ART REVIEWS : Back to the Future of Abstract Painting

Colored light flows like a river and swings like a pendulum in Jennifer Steinkamp’s soundless video installation. Projected onto the bare floor of an unlighted gallery at Food House, it also rolls rhythmically, creating the impression that the ground is breathing.

In the 35-year-old, L.A.-based artist’s sixth solo show in as many years, the solid concrete on which you’re standing isn’t a firm foundation as much as a membrane of pulsating energy. It has the capacity to push your body up against the room’s four empty walls.

Walking into Steinkamp’s carefully controlled environment is a little like jumping back in time--to an era when a generation embraced the possibility that mind-bending hallucinogens would expand consciousness, open up thinking and promote social harmony.

After your eyes adjust to the darkness, however, it becomes clear that Steinkamp’s art doesn’t so much take you on a nostalgia trip back to the ‘60s as propel abstract painting into the future. Steinkamp’s object-less installation uses computer technology and digital laser discs to engender an experience that once was thought to be the exclusive property of formalist abstraction.

Her mesmerizing work consists of an all-over pattern of irregular shapes that flow in and out of focus in a continuous cycle. The two-dimensional shapes shift between being biomorphic figures on an indeterminate ground and elements indistinguishable from the ground itself.

In the same way that abstract painting dissolved the difference between content and form, Steinkamp’s projected field of light turns purely optical phenomena into a profoundly physical experience of formlessness. Painting’s fixed picture-plane and static materials are compellingly replaced by a swelling and heaving rectangle of light.

As anti-narrative as any non-representational image, her installation more effectively transforms a flat surface into an enigma. Contemporary painting, it turns out, is less about pigment and canvas than perception and cognition.

* Food House, 2220 Colorado Blvd., Building No. 4, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1030, through July 31. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

Revolting Developments: A glistening, skinned cow’s skull--made of super-realistic synthetics--steals the show in Damien Hirst’s first West Coast exhibition. Sitting in a pool of fake blood on the shiny floor of Stuart Regen Projects, it makes the two real skinned lambs suspended in a pair of formaldehyde-filled aquariums look benign by comparison. Two baby sharks, also floating lifelessly in smaller fish tanks, seem even more approachable, if not quite playful.

In this decisive hierarchy of sensationalistic revulsion, six colorful abstract paintings achieve the lowest rank. At best anodyne and at worst innocuous, they appear to be added as an afterthought, as if to remind us that we’re in an art gallery and not on a set for a Hollywood horror movie.

The manipulative positioning of the 28-year-old British artist’s installation is intentional. It is, in fact, Hirst’s forte. As a showman, few can beat his ability to grab your attention, turn your stomach, and leave you feeling empty.

His is an aesthetic of clinical morbidity. In it, strong feelings are neutralized and intense responses are distanced. In the end, all we are left with is a sterilized environment from which even irony and absurdity have been eliminated because they’re too uncertain and ambiguous. Even the messes in Hirst’s works are squeaky clean.

The excessively calibrated machinations that signal his strengths as a showman also mark his downfall as an artist. Hirst’s works don’t expand the vocabulary or increase the experiences available to contemporary art. They simply aspire and strive to fit in with what’s already accepted.

Like a smart marketing campaign, Hirst’s pieces combine some of Jeff Koons’ offensive hyper-sanitization with a bit of Matthew Barney’s antiseptic obsessiveness. They also try to bring Joel Peter-Witkin’s sick photographs into three dimensions, overlaying them with a whiff of Francis Bacon’s dark carnality, as if this might give them a trace of historical legitimacy.

If this perniciousness makes it easy for collectors and curators to understand Hirst’s art, it also exposes his unwillingness to take real chances--to do anything more than find a safe niche in a shrinking marketplace. His work has an outdated ‘80s feel, a stale cynicism and a nostalgia for greed that turns sour even as it is perfectly preserved in poisonous chemicals.

* Stuart Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through July 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Lonesome Highways: The lonely twang of an acoustic guitar, the chirp of crickets and the whistle of passing freeway traffic fill Terry Allen’s dimly lit installation with a ghostly cacophony. Wandering around its scattered bricks, boards, an inner-tube and a single shoe--things you might find on the side of a highway--you feel some of the desolation and aimlessness of the open road.

Titled “Voices in the Wilderness,” Allen’s mixed-media works at L.A. Louver Gallery have the haunting presence of a stage set that has been abandoned by actors who are supposed to bring the inanimate props to life with a meaningful story. Each viewer is burdened not only with the responsibility of envisioning the actions that were meant to take place, but also with figuring out what went wrong to prevent them from happening.

The atmosphere of dashed hopes or shattered dreams hangs over Allen’s installation, which consists of a poignant combination of large landscape drawings, audio speakers and roadside detritus. The show’s penchant for gloom, however, is buoyed by a stubborn faith in starting over. Rather than memorialize a lost past or mourning a future that will never transpire, the 50-year-old, Santa Fe-based artist offers a tough yet touching celebration of simply keeping at it.

The voices in the wilderness that whisper and drift throughout his installation are not only the itinerant sounds on the four looped tapes that continually play in the background, but the freewheeling memories the entire ensemble evokes in your head.

More open-ended and less literal than many of the works he has made, “Voices in the Wilderness” abandons its visitors to a small version of the vast, American landscape that is crisscrossed by highways and side-roads. Here, escape proves to be illusory as your personal demons pursue you through a wasteland that is as anonymous as it is intimate and as barren as it is beautiful.

* L.A. Louver Gallery, 77 Market St., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through July 17. Closed Sundays and Mondays.