ART REVIEWS : A Visit to an Expanded Notion of Place

“About Place,” a group exhibition at the Municipal Art Gallery and the Junior Arts Center is among the first of the interim year projects sponsored by the biennale “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition.” As far as large-scale “theme” shows go, this one is about as wide open as it gets.

The art assembled here deals with an expanded--indeed, elastic--notion of place: in terms of memory, fantasy, history, light, space and time. (This is only a partial list.) Surprisingly, it works--not because of an intelligible curatorial vision, but because the quality of the eight individual installations is, on the whole, quite high.

There are a few exceptions. Lilla LoCurto and William H. Outcault’s interactive installation attempts to dramatize the inevitably flawed nature of communication. Their piece, however, is interesting only on a theoretical level. Practically, it is untenable, as it hinges upon the simultaneous participation of three visitors, leaving most unaccompanied viewers frustrated.

Linda Nishio’s “Meta-Tation Gym”--a simulated aerobics studio complete with mats, towels and T-shirts embossed with queries about existential crisis--is operatic in terms of its ambitions, but bogged down by equal parts glibness and triteness.

Likewise consumed by a taste for the operatic is Erika Suderberg’s darkened chamber filled with illuminated paving stones, each collaged with images and texts. It conjures the cemetery, as well as the grid-like structure of urban space. It is, however, also overblown and thin.

The rest of the installations, by contrast, sacrifice neither conceptual rigor nor poetry. Linda Hudson’s whispered evocation of the perspectival logic of the gallery is emblematic. A gazing ball, a transparent image and hundreds of mirrored squares trap, reverse, erase and expand the light that carves the cruciform space. As in her finest work, Hudson reconciles asceticism and luxury, geometry and seduction.

Pauline Stella Sanchez’s poetry is more absurdist. Like peregrinations within the mind’s (crossed) eye, a massive circle of drawings on the floor wanders between doodled molecules and precise spatial renderings. In the center of all this rises a crown dripping with mushrooms, painted a neon yellow, like a sty on the eye or a ghost in the machine. Hanging on the wall is a single painting in the same neon yellow--a retinal afterimage, perhaps, or more likely a mirage.

T. Kelly Mason’s installation eschews mirages, and engages directly with the history of Olive Hill, where Barnsdall is located. As such, it is a model of site-specific work. A large, free-standing wall leaning against the gallery wall creates a triangular niche filled with abstract drawings based on architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s hollyhock motif. This is the protected space of reverie and creativity.

Outside, a series of self-consciously complex flow-charts attempts to make into science Wright’s individualist philosophy and patron Aline Barnsdall’s demands on behalf of the community. This is the public sphere of rationality and compromise. For Mason, architectural space has its own realities; yet perhaps more important, it is a frame for psychological, sociological and ideological space. Mason’s notion of “place” is both literal and metaphoric, private and expansive.

* Municipal Art Gallery and Junior Arts Center, Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 458-4581. Closed Mondays, through Jan. 30.

Compulsion to Repeat: Upon first glance, it seems as though Rodney Graham has pulled off a perfectly wicked Donald Judd imitation: a horizontal, shelf-like structure in gleaming blue lacquer on wood, as unexpressive an object as they come.

A closer look reveals a copy of Sigmund Freud’s “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” sandwiched into the sculpture. Judd’s literalist space is assaulted by the mind’s messy, metaphoric depths; or, alternately, Freud’s living treatise is forever trapped within the fossilized space of art.

Like Freud, Graham is enamored of all species of perversity and only the most elegant of systems. His work, currently on view at Angles Gallery, enacts Freud’s notion of “the compulsion to repeat,” transforming this compulsion into a game in which Graham is always the winner, always in control.

One knows, of course, what Freud would say about this particular kind of delusion, but Graham pays no mind. No text is sacrosanct to him, not even Freud’s Standard Edition, into which he once slipped his own, four-page insert.

Here, it is C. R. Mueller’s translation of George Buchner’s obscure novella “Lenz,” which Graham subjects to his eccentric systematics. Graham discovered that in the first few pages of the story there are two occasions of the phrase “through the forest.” By typesetting the first 1,434 words of Mueller’s translation so that they fall on five justified pages, with the first occurrence of the phrase falling at the end of Page 1, and the second occurrence at the end of Page 5, Graham creates a textual loop in which Page 5 may be forever joined to Page 2 thus short-circuiting the text and condemning poor Lenz to wander the snowy forest in perpetuity.

Graham’s “Machine for Reading Lenz” is a wood-and-brass mechanism in which the five pages are pressed between pieces of hinged glass, which can be spun on their axes, as self-contained as a globe. Typical of Graham’s work, the “Machine” is hysterical, claustrophobic, yet inviting. Indeed, Freud once noted that hysterics (as well as impostors) love to draw others into their delusional systems.

* Angles Gallery, 2230 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 396-5019. Closed Sundays and Mondays, through Jan. 15.