ART REVIEWS : Lost in Thought Pondering Borofsky’s ‘String’

Jonathan Borofsky’s first installation in Los Angeles since his 1986 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art is a light-handed tour de force. Titled “String of Consciousness” and installed at the multilevel Hilldale complex of the Margo Leavin Gallery, his theatrical, multimedia extravaganza is freewheeling yet purposeful. Sometimes puzzling, often frustrating and always haunting, it refuses to tell its audience what to think as it gets us to do just that.

Ambitious, open-ended and at times perversely visionary, Borofsky’s befuddling constellation of objects, images and sounds is a captivating exploration of the beliefs and feelings that either hold us together in groups or divide us into opposed factions.

The 50-year-old artist’s installation consists of unfinished sculptures, a sexually explicit painting, 13 fragmentary sketches, a drawing made with a welder, an irregularly shaped mirror, giant wooden numbers, hastily scribbled sentences, hundreds of feet of string, a mural of a distorted Israeli flag, scattered power tools, a flying barefoot boy, primordial biomorphic forms and 11 continuously playing music videos, among many other things. Despite its material diversity, the installation feels spare. Not exactly reductive or minimal, it has the mysterious presence of an intensely focused idea.

More interesting to listen to than to look at, Borofsky’s latest project encourages members of its audience to get lost in their own thoughts. His static pieces don’t have the aura that we normally associate with autonomous objects of art. Instead, they function like loaded fragments of meaning. They only make sense when they are brought into contact with other components of a fluid, narrative structure.

The music and the viewer are the essential components of this structure. After a few minutes, the objects and images in the exhibition fall to the background, becoming the stage setting for a drama that plays out wholly inside each visitor’s head. Your attention floats around the gallery, momentarily settling on single works, but ultimately following the invisible movements of your mind.

Guided by the music, a synergistic whole begins to take shape. In it, intimacy and anonymity collide. Personal integrity and absolute facelessness collapse into an uneasy, powerfully disturbing fusion.

The mesmerizing music that integrates the exhibition and infiltrates your consciousness is performed by Jonnie Hitler, the artist’s dark alter ego. Part child and part archetypal fascist, Borofsky’s musical persona sings songs backward. Rather than making a joke of the demonic, subliminal messages supposedly hidden in rock ‘n’ roll, his original but unintelligible music is irresistibly engaging.

Borofsky’s recordings confound sense and reduce precise utterances to utter gibberish. They never, however, degenerate into meaninglessness or incoherence. Instead, the abstractness of his 11 strangely compelling songs allows us to watch our psyches struggling with themselves, indulging unsavory impulses while resisting their insidious influence. “String of Consciousness” thus charts the connections between madness and rationality, morality and mindlessness. It fuses seduction and ugliness to stimulate thinking.

Margo Leavin Gallery, 817 N. Hilldale Ave., (310) 273-0603, through Dec. 23 . Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Strode’s Dioramas: Ten miniature dioramas by Thaddeus Strode invite us into the fantasy-filled world of model-making. Lonely little streets, meticulously detailed shacks and quaint figurines hanging laundry on a clothesline recall the tiny model trains that fascinate children and some adults unwilling to give up that part of their childhood.

Strode, however, is uninterested in the fantasies of omnipotence and the dreams of absolute control that often give model-making its allure. He doesn’t fabricate elaborate scenarios to maintain a fragile sense of illusory order in a world otherwise gone wholly out of whack. Instead, the young, L.A.-based artist uses dioramas to give form to the raw irrationality at the root of everyday existence.

Atop 10 rudimentary plywood pedestals at 1301 Gallery, his constructions, collectively titled “Brain Capers,” constitute a weird world in which dumb humor intersects with penetrating insight, and playful irreverence gives way to philosophical conundrums. Like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Strode’s art conspires with childhood to demonstrate that what usually passes for reality is as flimsy and fictitious--and not as interesting--as any curious kid’s daydream.

In “Intovica/the Road to Ompac,” eight uniformed train attendants pirouette, swoon and frolic on an isolated, nighttime highway in front of an abandoned soda stand. “An Empty House (Ever, Everglades)” consists of a mossy, root-infested and cobweb-filled swamp in the middle of which sits a solitary shack. Out of its tiny roof sprout eight identical, oversize heads of a screaming comic-book villain. “I Hope Beglobia Isn’t Catching” shows a cut-out comic monster trapped in a cage made of real sticks and twine. At its feet, a tiny alpine couple from a model train set hang out their tiny laundry and prepare their miniature picnic.

Strode’s wacky dioramas reinvest the ordinary world with a sense of childlike wonder. They ask us to momentarily suspend disbelief and to entertain the idea that appearances deceive, or at least fail to tell the whole truth. His homemade constructions show that facts and rationality cannot account for the world’s complex inconsistencies, and certainly not the disruptions in sense that enliven creative minds.

Strode’s small models can be thought of as three-dimensional “studies” for his larger, representational paintings. In both, fantasy and reality intermingle as ordinary things shift positions with mere possibilities. On the highly artificial surfaces of both his dioramas and paintings, facts playfully give way to the imagination’s capacity to discover the extraordinary in the mundane.

1301 Gallery, 1301 Franklin St., No. 1, Santa Monica, (310) 828-9133, through Dec. 23. Closed Sunday through Wednesday.

The Melody Lingers: Mariella Simoni’s six compact paintings on beveled wood panels combine the solidity of cement building blocks with the compositional structures of flags from countries we seem to recognize, but cannot exactly identify. They insist upon the physical properties of their materials, yet evoke sign-systems that elude comprehension. The Italian-born artist’s abstractions at Shoshana Wayne Gallery are both diminutive and bold, compressed and expansive, formally reductive and wildly excessive.

Simoni’s paintings thrive on the tension she creates by defying the order implied by their four framing edges. Their fields of oddly unnatural colors seldom align horizontally or vertically. Instead, they angle off at sharp slants and arbitrary diagonals.

Across these off-balanced geometries, Simoni often builds up thick swathes of paint that look as if they were applied with a brush twice the size of the paintings themselves. The speed suggested by these slowly built-up, artificial gestures is held in check by the seductive details of the translucent surfaces they partially obscure.

Simoni’s little paintings stick in your mind like a melody your memory keeps replaying despite your desire to forget it. Her single large painting, made up of four horizontal bars held in place by a thick underline of rusty pigment, reinforces the metaphor of music. Like an empty sheet waiting for a score, it quietly contrasts with the jam-packed vitality of her smaller works.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 1454 Fifth St., Santa Monica, (310) 451-3733, through Nov. 30 . Closed Sundays and Mondays.