ART REVIEWS : ‘LAX’: L.A. Is Written All Over It

Spanning seven museums and galleries from East Los Angeles to Santa Monica, fussed over by upward of 12 curators, and packed with the work of more than 50 of the region’s most interesting painters, sculptors, videomakers, photographers and performance artists, “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition” is as frenetic as its namesake during the holiday season.

That frenzy, however, is part of the plan, a perfect antidote to the city’s stubborn reputation as the slack paradise of the culturally dormant. Everybody who lives in L.A. already knows that there is nothing laid-back about this city or its cultural scene. But this first installment of what is to be an ongoing, multi-institutional biennial is as much for everybody out there (with the impressive catalogue serving as evidence) as it is for Angelenos. And by and large, it is a great success.

“LAX” was spearheaded by the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and so it is only fitting that its linchpin is the large, group exhibition at Barnsdall Park. Divided between the gallery’s lofty spaces and the more intimate rooms of the Junior Arts Center is the work of 14 artists: Lisa Adams, Cliff Benjamin, Dominique Blain, Carole Caroompas, Karen Carson, Robert Gil de Montes, John McCracken, Mark Niblock-Smith, Susan Rankaitis, Leonard Seagal, Peter Shelton, John Valadez, Patssi Valdez and Kim Yasuda.

The show opens magnificently, with Yasuda’s installation--a gossamer corridor of white string that begins outside the gallery, traverses the lobby and continues beyond the back doors. At the end of the gallery, the swaying strings are slipped between a pair of video monitors, one featuring a slow-motion image of a woman crocheting, the other of another woman unraveling her work.

“Either Here or There” is a deeply generous piece, opening the tight knots into which art is too often wrapped. The troubling distinctions between the vaunted spaces of art and the quotidian spaces of everyday life are refused. We are made privy to the artist’s sense of the futility of her work, while we celebrate her desire to create, nonetheless.

Yasuda’s installation is multiply resonant; the same cannot be said for the Barnsdall exhibition as a whole. This is a criticism neither of the individual artists nor their works; while one can quibble endlessly about choices, the selections are uniformly excellent. Still, there is something troubling about a show whose only visible curatorial strategy is playing it safe.

This is a problem endemic to the biennial format--typically curated by committee (here, project director Edward Leffingwell and Cultural Affairs Department curators Noel Korten, Scott Canty and Jeffrey Herr) and without a theme. But, this is not only a biennial without a theme: This is a show without an identity.

There are seven men and seven women. There are minimal forms, conceptual installations, expressionist paintings, Dadaist quips, surreal objects, abstract imagery, multicultural histories, photo-based sculpture and feminist humor. All the bases are covered, which turns out to be the riskiest game in town. We wind up with little more than a disjointed compendium of some of L.A.’s greatest hits.

While this speaks to the rich diversity of the work produced here, it makes for a curiously cool show. In this context energies are dampened rather than redoubled. What one would have wished for--indeed, what one counts on curators for--is to stimulate interplay between the works, to initiate dialogues, trialogues, stand-offs, alliances. Why else bring the artists--and us--together?

Placing McCracken’s polished, stainless steel forms in the center of the room so they reflect the works around them is a start, but only a start. The biennials of the future must be places where ideas about Los Angeles art are not only announced, but generated.

This effort begins in the smaller rooms of the Junior Arts Center. It is difficult to imagine anything more different than Benjamin’s dark take on sexuality and the “natural”; Blain’s powerful, photo-based installation about labor, culture and the culture of labor; and Niblock-Smith’s funny but heartbreaking objects, which plead for the persistence of beauty.

Their juxtaposition sparks surprising emotions, reflections and tensions. A deeply meditative mood is sustained, and then heightened. This is, of course, no coincidence. The curatorial intelligence such a juxtaposition evinces should set the standard for the next go-round.

L.A. Municipal Art Gallery and Junior Arts Center Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 485-4581, through Jan. 24. Closed Mondays.

Karen Carson and Jacci Den Hartog--guest curators of the wonderful, seven-person show at LACE--seem quite uninterested in pleasing everyone and placating whoever is left over. Their focus is unabashedly narrow, their selection of artists admirably idiosyncratic.

For Carson and Den Hartog, art seems to have something to do with the artist’s desire to create a private world, and with the viewer’s desire to slip under someone else’s skin--if only for a few moments.

Slipping under Sally Parsons’ skin means hitting the floor. There, at about ankle height, sway her tiny, sparkling, manically festooned sculptures--or are they texts? In Parsons’ world, words become three-dimensional objects, and pretty flimsy ones at that. Snatched from their comfortable positions on the page and riled by their newfound fragility, these little things shout, “GO AWAY,” or “RUN,” while wrapping themselves in protective cloaks of sequins, beads, ribbons and rosettes.

Like Parsons, Brian Mains renders absurd all faith in predetermined systems and categories. His large paintings are luscious and dreadful--headless, flayed bodies bound by rope-wielding angels; garlands of pink intestines intertwined with spiked vines of the most exquisite lavender.

The symmetry of classical religious imagery is fractured into a kaleidoscope of horrors. Yet Mains’ touch is so coolly unimpassioned that there is no room for catharsis. These paintings are as sly as the poker-faced angels inhabiting them.

Caryl Davis’ small, sculptural forms are also sly, poised on the floor like visitors from an alien (but soigne) planet. With their beret-like “bodies” of crocheted angora, and their tapering legs sleekly encased in the same, these dark, furry objects toy with the myths of femininity--the female as black widow, the comfort-soaked routine of “women’s” work. Yet this can scarcely be called feminist art; the only logic to which it ascribes is its own, luxuriant materiality.

Michael Pierzynski’s alternate universe is collapsed into little thises and odd thats, the throwaway flotsam and everyday jetsam that engulf us, unbidden and unnoticed. Here, however, the ordinary is uncanny. Cast from wads of gum, pieces of fruit, coral reefs taken from aquarium seascapes and other found objects, Pierzynski’s mini-sculptures are carefully arranged on high tables. They look like specimens (radioactive, perhaps) you don’t want to touch.

Steve Thomsen shares Pierzynski’s archeological take, but his work is more prosaic--faked fossil slabs embedded with hair rollers, clothespins and toy soldiers. Though Thomsen’s technique is impressive, there is a certain predictability here. Likewise with Margaret Ecker, whose small, wooden boxes filled with old postcards, milagros and bits of printed fabric feel familiar, though I’ve never seen them before.

It is impossible to imagine Joyce Lightbody’s musical scores ever becoming familiar. As well as functioning as directives for choral groups and carillon bells, these are extraordinary visual documents. Obsessively annotated with symbols and letters, fastidiously collaged with thousands of bits of stamps from around the world--color-coded, number-loaded, graphed and charted--these works on paper are encyclopedic, impenetrable and impossibly seductive.

LACE, 1804 Industrial St., (213) 624-5650 , through Dec. 24. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

On view at USC’s Fisher Gallery is an ambitious, multimedia installation by Margaret Lazzari and Ken Goldberg. “Power and Water” delves beneath the skin of Southern California’s cultural identity to explore the technologies, personalities and ideologies that keep it supple.

The transformation of a desert into a mythical site of swimming pools, sunshine and the good life, defined and refined by Hollywood, was (and continues to be) a Herculean task. The Southland’s two-century-long story is the story of water--harnessed, rechanneled and exploited, from the Mission era’s dams and channels to the monumental Los Angeles Aqueduct and All-American Canal.

Lazzari and Goldberg transform this history into a series of large-scale paintings. They depict legendary water engineer William Mulholland; a shimmering swimming pool and an overflowing fountain; and a garland of oranges, made juicy by irrigation, surrounding an image of a hydro-electric tower ferrying power generated by the same water.

Accompanying each of the paintings is an excerpt from literary or historic texts that reaffirms the installation’s ostensibly critical stance. Overlaying some of them are crude paintings on transparent vinyl panels, which have been generated by the elaborate computer system and motor-driven plotter that occupy the center of the gallery.

There are two problems here. First, little of the information is new; for those who have seen Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” none of this is breaking news. Second, the reasons for introducing computer-based technologies into this context remain unclear.

Beyond this, there is the contrast between the heroic age of mechanical drawing and the current ubiquity of computer-aided design. For those still making their way through the intricacies of the cybernetic universe, however, the connections aren’t all that obvious. “Water and Power” seems, in the end, more like two separate projects than one.

If “sweet” were not such a debased word, it would be the word to describe “Bibliography,” Buzz Spector’s new installation (also at USC). Spector is well-known for manipulating books to make sculpture. Here, he conjures them to make poetry--quiet, thoughtful and, if not necessarily profound, then profoundly gentle.

A white shelf encircles the room. Thirty-one books are placed upon it at regular intervals. Poised on top, stuck in the middle or laid alongside each volume is a pair of eyeglasses--as if the reader had gotten up for a moment, soon to return and find her place. Above the shelf is a series of handwritten lists, chronicling all the books read by a single, unnamed individual over the course of a lifetime.

That is all Spector gives. As with any good poem, however, there is always more to be taken.

The patient reader of Spector’s inventory is rewarded with a glimpse into the life of another reader. That reader, at first a cipher, is transformed into a little girl; a little Jewish girl; a diligent student; a teen-ager fond of cooking; a knitter; a mystery fan; a mother, and a woman tired of cooking, confused about sex, worried about high blood pressure, brave enough to fight breast cancer and, then, to make peace with her own mortality.

“Books succeed, and lives fail,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Bibliography” succeeds, telling this sad but beautiful story with economy and grace.

Fisher Gallery, USC, 823 Exposition Blvd., (213) 740-4561, through Dec. 19. Closed Sunday and Monday.