An Intriguing Record of a World in Motion

At a time when attention spans seem to be shrinking and impatience appears to be the order of the day, it’s refreshing to see an artist transform these sad facts into unexpected virtues. Simultaneously thought-provoking and thrilling, Kevin Hanley’s pair of video installations at ACME Gallery speed things up only to slow viewers down, giving us so much to look at in a few split seconds that we spend more time than usual before his rapid-fire images, enthralled by their capacity to make time pass both slowly and swiftly.

Although it’s difficult to imagine a person whose movements are at once spastic and graceful, that’s exactly what Hanley presents in “Recounting a Dancing Man,” a radically altered version of one of Fred Astaire’s dance routines from “The Belle of New York.” Projected onto a gallery wall, this 90-minute video initially appears to be jarring and mean-spirited. Who, after all, would want to make Astaire’s fluid movements and breathtaking bodily control look like the jerky gestures of a souped-up marionette?

It doesn’t take long, however, to fall into the speedy rhythms of Hanley’s up-to-the-minute art. A little patience is all that’s required to see that this piece is neither disrespectful nor cynical.

Hardly as offensive as the recent TV commercial that had Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner, Hanley’s projection gives stunning visual form to modern technology’s impact on our perception of the human body. If his projection has the look of a video game gone out of control (and sometimes seems to filter Astaire’s ability to entertain through eyes weaned on Pee-wee Herman’s madcap antics), it also recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s awesomely simple photographs of human locomotion.

To make “Recounting a Dancing Man,” Hanley digitized a four-minute routine in which Astaire wears a white suit and dances on an empty stage before a royal blue backdrop. Utilizing a video-editing program, the artist then replays the sequence by moving his computer’s mouse, altering Astaire’s movements with each movement of his hand. Disruptive and edgy, the resulting video captures some of the energy and amazement of live performances, where you have to pay close attention because there are no instant replays or opportunities to rewind the tape.

In the gallery’s opposite corner, Hanley complements the whiplash theatrics of “Recounting a Dancing Man” with the nervous earnestness of “Recounting a Drunken Man.” This out-of-sync diptych depicts a young, clean-cut man who leans forward in a chair, fidgeting, stuttering and twitching as he suffers through an apparently exhausting interrogation.

He actually articulates a single sentence that has been broken into so many fragments by Hanley’s editing that it has the presence of oddly Joycean saga. Repeated endlessly, the syllables that make up his 10-minute sentence recall Francis Ford Coppola’s movie “The Conversation,” in which an ugly truth is discovered when a spy’s garbled tape is gradually deciphered.

As a pair, Hanley’s videos stand out as high points in a medium too frequently given over to lazy self-indulgence. As in any other art, a little formal rigor goes a long way, especially when it’s handled as deftly as it is in Hanley’s mesmerizing explorations of time’s shifting passage.

* ACME Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Feb. 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Straight Lines: Christopher Georgesco’s steel sculptures are so steeped in Modernist art history that it’s difficult to see them with fresh eyes. The historical precedents standing behind the L.A.-based artist’s new works cast such long shadows that his 15 abstract monuments at Newspace Gallery do not have enough room to stand on their own. Their dependence on revered antecedents undermines their attempt to transcend everyday experience.

Imagine what a sculpture by Constantin Brancusi would look like if it consisted of straight lines, sharply angled planes and gradual, faceted curves. This will give you an idea of the way Georgesco’s cautious works fall short of the 20th century masterpieces to which they too explicitly refer. In contrast to the sumptuous plumpness and sexy tumescence of Brancusi’s exceptional art, Georgesco’s workmanlike sculptures appear to be unnecessarily austere and overly analytical, less emotionally charged than rationally calculated.

Neither as vigorously idiosyncratic as Tony Smith’s segmented structures nor as lifelessly diagrammatic as Guy Dill’s geometric forms, Georgesco’s honest sculptures come somewhere in between these two artists’ works. More admirable for their intentions than their achievements, they attest to the integrity of any good effort.

* Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., (323) 469-9353, through Feb. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Geometry Class: At Louis Stern Fine Arts, a small exhibition of paintings, watercolors and drawings by Frantisek Kupka (1871-1963) features five oils on canvas whose crisp, geometric shapes, airborne compositions and off-balanced colors seem oddly contemporary. Resembling early versions of the stylized images of buildings architects design on computers, these streamlined paintings embody Modernism’s long-lost optimism, showing that a few skillfully composed elements still have the power to move viewers.

Four medium-size abstractions from the 1930s and ‘40s suggest that Kupka admired Piet Mondrian’s rigorously simplified images but was too restless to follow such a reductive approach to painting, in which every black bar and rectangle of red, blue and yellow are firmly locked onto a single white plane. Alongside the primary colors, Kupka’s airy, open paintings include hot orange-reds, rich wine-reds, solid brick-reds and pastel blues. Earthy browns, delicate grays, goofy lavenders and grassy greens add to the playful unpredictability of the avant-garde artist’s oeuvre, as does a wide range of paint applications, including brushy translucence and opaque smoothness.

Kupka’s simplest works, such as “Ensemble statique” and “Points d’attache,” consist of several bars and rectangles that overlap one another to create the impression that they inhabit a shallow, recessional space. His most complex ones, like “Bleus par plans” and “En Degrades (verticales),” are made up of overlapping planes that appear to be floating in front of one another. These often elaborately patterned sections sometimes look as if they’re in motion, jostling their counterparts for better positions.

The exhibition’s centerpiece is an about 5-by-4-foot canvas that is all rapidly receding diagonals and towering verticals. “Architecture philosophique” (1913) adds checkerboard patterns and tricolored zigzags to Kupka’s restless mix of visual energy and geometric simplification. Vibrant and lively, all of his rarely seen paintings show that simple things can be endlessly fascinating.

* Louis Stern Fine Arts, 9002 Melrose Ave., (310) 276-0147, through April 10. Closed Sundays and Mondays.