There’s Evidence of Good Work Found at ‘Scene of Crime’

Like a star-studded disaster movie or a sci-fi epic with eye-grabbing special effects, the exhibition “Scene of the Crime” is a pleasant summer diversion best enjoyed by not bringing too much scrutiny to bear on its shaky premise. The show has lots of first-rate art among its 72 works by 39 West Coast artists, and they’re at least rewarding to see.

Organized by guest curator Ralph Rugoff for the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum and co-sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art, “Scene of the Crime” proposes that at least since the 1960s many artists have conceived of their work as constituting a kind of evidence.

Rather than making a picture or an object that is whole and autonomous, meant to be complete in itself, these artists create work that is a visual trace, leading to a complex awareness of a past activity, person or thing that is now among the missing.

The encounter between Abstract Expressionist painters and their empty canvases is said to be the source of this decisive shift. As critic Harold Rosenberg famously put it, art began to function as the record of an event.

A dramatic change like that must inevitably alter the way an audience looks at art. How do we approach such work?

The curator offers forensics as a model--forensics being the application of scientific (especially medical) knowledge to legal matters, as in the investigation of crime.

Much of the work in “Scene of the Crime” does present itself as evidence. Consider “Royal Road Test” (1967), a cheaply produced book of black-and-white snapshots with minimal captions, in which Edward Ruscha made a sober account of a curious event. While driving at high speed in the desert, he and two friends heaved a portable typewriter out the car window. The pictures and captions describe the highway wreckage.

Ruscha’s spiral-bound artist’s book certainly stands as evidence of the event. But its artless photos and snippets of dry text are also a witty rejoinder to a then-popular literary genre, typified by Jack Kerouac’s late-1950s beat novel “On the Road” and the scrubbed-up, early-1960s television series “Route 66,” which the novel’s success most likely inspired.

If you’re wondering just what crime is being evidenced in “Royal Road Test,” you’re not alone.

Typewriter vandalism? Highway littering? Probably not.

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The weakness in “Scene of the Crime” is its arbitrary attribution of criminality to evidentiary works of art, which by themselves make no such claim. Indeed, I don’t get the criminal angle in most of the show’s examples.

Nancy Reese’s dramatic 1990 painting “El Sen~or” shows a four-masted sailing ship in flames, its cinematic staginess enhanced by the flat strip of burnished silver-gold that runs down its left side. Is this, like Robert Overby’s 1971 latex rubber cast of a burned door, meant to suggest arson? Or maybe piracy?

Uta Barth’s beautiful photographs of hazy interiors, in which the camera’s focal length is set to correspond with a person or object that was removed before the shutter snapped, are evocative pictures of space and light. Should we also be thinking kidnapping? Robbery?

Is Monica Majoli’s small, intensely concentrated, lovingly painted picture of gay male sadomasochistic sex supposed to be regarded instead as something heinous, like the violence of rape? Or more modest, like moral turpitude?

Relatively few of the works in the Hammer’s galleries make direct reference to criminal activity. Among them are Chris Burden’s relic from a 1972 performance, in which he was arrested by police for creating a public hazard by lying in La Cienega Boulevard beneath a tarpaulin, protected from passing traffic only by warning flares; Eileen Cowin’s Cibachrome photograph of a stage set, modeled on a breathtaking Neo-Classical portrait of a murdered French revolutionary; Janet Fries’ 1975 documentary photographs, which apparently show dead bodies cordoned off by police; and Vija Celmins’ exquisite little 1966 painting of a gangster’s bullet-ridden car.

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Missing are some works you’d expect to see, including one I’d wager inspired the show: Mike Kelley’s justly celebrated 1988 corridor of art and crime, “Pay for Your Pleasure,” in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art. It features famous artists’ declarations on the relationship between creativity and mayhem, culminating in a borrowed artwork made by an actual murderer.

Kelley is instead represented by other, less direct examples. And given the relative dearth of crime-specific works here, it’s surprising not to see Charles Gaines’ blunt series of recent mixed-media meditations, “Night/Crimes.”

Still, while all the included works can be read as offering some sort of evidence or clues, more than two-thirds make no explicit reference to crime at all. Evidence, remember, isn’t just forensic. Clues can be anthropological, scientific, mnemonic--even art historical.

The big clue to be found in “Scene of the Crime” is how curatorial frames of reference can be slippery, endowing works of art with meanings they otherwise don’t possess.

Mostly the game is harmless entertainment. But sometimes it does violence--as in the unfortunate case of Majoli’s painting, where the homophobic suggestion of a “crime against nature” inevitably arises.

Crime, aesthetically speaking, would appear to be regarded here in a rather old-fashioned, frankly Modernist way. Art is loosely proposed as a transgressive activity, in which a socially accepted order is sharply violated.

The final work in the galleries is Lewis Baltz’s big Cibachrome print, more than four feet high and eight feet long, titled “11777 Foothill Blvd., Los Angeles, CA” (1991). The picture shows, beneath a washed-out sky, a dull suburban intersection marked by typical apartment buildings, a gas station and a forest of telephone poles.

Interestingly, it’s not a picture of the dusty roadside spot where Rodney King was notoriously beaten by police. It is instead a picture from that spot, looking out into the world, which eloquently discloses nothing except how mundane a historic crossroads can be.

In post-Rodney King, post-O.J. Los Angeles, “Scene of the Crime” goes the other way, baldly trading on routine sensationalism. Think of it as a kind of fashion-minded footnote to “Helter Skelter,” the 1992 box-office smash at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which used the infamous jargon of the Manson murders to suggest a dystopian twist to sunny Southern California. In addition to its sizable quantity of compelling art, the show’s shamelessness is the source of a good part of its charm.

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“Scene of the Crime,” UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 443-7000, through Oct. 5. Closed Mondays.