before the tube. In numerical and spiritual reality it’s not the phantom performers who count, but the watchers. They are the people fulfilling the bedrock L.A. dream of living in a place of one’s own and doing their thing undisturbed. Virtually everything about this town contributes to privacy--from its anonymous vastness and detached houses to its paucity of places for casual public socializing.

There is no intended theme that binds these five shows together. They are simply exhibitions promised to artists who received the museum’s Young Talent Award, which was given from 1963 to ’86. The artists on view are the last of the winners to have their work exhibited.

At that level the event feels like a late spring clean-up of unfinished business. Organized by members of LACMA’s modern and contemporary curatorial staff, the shows could be an occasion for some predictable parochial grousing about why the museum doesn’t do more for local art more often.

That’s an old tune and a true one, but whistling it again tends to distract from the wonderful Angeltown poetics that waft naturally from this work. They rhyme into an intimate epic about a megalopolis that really has no mainstream. Despite eddies in the Zeitgeist or currents of fashion, this is a place where every artist--like every other citizen--can act out his most cherished pipe dream. Channel your past life as court sculptor to an Egyptian Pharaoh or the West Coast rep of Andy Warhol’s Factory and it’s OK with Los Angeles. The town may ignore you but it won’t stop you.

Of the quintet, Ilene Segalove is closest to Tinseltown’s fashionable media-as-art image. She makes funny videos, the latest of which were not yet available for review at a press preview. But a series of a half-dozen poster-like photomontages gets to the core of her sensibility.

Contrasting the impersonal posture of a conceptualist like Barbara Kruger, Segalove deals with the quirky relationship between media, art, history and the havoc their mix causes to the naive receiving mind. Her “Meditation Breeds Discrimination” is a wacky melange of Van Gogh self-portraits, Kirk Douglas’ impersonation of the artist, snippets of Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in “On the Town” and assorted memorabilia. Segalove lyricizes the media, adding text that reads: “Everything I ever knew haunts me in a memory stew.”

Gifford Myers probes the poignant eccentricity of the Southland’s vernacular architecture in ceramic sculpture so small that they might serve as brooches. They depict everything from faux Mediterranean to Valley Swimming Pool Sybaritic. Some houses sit uneasily on the edge of the planet, others are targets of tornadoes. They look like those myriad dwellings we all glimpse from the freeway, igniting both uneasy fears of insignificance and longings for intimate invisibility.

Myers contrasts his own miniaturized scale in big, colorful tiled balls that, like some of the houses, imply apocalypse and tweak our love of illusion.

The potential isolation of L.A. life is an invitation to eccentricity. After all, this is the place Simon Rodia built the Watts Towers. John Frame takes up the tradition in small, exquisitely executed sculptural tableaux, often in wood. The very personification of local idiosyncratic individuality, Frame looks like a crafty folk artist living somewhere between the medieval morality play and commedia dell’arte.

In nearly 100 small pieces, he uses the classic memento mori to remind us that all is vanity. That’s another old tune that Frame gives new life to with a combination of revivalist Gothic carver craftsmanship and surreal absurdity worthy of dream-seers from Giorgio de Chirico to William Wiley.

The rather oddly all-male cast of Frame’s world is populated with figures metamorphosing from men to sculpture, architecture and puppets, and back to the trees from whence they came. His long-nosed jesters and beagle-jowled priests are at once pompous and naive because they don’t quite realize how precarious everything is. Frame crucifies rationality in “Tell My Bones I Am Poured Out Like Water.” In “Fishermen Lost in the Land,” he reminds us we are alone on the ship of fools.

Hanging almost unseen above the fray of his rather puritanical purgatory is a plaque carved with the word “Focus,” another with the admonition “Balance.”

Living in the L.A. of self-elected exile permits one to snub history. Two painters here have ignored it to their profit. If German-born Roger Herman had taken the chronicle of abstract art from Kandinsky to Pollock as the map of a linear endgame, he probably would not have done the three wonderful paintings on view here.

The oversize compositions tend to resemble early, much smaller works by noted New York Abstract Expressionists like Ad Reinhardt. They have the teeming, colorful exuberant qualities those artists exhibited while they were still young and searching. Herman gets the same excitement into purely abstract compositions that nonetheless have the feel of a bustling patchwork crowd in a park on a sunny Sunday.

Suppose Sabina Ott had thought about resemblances that could be spotted between her painting and earlier work by Ed Moses. She might have been paralyzed by her parallel emphasis on craftsmanship and even the use of floral patterns as a leitmotif.

Instead, she plowed ahead in Post-Modernist fashion. She lets raw wood show through clouded, waxy encaustics that surround rose motifs carved into the paint to come up with something of gentle strength and distinction.

These five shows tell us important things about the unique metabolism of the L.A. aesthetic. It’s cyclical, muffles time, induces dreams, craft and refinement. It produces bumper crops of artists who go their way whistling.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Aug. 23. Closed Mondays .