‘Poetics Project’ Relives Group’s Heady Days

The line is the same, whether it’s the Cabaret Voltaire, the Cedar Bar, the Summer of Love or Studio 54: “If you can remember it, you weren’t there.”

The reference is to youthful intoxication, but its meaning goes deeper: If you are truly part of a scene, you live it so fully you can’t be expected to anticipate its recollection. But histories will always be created, and those fleshed out by the actors themselves are the most seductive, if not always the most trustworthy.

The mechanics and aromas of reminiscences, rehashes and rehearsals are the subject of Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler’s “The Poetics Project” at Patrick Painter Inc. The installation documents a collaborative artists’ group and art band that Kelley and Oursler were members of in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It’s not an easy read, especially given the artists’ mutual taste for authenticity leavened by irony.

In a darkened room, six video projection screens are carefully arranged: Five are curved and mounted high overhead, the sixth is huge and mounted at eye level. As the music of the Poetics blares, bleats and vibrates through the space, one picks out various images: deadpan shots of California Institute of Arts, the artists’ alma mater; the wake for ex-Poetics member Bill Stobaugh; studio shots of the production of the Poetics’ CD boxed set; talking-heads-style interview footage about the group, only some of which turns out to be actual.

Is this shameless auto-hagiography or a devastating sendup of the (art and rock) star system’s institutionalized narcissism? It seems to be both.

The Poetics Project is ongoing, and previous incarnations have been seen in Barcelona, at Documenta X and in Tokyo. The L.A. show can be seen as a remix, like the CDs of the Poetics music and sound works from 1977 to 1983 displayed at the gallery’s front desk. Music critic Greg Siegel has referred to remixing as revisionism, adding that it corrupts the relationship between a culture and its memory of itself. As these artists have long been attracted to corruption in its various manifestations, one can be sure, at least on this count, that this was precisely the point.

* Patrick Painter Inc., 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-5988, through Jan. 10. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Revelations: At a moment in which video projection can lay claim to some of the most interesting art around, Sam Taylor-Wood’s work stands apart. With its attention to the minutiae of interpersonal relationships, it mines the conventions of the soap opera only to blithely undo them. There is never a denouement, only a melodrama that spirals around and around itself.

At Regen Projects, “Sustaining the Crisis” is true to form: seductive, but not cheap; tricky, but not too much so. At opposite ends of the room are two wall-sized projections, each an eight-minute loop. One depicts a beautiful woman striding down a busy London street, nonchalant despite the fact she is topless. The other is a close-up of a man, his eyes fixed on something in the distance (the woman?). The sounds that fill the room are those of their breathing, amplified almost to the point of non-recognition.

If Cindy Sherman’s film stills distill the essences of stories that were never actually told, Taylor-Wood’s videos set essences into motion so that they seem to walk away from themselves. The old boy-watches-girl story is replayed, then picked apart.

What gets revealed in the process is not only female narcissism, but also the pathetic quality of masculine desire. She may be the object of the gaze, but he’s the one with sweat pouring down his neck.

Perhaps most interesting, though, is the way Taylor-Wood transforms the logic of narrative into spectacle. We can’t see both projections at once, nor can we take in both sides of any story. At every moment we must align ourselves instead on one or the other side of the divide.

Yet, our desire to know ensures that our position keeps shifting. This oscillation is precisely what makes empathy possible, and empathy is what makes Taylor-Wood’s art more than a voyeuristic indulgence.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, (310) 276-5424, through Jan. 17. Closed Sunday and Monday.

New Direction: I’ve always thought of Patrick Nickell’s throwaway assemblages as having a gallows sense of humor--witty in the face of pending disaster (i.e., the string breaking, the cardboard buckling, the plastic wrap ripping, humidity taking its toll). One might also take the work as nervous, albeit in a productive sort of way, which is to say fragile, jittery and intense.

None of this (except for the intensity, perhaps) holds true in relation to Nickell’s new wall pieces at Kohn Turner Gallery. These are wildly colored, doodly abstractions (or in-your-face emblems) on sheets of corrugated cardboard, layered like sandwiches and stuffed with crumbled and rolled-up newspaper. If a certain Pop sensibility infused the earlier work, here it dominates. Unfortunately, the strong-arming required mitigates against the light touch that had been Nickell’s trademark, messing things up quite a bit.

Undermining your own style can be an interesting strategy, if strategy itself is at issue. It has never been for Nickell, though, so the change in direction seems to be about enlivening something rather than questioning it. Not that the work needed interrogation. On the contrary, it did what it did very well, and would have been better off left to its own devices.

* Kohn Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 854-5400, through Jan. 3. Closed Sunday and Monday.

Challenges: In a month in which all anyone is talking about is the behemoth that is Richard Meier’s Getty Center, it is worth taking a trip cross-town to the MAK Center at the Schindler House, a jewel-box of Modernist restraint. There, staged inside the perfectly proportioned 1920s wood and concrete slab house, is a fine selection of photographs, drawings and photo-collages that document Gordon Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture” of the 1970s.

Though trained as an architect, Matta-Clark is known for his will to destruction. Over the course of a career cut short by an early death, he split a house literally in half, removed sections of another house’s facade, cut a geometric shape into the wall of an abandoned warehouse pier and excavated a conical space in two 17th century townhouses slated for demolition.

Organized by Christine Nichols, the show makes clear, however, that Matta-Clark was not simply celebrating anarchy. In cleaving a private dwelling in two, he ripped open the fables of domestic bliss; in exposing the innards of public spaces, he challenged the orthodoxies of that 20th century bane known as urban planning.

Architectural photographs are usually shot before any human beings are permitted to sully their perfection. Matta-Clark’s photo-documents acknowledge the folly of architecture’s pretense to immortality.

* MAK Center for Art and Architecture L.A. at the Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, (213) 651-1510, through Jan. 18. Closed Monday and Tuesday.