New Angles on City of Angels

Los Angeles is famously incoherent. Thus, it comes as no surprise that an exhibition about the burg gets a little mixed up. “A Place in the Sun: Visualizing L.A. Public Spaces” at the Pasadena Armory includes thematically related works by some 40 artists, urban planners and students.

An ambitious undertaking for a modest-sized community gallery, the show is by no means a bust. Organized by gallery director Jay Belloli, it comes with a nicely designed small catalog, and works are intriguing even when too oblique. But everything feels somewhat constricted. One can only hope the idea might act as a catalyst. Dealing with the nature of L.A.’s civic life as the millennium approaches resonates with aptness.

The theme of Lotusland’s public infrastructure is examined from perspectives linking the aesthetic to the critical. The two clearest instances are a group of paintings and a videotape.

James Doolin’s images include four studies for his panoramic triptych in the MTA building. They trace the city’s growth from 1910, when it looked like one huge orange grove crossed by a peacefully chugging train. Envisioned after 2000, the limpid sky hints at a Wagnerian sunset that makes Bunker Hill’s glittering skyscrapers smack of apocalypse.

Doolin shows a lively holiday on the bluffs of downtown Santa Monica in “Sunday in the Park.” The image reminds us of the region’s charms. The title hints that the artist feels Georges Seurat as a kindred spirit. Doolin doesn’t paint with dots, but he does share the pointillist’s precision and detachment. Those qualities encapsulate L.A.’s light and space as well as its impersonality and self-absorption. If there’s any justice, Doolin’s work will one day rank with such premier L.A. icon-makers as Ed Ruscha and David Hockney.

Paul Forrer’s video “The Least Remembered City” presents an “anti-tour” guided by Norman M. Klein, author of the insightful book “The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory.” Like Doolin, Klein takes us to Bunker Hill. He explains wryly how the enclave--once L.A.’s richest repository of classic Victorian architecture--was simply bulldozed to make way for Manhattan-style skyscrapers.

Klein worries aloud about L.A.’s chronic case of historical amnesia, its tendency to allow real public spaces to give way to malls.

There’s an aura of calm about Doolin’s paintings, sympathetically suggesting that this is a basically beautiful place vast enough to allow people to sort out their lives as best they can. In Forrer’s video, Klein points to a more traditional model based on cities such as New York, which, in the past, had reputations for a strong sense of civic consciousness.

The very ambiguity of most of the other projects here reveals the town’s psyche. Artist Kim Abeles’ “Public Sitings (All Space in Los Angeles County)” is a wall-size map. Abeles marked public spaces with a long string. Each is attached to poker chips, whose colors vary according to the nature of the site--cemeteries, hospitals and so forth. OK, sounds like a plan for demographic cartography.

Trouble is that all the chips are piled willy-nilly at the bottom of the map. Trying to read the resulting confetti by predominance of colors, I sensed that most public buildings hereabout are schools. They’re followed in descending order by parks and beaches, then fire and police, with libraries and museums bringing up the rear. The visual message, however, is one of analysis overcome by complexity. It’s almost like a satire of urban planning.

Similarly, veteran L.A. photographer Robbert Flick presents “Between Hollywood and Wilshire,” an accordion book 32 feet long. It depicts a slice of street in a mosaic of what appear to be several thousand postage-stamp-size photos. Neatly done, it’s nonetheless a picture of chaos.

The real message is that L.A. exists in multiples. Pick the one that suits you, and that’s your authentic article. For ecological concept artists such as Newton and Helen Harrison, L.A.’s a place that wants an idyllic serpentine walk along the old Arroyo Seco. For Gregg Segal, it’s kids kissing at the bus stop, in front of the church or at the tatty corner carnival. Embrace her, ignore her, it’s all the same to the Queen of the Angels. This town’s just different.

* “A Place in the Sun: Visualizing L.A. Public Spaces,” Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, to Sept. 13, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (626) 792-5101.