Setting the Stage for a Perceptive Vision

It’s impossible not to use the word “visionary” when describing the work of James Turrell; that’s one excuse.

Here’s another: Though the word is embarrassingly shopworn, when applied to Turrell it feels brand-new. That’s because Turrell, like no other artist of the past three decades, has embraced the contradiction between what is there and what appears to be there--between the realm of the spiritual and the persistence of the fact--and offered it up to the spectator as if it were a gift.

Though Turrell’s room-sized installations continue to startle viewers, he is best known for the quixotic Roden Crater project, located in an extinct volcano in Arizona. For decades, the artist has been at work on this monumental earthwork, calculating the celestial movements in relation to the site and reshaping the crater’s rim to provide a tangible experience of light and space. In a show now on view at Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, he shows work that relates to this endeavor, at least peripherally, in terms of its interest in producing specific optical effects.

But these scale models for what Turrell calls “autonomous spaces” are different from his other work. Not merely visionary, they are arguably ironic, which makes them the fin de siecle tropes our particular century deserves.

Here is an array of ghostly white plaster structures laid out with military precision on high tables, like miniature Lost Paradises for the gnostically inclined. Each one based on a uniquely perverse geometry, they include a saucerlike form hung up on a pyramid, a sphere set halfway into a cube poised on a circular platform, a skinny flight of stairs leading up to an elongated cylindrical chamber and so on.

These spaces seem destined to structure perceptual experiences: to render the light extraordinarily thick, to change the color of the visual field, to bring the sky into the interior, etc. Yet, with titles like “Alien Exam,” “Human Sacrifice Crater” and “Cold Storage,” they also transform trauma into allegory.

Outfitted with tiny chairs and, on occasion, with operating tables, they are evacuated stage sets for fiendish mise en scenes, at once leisurely and hysterical. Purportedly, some are in the process of being constructed to scale. One wonders why, though, since they are so remarkable precisely as shown here.

* Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 935-4411, through September. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Pictures and Phrases: At Watts Towers Arts Center, Pat Ward Williams’ image-and-text pieces deal with the power of street gossip, the truculence of everyday stereotypes and the ubiquity of institutionalized racism. The show is modest in scale, including several smaller black-and-white photographs emblazoned with evocative words and phrases. There is also one large piece, which is more impressive but also emblematic of the problems this particular approach to political art consistently seems to generate.

A wall-scaled image of a group of young black men, blown up so that the surface resembles a black-and-white mosaic, is emblazoned with the phrase, “What you lookn at?” The phrase appears to have been scrawled across the surface with red spray paint.

The image is elsewhere studded with tiny snapshots of African American families, with pictures torn from magazines of gang youths, actor Will Smith and a bloodied Rodney King, and with unabashedly didactic texts, one of which reads, “Is this too aggressive? Am I typical? What’s your source of information? TV?”

The piece is competent, as are the others in the show, which make reference to everything from the Simpson trial and homelessness to Williams’ own experiences with academic tenure. But it is completely and utterly predictable.

The image-text idiom has been expedient for politicized artists at least since the days of Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield in the 1910s and ‘20s, and Williams dutifully mines their experiments with collage (to create her work’s sense of disjunction), not to mention their passion. But once this idiom was institutionalized in the 1980s--by everyone from Barbara Kruger to Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems--and became a codified style, it sacrificed its power of surprise.

Can you have an effective political art whose aesthetic is no longer shocking? That is, in fact, almost cozy? Despite its unwavering sense of commitment, Williams’ work suggests not.

* Watts Towers Arts Center, 1727 E. 107th St., (213) 847-4646, through Sept. 15. Closed Mondays.

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Brute Force: Ani Kupelian’s Brobdingnagian gateway, centered just under the skylight in the otherwise deserted Brand Library Art Gallery, weighs 2,500 pounds and measures 15 feet high by 8 feet wide by 2 1/2 feet deep. Set on cast-iron wheels, this steel, wood and tile behemoth took 2 1/2 long years to complete, and Kupelian has scattered the gallery’s foyer with the mechanical drawings, receipts and photographic documents to prove it.

One can hardly argue the fact that “Trespass” is spectacular. Formally speaking, it’s very stylish, done in shades of olive green and gray, accented with clean lines and gleaming hardware.

Conjuring a bank vault, an airport security gate or a futuristic surveillance apparatus, it reeks of techno-fetishism, although this seems to be beside the point. Kupelian is more concerned to evoke the border and the related questions of inside and outside, private and public. More’s the pity, because as social critique (as opposed to Minimalist sculpture) “Trespass” falls short.

To her credit, Kupelian has steered clear of the overly narrative approach to critique that has been many an artist’s downfall. Narrative, by definition, has a beginning, a middle and an end, and thus a single point it wants to make.

Yet eluding the lure of the didactic remains a struggle for her. In the gallery’s foyer, her collaged photographs and news clippings of a Roman triumphal arch, a 17th century Nikko gateway and the Brandenburg Gate, for example, put a spin on “Trespass” that is unnecessary and probably redundant. The brute efficiency of the materials and the piece’s sheer size, especially in the context of the gallery’s gentility, evokes an authority that is chilling all on its own. It needs no belaboring, at least not of the kind we experience here.

* Brand Library Art Gallery, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale, (818) 548-2051, through Sept. 14.