Desert Scenes: Industry, Oddballs and Zzyzyx

In the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, the United States government commissioned many young photographers to travel the nation’s back roads and country lanes, documenting life as it was lived far from city centers. Scores of powerful pictures were produced and the careers of numerous photojournalists were launched. A moving, if patchwork portrait of America’s diverse population took shape as books were published, exhibitions were presented and archives were formed.

In the 1990s, such ambitious government involvement with the visual arts does not exist.

Nevertheless, a loose group of mostly young Los Angeles-based artists has taken matters into its own hands and formed the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Directed by Matthew Coolidge, this do-it-yourself operation has managed to put together a potent show of 100 photographs, accompanied by informative captions and a neat black-and-white catalog.

Titled “Hinterland: A Voyage Into Exurban Southern California,” this engaging display of 8-by-10-inch color prints takes viewers on a peculiar tour of California’s 10 southern-most counties. You skip the big cities and instead visit such off-the-beaten-track sites as military installations, mega-prisons, industrial facilities, mines, pipelines, aqueducts, research centers, spiritual retreats and a variety of homemade tourist attractions that draw passersby even further off the beaten track.

At Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the photographs wrap around the gallery’s walls in the order you’d see the locations they depict if you drove in a sensibly serpentine path across the predominantly desert landscape that extends from the Pacific Ocean to the state lines of Nevada and Arizona, and from the 36th Parallel to Mexico’s border.

Since these straightforward pictures have not been categorized by theme or subject, viewers are free to dip into the series in any order they choose. You can piece together your own personalized tour of the hinterlands or spend more time trying to take in an overall view of the whole.

In either case, standouts include the Rocketdyne Field Laboratory, the world’s largest Doritos factory, the Goldstone Deep Space Tracking Center, an abandoned jojoba plantation, the Tehachapi Wind Farm, a carnival-esque device at the National Parachute Test Center and Navy Target 103 A, made of hundreds of old tires that form a bull’s-eye for bombing practice.

This stretch of desert is also home to the town of Felicity, featuring a pyramid-shaped monument that marks the Center of the World, and Zzyzyx, a ghost town turned university study center on the edge of a dry lake bed. More than half a dozen sites cluster around the poisonous and expanding Salton Sea, into which drains New River, North America’s most polluted waterway.

If the desert’s inhospitality provides seclusion for the aerospace industry and various types of government-funded research and development, it also gives plenty of elbow room to loners, eccentrics and visionaries. Examples include: Dixie Evans’ Exotic World Burlesque Museum, Edwin Dingle’s Institute for Mentalphysics, George Van Tassel’s Integraton Energy Machine, Ed Parker’s Tired Iron Museum and the Unarius Academy of Science’s Starcenter One, a handsomely groomed landing pad for 33 spaceships whose arrival is awaited by the academy’s members.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that the activities of Coolidge’s Center for Land Use Interpretation fall somewhere between the mundane, fact-gathering labor of government agencies and the free-wheeling lunacy of social misfits. It’s no accident that nearly all of the photographs depict either government-sponsored endeavors or the works of passionate kooks.

Ever since the era of Romanticism, artists have been forced into the latter category. It’s exciting to see that the center is changing this stereotype, simply by mimicking the neutral, no-nonsense language of officialdom. Their members have even proven to be effective grant writers: They received one of the very few $20,000 grants the National Endowment for the Arts awarded to organizations outside of New York City.

Basing their work on the farsighted writings of Robert Smithson, the loopy research of Jeffrey Vallance and the wonder-inducing humor of David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology (located only two doors down the street from their own modest headquarters on Venice Boulevard in Culver City), Coolidge and his cohorts show that data can be gathered artistically, and that art need not stay in white-walled galleries to be effective.

As savvy as it is surreptitious, the center’s brand of Conceptual art resonates in your mind long after you’ve left the exhibition. After all, you have been left with the center’s most important work: to interpret just what these various uses of the landscape mean. No one--certainly not the government--will do it for you.

* Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 957-1777, through July 6. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays.

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Ins and Outs: Michael Rouillard’s exceptionally focused paintings at Kiyo Higashi Gallery generate physical experiences that trigger unresolvable conundrums. Abstract and sensuous, these modestly scaled acrylics on sheet metal defy logic as they entice viewers to keep looking at their elusive surfaces.

A typical painting by the New York-based artist is actually two or three razor-thin paintings sandwiched together so that the edges of each sheet establish specific relationships to those behind and in front of it.

Sometimes the slightly larger sheets read as delicate frames for the handsome panels resting atop them. At other times, they look like shadows (or halos) that give the panels they are paired with more substance and depth than expected.

At still other times, the edges of these sheets appear to be nothing more than precise lines inscribed in space to crisply demarcate the otherwise expansive surfaces of Rouillard’s meticulously painted pieces.

Inch-thick spacers also open gaps between some of the sheets within his layered paintings, or between the painting and the wall on which it hangs. This simple gesture complicates Rouillard’s art tremendously.

Although it’s obvious which side of each piece is its front, it’s impossible to determine which part of any painting is the interior and which part is the exterior. For that matter, it doesn’t make sense to think of Rouillard’s works in terms of parts and wholes. To look at any of them is to see that it’s all there, even if it isn’t completely revealed.

Rouillard’s use of color intensifies this impression. In his slippery paintings, hues don’t blend together as much as they disappear into each other. Profoundly superficial, these supple images lay everything they’ve got on the surface, without giving up any of their intrigue.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (213) 655-2482, through June 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Captivating: You’ve heard of elevator music. But have you ever seen any elevator art?

A pair of long, vertical works by British Colombia-based artist Robert Youds gets quite a bit of mileage out of this seemingly silly idea. Installed above one another in the elevator shaft at Post Gallery, these playful stripe paintings replace the mind-numbing blandness for which elevator music is known with a jolt of raw energy.

Made of afghans that have been cut into thin strips and dipped in enamel paint, each piece consists of two 7-foot-long sections of fabric whose gnarled, irregular edges gently entwine. In one, a blue strip hangs next to a purple one; in the other, a bright yellow swathe casually wraps around an acid green one.

Part of the pleasure of Youds’ art is because of its setting. The unrefined elevator shaft, fully visible from the unenclosed freight elevator, accentuates the scrappy, in-the-street feel of his fugitive paintings.

One advantage of exhibiting art in an elevator shaft is that you have a captive audience. The biggest disadvantage is that your pieces have less than a minute to do their work.

Youds’ clever abstractions make the best of this setup. By providing a fleeting interlude to an everyday activity, these stripped-bare stripe paintings compel viewers to pay close attention as art passes by faster than usual.

* Post, 1904 E. 7th Place, (213) 488-3379, through June 28. Closed Sundays-Tuesdays.