Big Messages Come in Small Packages

Whenever a piece of art actually works, the effects that ripple from it occupy so much more time and space than the object itself that we tend to endow it with magical properties.

Think of the crowded gallery at the Louvre in which Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” hangs behind bulletproof glass, and you’ll have an idea of art’s power to pack loads of resonance--emotional and intellectual--into a work of modest dimensions.

At the Laguna Art Museum, a 27-artist show gives dramatically intimate form to the disparity between an object’s size and its impact. Titled “At the Threshold of the Visible,” guest curator Ralph Rugoff’s compact display of 56 works (made between 1964 and 1996) turns its back on crowds and fame to examine what happens when a viewer comes face to face with an object one-hundredth, one-thousandth or even one-millionth the size of his or her body.

Every work in the exhibition fits into a shirt pocket. Most make a dollar bill look gigantic. Some could even get lost under a fingernail.

On first glance, the single-gallery installation doesn’t look like much. Its paintings, sculptures and photographs are overshadowed by the paraphernalia of museum display: metal railings, Plexiglas covers, protective vitrines, bulky pedestals and signs warning viewers not to touch the art. There’s something absurd about being instructed not to touch an object you might otherwise overlook, but that’s part of the show’s charm.

One of the weightiest works neatly sums up the goals of “At the Threshold of the Visible.” Yoko Ono’s “Pointedness” is a golf-ball-size bronze sculpture that resembles nothing so much as a Lilliputian shotput until you read its label: “This sphere will be a sharp point when it gets to the far corner of the room of your mind.”

The point of the piece is that once art gets into your head (or under your skin), it plays mind-bending games with your thinking. Equally important, Ono’s sculpture-plus-sentence demonstrates that an active imagination has the capacity to change the world: first by transforming a metal ball into a pinpoint, and then by continuing to assess its surroundings from more than one perspective.

In a sense, Ono’s piece is a stretching exercise designed to keep one’s mind flexible and open--which is a good way to view the exhibition. Although not everything here is as deft, clever or stimulating as “Pointedness,” there’s something for almost everyone.

Among the most dazzling feats of concentration are works by James Lee Byars and Hagop Sandaldjian. On a sheet of black tissue paper, Byars (1932-1997) has used gold leaf to print 100 mind-boggling questions. Covering a wide range of philosophical issues, but only two square inches of tissue, “The Book of the Hundred Questions” compresses endless curiosity into the scale of microchips.

Likewise, Sandaldjian (1931-1990) has painted an image of Mt. Ararat on a grain of rice. He has also sculpted a self-portrait using nothing but dust and far less than a drop of acrylic paint. Invisible without a magnifying lens, this unbelievably small sculpture rests on a single human hair that is balanced in the eye of a needle.

Many of the most engaging works look as if they’d be more at home in a dollhouse than a museum, including five “Micro-paintings” by Gene Davis (1920-1985); four photographic diptychs by Sam Samore; three poignant pictures of Los Angeles’ environs by Judy Fiskin; two landscape paintings by Joan Nelson; and a lovely little rock garden by Aura Rosenberg.

As if to remind viewers that size cannot be equated with harmlessness, the show includes two works whose impact resides in their materials. Carved from human bone and enshrined in an old-fashioned bell jar, Charles LeDray’s tiny stepladder evokes bodily vulnerability.

You have to squint to see the second, Tom Friedman’s speck of a sculpture, which is set under glass in the middle of a kitchen table-size pedestal. When you read the label and learn that this work is a half-millimeter sphere of feces, your mind and body begin to play tug of war with each other. Like Ono’s bronze orb, Friedman’s sphere insists that the magnitude of a viewer’s response has nothing to do with the size of whatever triggers it.

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* “At the Threshold of the Visible: Minuscule and Small-Scale Art, 1964-1996” is on display at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. (949) 494-6531. Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., $4-$5; children younger than 12, free. Ends Oct. 10.