‘Nirvana’ Via Spectacle

“Nirvana,” the giddy new installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by Tokyo- and New York-based artist Mariko Mori, seamlessly fuses East with West, tradition with iconoclasm, and ancient philosophy with modern ideals, all in heady and ingratiating ways.

As in the photographic work of Ruben Ortiz Torres, an authentically multicultural vision is proposed as a hybrid state of consciousness, drawn from a spectrum of diverse sources, rather than as a simple reversal of established relationships between the mainstream and the margins. And, like the work of Matthew Barney, wild fantasy and operatic spectacle are this young artist’s often gaga means for achieving it.

Mori has her own distinctly compelling voice, though, and at LACMA, in the Contemporary Projects show organized by curator Carol S. Eliel, it sounds with the clarity of a glass bell. The 30-year-old artist makes an impressive solo debut in Los Angeles.

“Nirvana” (1996-98) is composed of three parts. The central gallery houses four sleek, billboard-size photographs that have been digitally manipulated in surprising ways. Nearby, a darkened room houses a 3-D video projection, its dreamy illusions of floating imps witnessed with the aid of plastic glasses. Finally, in a gallery down a short hallway, a 6-foot-tall, tear-shaped form of clear acrylic encloses an open lotus flower, which gleams in a vivid hyper-rainbow of translucent green, yellow, orange, red and blue plastic.

Nirvana, of course, is the exalted state of perfect blessedness in Buddhist religion and philosophy, achieved by the extinction of individualized existence and the absorption of the soul into a supreme spirit. Nirvana is not something typically associated with billboards, 3-D glasses and colored plastic.

However, Mori deftly exploits this modern vocabulary of materials and forms--and why not? The traditional mediums of gilded bronze and delicate colored pigments on silk aren’t essential to evoking transcendent ideas.

That she’s regularly able to muster a sense of intoxicating high-tech poignancy is one measure of her skill. A surprisingly awkward installation plan in LACMA’s Anderson Building somewhat diminishes the potential impact of “Nirvana.” But, individual elements do retain their punch.

The four photo-murals, each 10 feet tall and 20 feet wide, are like something you might pass by in an airport concourse. Sandwiched between thick sheets of tempered glass, the slick color photographs stand out from the wall a good half-foot, held in place by stainless-steel brackets. As objects that beseech attention, they have real presence.

As images, they’re ethereal. Encircling the globe, the photographs were taken at Israel’s Dead Sea, China’s Gobi Desert, Arizona’s Painted Desert and a stalactite-studded cave in France. Each is a picture of a void in nature, but paradoxically the spaces feel filled--stuffed with nothingness. Water, wind, fire and earth comprise their fundamental elements, all elaborated by a cast of ornamented characters that projects traditional Buddhist prototypes into futuristic settings.

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The most compelling of the four is “Pure Land,” in which the stark beauty of the Dead Sea is presided over by a richly garbed deity. Accompanied by a hovering retinue of cartoonlike robot-spirits, each sitting on a puffy little cloud and playing a musical instrument, the deity floats above a lotus blossom. In style, imagine something from the Jetsons by way of Tibet.

Mori casts herself in the central role of Kichijoten, goddess of wealth and good fortune. She’s shown here, as she has been for centuries in Asian paintings and sculptures, as an idealized beauty in diaphanous robes--seemingly weightless and floating through the air.

This image is also central to the brief 3-D video. The animated cyborg-spirits become, well, animated, gaily seeming to dart about the room in which you stand, while the floating celestial nymph conjures a universe of sweet cosmic harmony.

“Pure Land” is plainly a reference to Pure Land Buddhism, a popular 10th century variant based on a belief in the soul’s potential for rebirth in a mythical Western Paradise. Given Mori’s deft fusion of traditional imagery with up-to-the-minute materials and formats adapted from cartoons, advertising, Silicon Valley and MTV, it’s tempting to regard that Western Paradise as the idealized promise of modernity.

If, like me, you are not fully conversant with the complex twists and turns of Japanese Buddhist iconography over the centuries, two things closer to home are helpful to know about the artist. One is that Mori is a former fashion model, which explains her mostly razor-sharp way with the seductive power of imagistic style and glamour.

The other is that, after art school, she attended the independent study program at New York’s Whitney Museum. So, she’s equally well-grounded in the inescapable intersections between fashion and art that the Whitney has long traded on.

The single artistic misstep is a weak sculpture called “Mirage” (1997), which stands at the entrance to the show and is not part of “Nirvana.” Five transparent digital stills from a video shown continuously in an adjacent room are mounted atop chest-high monoliths of translucent plastic, to mostly grandiose effect.

The video focuses on Mori as a silver-wigged, metallic-eyed, futuristic sylph dressed in pearlescent-white lame and plastic garb, playing with a crystal orb as airport passengers scurry by in the background. (The footage was shot in the massive new air terminal at Kansai International Airport, designed by celebrated architect Renzo Piano for a man-made island in Osaka Bay.) The video’s enchantingly mercurial quality is sacrificed in the clunky, self-important sculpture, which looks like a Blockbuster sales display for the video.

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More successful is the “Enlightenment Capsule” in the final room, a deliriously odd sculpture that concludes the “Nirvana” suite. The acrylic bubble, looking rather like a disco-era cocktail bar from a Malibu rumpus room, is lit by sophisticated fiber-optic technology, which channels an intense beam of daylight into the enclosed gallery by means of a slender tube connected to an outdoor patio. The light has been purified, scrubbed clean of most infrared and ultraviolet rays, and its clear intensity causes the plastic lotus to seem to glow from within.

Imagine “Barbie Girl” sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and you’ll have some idea of this refreshing artist’s peculiarly engaging spiritual quest. Faith, not tired irony, is Mori’s saving grace in “Nirvana,” which seeks to redeem through art an otherwise soulless technology.

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* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Aug. 10. Closed Wednesdays.