A Bare-Bones Look at Cyberspace Totems

At Thomas Solomon’s Garage, Rainer Ganahl puts on a low-tech demonstration of high-tech’s staging of information. If this sounds labyrinthine, it is, despite the simple visual geometries that predominate.

Ganahl uses the tropes of computer software to transform architectural space into cognitive space. A painted image of a hypertext window, which depicts a fragment of the contents page of Gilles Deleuze’s book “Coldness and Cruelty,” floats sideways up the wall. A thin vertical line traverses the wall opposite, turning it too into a blank computer screen.

Yet this line is unstable, as is everything in cyberspace. Next it becomes a disembodied, Barnett Newman “zip,” just as the oversized black and white pixels painted on the adjacent wall become a prototypical Modernist grid.

This transformation happens as if by rote. The latter image is also a schematization of “snap to grid,” a computer command that guarantees precision at the cost of limiting the user’s range of motion. That this cybernetic operation is an apt metaphor for Modernism’s seductive and ultimately mechanistic nature tells you something about Ganahl’s attraction to and repulsion for the computer. It also tells you about his penchant for conceptual gymnastics.

The most revealing element in this spare installation is the word “toolbox,” painted onto the wall as if it were a button in a graphical user interface. This word conjures not merely the personal computer’s contrived user-friendliness, but also Deleuze’s notion of theory.

Deleuze insists that theory is not sacrosanct, that its use-value fluctuates according to the user and the task at hand. Ganahl is wary of this rhetoric of utility and its falsely democratic implications. Like Modernism (and the digital revolution, for that matter), theory remains tricky and firmly lodged in the domain of the elites. Ganahl’s work is itself far less accessible than it appears. But it makes clear that theory, like any other system, is reducible to information; the hitch is that information produces us, rather than vice versa.

* Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N. Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through April 13. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Beauty and Intrigue: “Paris Green,” the title of Amy Drezner’s new installation at Marc Foxx Gallery, refers to an artificial pigment first made in Germany in 1814, which was widely admired for its purity and brilliance. The material is now used chiefly as an insecticide, as its fine dust is poisonous, releasing arsenic-laced hydrogen that attacks the skin, eyes, nose, throat and lungs.

This information is nowhere present here. In fact, what is present is completely elusive: a plastic sphere filled with feathers; 7,000 yards of fishing wire, knitted into a dense coil; a silhouette covered with chunks of mirrored glass; a thin patchwork veil thrown over a heap of chairs; and four photographs of green-tinged wallpaper, protected by transparent sheets of pressed vinyl.

And yet, this elusiveness isn’t frustrating. If Drezner gives us nothing, she also gives us precisely what we want: beauty, danger and magic. The bits of mirror are sharp and malevolent, the veil obscures what is already enigmatic and the knitted wire is illuminated by a flashlight, as if to call attention to its delectable madness.

This is Drezner’s second solo show. The first time around, she insisted upon a more explicit narrative, but this time she accepts with grace her tendency toward obscurity. Indeed, fine threads tie the disparate pieces of this stunning installation together, threads so thoroughly tangled that they create a layer of intrigue. These are not unsolved mysteries, but deliberately, defiantly unsolvable ones.

* Marc Foxx Gallery, 3026 Nebraska Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 315-2841, through March 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.