Bit by Bit, ‘Fractions’ Creates an Absorbing, Irresistible Whole

Larry Bell’s new installation of 245 paintings on paper ranks among the year’s best gallery shows. It’s terrific to see an artist of Bell’s stature and talent at the top of his game, pushing beyond the tried-and-true to find new ways to do what he’s always done best: slow down viewers in order to allow their surroundings to reveal themselves more fully than usual.

Two rows of 10-inch-square abstractions wrap around the walls of Kiyo Higashi Gallery. To stand back and take in the whole is to be struck by how each piece interacts with those around it, forming a cyclical rhythm of expansion and contraction.

But the best way to see Bell’s iridescent “Fractions” is to move in close and focus on a single work. To do so is to feel as if you’ve fallen into a microscopic cosmos. So many visual incidents are packed into every square inch of each multilayered piece that it’s easy to forget its actual dimensions and get lost following tiny swirls of color and miniature constellations formed by mysteriously suspended flakes of pigment.

Bell’s abstract images exert a seemingly magnetic pull on peripheral vision. While one work absorbs your attention, others tug at your eyes, irresistibly drawing you on to new exploration. The installation is more of an event or series of experiences than a static arrangement of objects.

Something like synergy is generated by Bell’s art. In contrast to most shows with so many works, your interest actually builds, your level of engagement rises, each of the “Fractions” seems more beautiful than the last.

Bell’s fluid pieces evoke Ed Moses’ Zen-inspired works, in which the ease of a gesture intensifies its impact, rather than diminishing it. They also recall John M. Miller’s riveting paintings, which are at once utterly singular and elements of multi-part installations.

To create his “Fractions,” Bell cut discarded earlier works into bits and used them to make new compositions. Many of the discarded pieces contained chemically treated surfaces. When he subjected each “Fraction” to the high temperatures of a laminating press, it caused layers to melt and flow, sometimes blending and other times sitting atop one another like oil on water.

Titled “Fraction of the Fractions,” his joyful show is merely the tip of the iceberg. Over the past three years Bell has made more than 7,000 of the 10,000 recycled collages he plans for the series. It no longer makes sense to distinguish between parts and wholes, because each is so effortlessly transformed into the other.

* Kiyo Higashi Gallery, 8332 Melrose Ave., (323) 655-2482, through Sept. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Art Isn’t as Art Does: “Life / Boat” is such a poor excuse for an exhibition that it wouldn’t merit a review if it didn’t also give coherent form to a common misunderstanding. Today, many viewers and well-intentioned institutions mistake what artists do with what art does.

For their ongoing collaboration at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Raymond Pettibon, Jason Rhoades and Hans Weigand have transformed a few rooms and hallways of the historic Schindler House into temporary “offices” and “production facilities.” Provisional desks and bookshelves are scattered with pamphlets, magazines, notebooks and pens.

Three new computers, a huge printer, a sewing machine, a commercial refrigerator, an empty freezer, a maquette and two unfinished pieces from a planned edition are intended to demonstrate how complex, wide-ranging and perfectly ordinary the business of being a contemporary artist is.

But a lot of dust has settled on these props. The rooms don’t have the presence of an active work space but instead feel like an abandoned set from a half-hearted art-school performance.

On two monitors, videos show the artists wandering around a 20-year-old yacht. The jerky, unedited tapes track them as they plan renovations and are instructed on the mundane but essential aspects of the boat’s operations by a man who appears to know what he’s doing. This distinguishes him from the trio, who present themselves as privileged idiots.

The artist as idiot savant is an old-fashioned idea, one that has had more currency in Europe than the United States. Surprisingly, this hoary ideal lives on in “Life / Boat,” which is based on the equally dubious notion that everything an artist does is interesting--simply because it is done by an artist.

To read the press release at the front desk is to learn that Pettibon, Rhoades and Weigand “acquired” a 34-foot yacht in March. In the future, they intend to produce boat-related “art,” including fresh and frozen fish, nautically themed posters and customized flotation devices.

These objects may or may not be compelling. What is clear is that “Life / Boat” doesn’t float, either as an installation, a performance or a commercial production.

* MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, (323) 651-1510, through Sept. 26. Closed Mondays.

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Inside the Ring: True to its title, “Boxing” is a straightforward show that eschews the spectacular glamour of heavyweight championships in favor of more intimate glimpses into a sport decried for its barbarism and loved for its all-or-nothing poetry.

Dating from every decade since the 1930s, its 49 photographs (all but two of which are black and white) depict boxing as an honorable endeavor in which heart and hard work rarely lead to fame and fortune yet never fail as the standards by which men are measured.

Six of the strongest images at Paul Kopeikin Gallery are vintage 8-by-10-inch silver prints shot by anonymous wire-service photographers. Untitled, undated and unadorned, they show regular guys fighting as if their lives depended on it.

By depicting an empty gym’s temporary ring surrounded by cheap folding chairs, Henry Horenstein’s “Boxing Ring, National Police Athletic League Championships, Buffalo, NY” captures the local, after-hours atmosphere that suffuses the show. Far from the spotlight, most of its works portray unremarkable men who harbor no illusions about the magnitude of their back-alley matches.

Nevertheless, there is nothing dispirited about these one-on-one battles, in which any three-minute round can be an eternity.

A large color portrait by Robert Lyons shows a young man in a classic boxing stance, fists up, chin down, eyes focused forward. So filled with fear is his face that it’s clear he is as unconvinced by his pose as any opponent would be.

Even when Muhammad Ali is the subject of a photograph, the little guys in the background contribute to its impact. In the center of Niel Liefer’s 1965 picture towers Ali, bellowing triumphantly over Sonny Liston’s supine body.

Riveted to the fallen champ, the eyes of the ringside fans convey a sense of fateful inevitability. Likewise, all but one of the ringside photographers point their cameras at Liston. The exception, like Liefer, aims at Ali, who radiates raw power and righteous surprise.

Liefer’s picture is a stunning emblem of the difference between personal achievement and public acknowledgment. Speaking volumes about the power of inner strength and the fickleness of fame, it fits into a show that celebrates unsung heroes.

* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 138 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 937-0765, through Sept. 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Blossoming Graffiti: Until fairly recently, graffiti did more than mark territory or advertise an individual’s moniker. At the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Stefano Arienti’s spray-painted pictures of flowers and people take viewers back to a time when anonymous street writing conveyed provocative social messages to the general public.

Although no words appear in the Milan-based artist’s ghostly portraits and still-lifes, a sense of urgency charges their hastily sprayed shapes. Imagine what urban centers would look like if taggers abandoned written symbols and instead left behind images of their friends and heroes, as well as paintings of roses, sunflowers and orchids.

This will give you an idea of the dissonance at the heart of Arienti’s otherwise simple depictions, in which the desire to make the world more beautiful is reckoned against the knowledge that there’s not enough time to do the job properly. The artist’s fleeting, fugitive traces throw in their lot with the incidental pleasures that give everyday life its texture and resonance.

Restricting his palette to brick red, fiery orange, plum and purple, Arienti manages to give his sitters a jolt of bodily substance and emotional vitality. Likewise, his single blossoms and casual arrangements are endowed with just enough detail to allow even casual gardeners to identify them as birds of paradise, mums, lilies and daisies.

All of Arienti’s images can be read swiftly and from a distance. When you move up close, their once-solid forms dissolve into puffs of colored air. Arienti’s art thus duplicates the experience of glimpsing things through the windows of lurching subways and speeding automobiles.

Made rapidly and viewed in a flash, it occupies your mind’s eye like a vanished apparition of a world that might have been different.

* Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 1023 Hilgard Ave., Westwood Village, (310) 443-3250, through Sept. 10. Closed Saturdays and Sundays.