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Whether It’s Moving or Still, Jules Engel’s Work Is Animated

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

At Tobey C. Moss Gallery, “Spatial Concerns” is a satisfying retrospective of Jules Engel’s paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, books and animated films, although it retraces territory that was previously covered in a 1992 Engel exhibition at the gallery. Nevertheless, the show provides an invaluable opportunity to view six decades’ worth of work by a pioneering animation artist and abstractionist.

Engel looms large in the world of experimental animation. He choreographed the Russian and Chinese dance sequences for Walt Disney’s “Fantasia,” worked as a colorist for the groundbreaking animation studio U.P.A. and, since 1968, has been the director of CalArts’ experimental film program.

The bulk of Engel’s works addresses the problem of conveying movement, direction, rhythm and force in two-dimensional formats, concerns that extend the art-historical links between classic geometric abstraction and the experimental animated films made by artists such as Marcel Duchamp (“Anemic cinema,” 1927), Fernand Leger (“Ballet mecanique,” 1924) and Viking Eggeling (“Diagonal Symphonie,” 1924).

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Unlike those early Modernists, however, Engel has always been less concerned with pushing boundaries than with approaching art as a highly constructive form of play. He is as likely to create art out of a sheet of bumblebee stickers as with traditional media, treating painting, drawing and animated films almost like sketch pads--or a child’s Etch-A-Sketch.

The show includes several of Engel’s early, Cubist-inspired paintings dating from the 1940s, which represent necessary attempts to grapple with a prevailing style but aren’t especially interesting in themselves. Things heat up considerably, however, when Engel zeros in on the interaction of line and color, as in the zigzagging mental chess game depicted in “Your Move” (1948) or the dizzying thicket of colorful squares in “Wire Wall,” a work from 1984.

Engel brings geometric abstraction and animation aesthetics together with a palpable sense of glee. Squiggly lines, triangles and tiny balloons carouse against slick white grounds in a pair of 1970s-era collages titled “Toy Shop.” “Circles I and II,” an equally buoyant pair of 1939 watercolors, look as though they could have been drawn with a Spirograph.

Despite Engel’s skillful choreographing of color, shape and movement, his drawings and paintings ultimately feel like warmup exercises for his filmic abstractions, in which Engel proves himself a true master. Four examples from Engel’s filmography are available for viewing--the best are the three-minute “Train Landscape” (1974) and “Accident” (1973)--and they’re about as far away from “The Simpsons” as you can get.

* Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., (323) 933-5523, through April 24. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.

Shifting Perceptions: Lynn Aldrich’s new sculptures at Sandroni Rey Gallery are a lot like trap doors: When viewing them, you think you’re on solid footing, but suddenly the ground seems to drop from beneath your feet. You find yourself in an epistemological no-man’s land, asking yourself how and why you got there.

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Aldrich’s witty and inventive brand of kitchen-sink Conceptualism playfully reveals science’s blind spots while debunking myths of scientific objectivity. Whereas the scientist invariably slots new information into preexisting categories of knowledge, Aldrich makes it impossible for her viewers to take anything for granted.

To prove her point, Aldrich short-circuits the meaning and function of ordinary household objects. She transforms fuddy-duddy thrift-store lampshades and corrugated plastic patio siding into slyly Minimalist meditations on the relation of color, light and space; or repaints a globe, splits it in two, and affixes each half to either side of a dividing wall so that, like the sun, your body must travel 180 degrees around the wall to face each hemisphere straight-on.

In one of the show’s best works, Aldrich transforms what might otherwise be a pristine Modernist monochrome into a giant piece of flypaper. Aldrich coated the surface of a blank white canvas with lacquer and affixed it to the front of a U-Haul, which she proceeded to drive for 1,000 miles. At journey’s end, the canvas was splattered with hundreds of dead insects, each bug’s demise plotting a moment in time and a point in space.

From a distance, the piece recalls one of Lucio Fontana’s multiply punctured paintings, although Aldrich’s approach to the canvas is accretive rather than destructive. Her ad hoc reconfigurations of familiar objects--and art-historical scenarios--remind us that, in our “post-Modern,” “post-Enlightenment” and “post-Humanist” era, necessity truly is the mother of invention.

* Sandroni Rey Gallery, 1224 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (310) 392-3404, through April 17. Closed Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays.

Full of Surprises: Measuring about 20 feet high, 25 feet wide and 40 feet long, architect Frank Gehry’s massive new sculptural installation at Gagosian Gallery brings a variety of associations to mind: a prehistoric skull, a giant shell, an armadillo and the proverbial Trojan horse. The latter image is particularly evocative. What sort of surprise might Gehry, an undisputed master of the provocative architectural twist, have slipped into the gallery’s “white cube” interior?

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At once burly and elegant, Gehry’s installation consists of a curvilinear, maple-lined wooden skeleton over which thin, overlapping sheets of gray lead fit like skin. Openings at both ends allow you to walk through the installation’s vault-shaped interior.

In an adjacent room, a series of computerized drawings allows you to view the entire sculpture from different angles. Gehry’s installation is impossible to take in all at once, and as such demands complex viewing strategies on the part of viewers.

The sculpture’s lead shell and massive size contrast dramatically with the airy, light-filled gallery (designed by architect Richard Meier), appearing almost too large for the room. Gehry has said that he wanted to achieve an effect similar to the gargantuan green apple in Rene Magritte’s 1958 painting, “The Listening Room.”

Gehry’s steel-and-scaffolding, deconstructionist approach to architectural design would seem to leave little room for sensualism. Yet, surprisingly, what lingers longest in the mind after viewing Gehry’s sculpture is the deliciously pungent scent of maple wood, which permeates the gallery like fine perfume.

The horse’s “secret weapon” is thus revealed to be the sensory allure of organic materials such as wood and lead, along with the implied residue of human sweat. Without these elements, Gehry’s demanding (and often perplexing) designs might simply feel remote, like abstract intellectual constructs rather than spaces inhabited by living, breathing human beings.

* Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through May 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Travel Journals: For the past several decades, photographer-adventurer-environmental activist Peter Beard has kept a series of voluminous journals in which he pastes a variety of two- and three-dimensional objects. Some time after completing a journal, he will photograph a two-page spread and enlarge the color print so that it dwarfs the viewer in size. Beard then adds additional layers of drawings, photographs and other ephemera, often framing the entire composition in blood (usually an animal’s, sometimes his own), which he brushes or smears directly onto the photograph’s surface.

Hundreds of these photographed journal pages are currently on view at Fahey/Klein Gallery. The effect is at times overwhelming. Beard crams as much material as possible into each page in an effort to give physical form to his stream-of-consciousness impressions of Africa, where he’s lived since the mid-1960s.

Here we have what is not so much a day-to-day account of a man’s life, but a form of cultural autobiography in which the individual is inseparable from the larger political and social whole. Photographs of lions, crocodiles and giraffes are juxtaposed with images of Jackie Kennedy and a plethora of large-breasted pinups. Newspaper articles are coupled with Beard’s drawings and musings. Bones, feathers, shells, snakeskins, surgical gloves and other objects remind us of war, AIDS and threats of global extinction.

At once diaries, travelogues and fetish objects, Beard’s labor-intensive collages-within-collages possess neither the cryptic charm of a Joseph Cornell box nor the desiccated mystique of a Bruce Conner assemblage. What they do have going for them is their unabashed theatricality. Dripping blood and telling tales of human and animal atrocities, Beard’s journals speak of life’s irreconcilable contradictions and of his own refusal to feel indifferent to them.

* Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 934-2250, through May 15. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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