L.A. Map Makes the Invisible Plain

Wrapping your mind around the enormity of Los Angeles, the Postmodern paradigm of the suburban city that has now replaced the obsolete urban model, is no small task. Lincoln Tobier, a young, New York-based artist making his solo debut here in a show in the Contemporary Projects Series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, valiantly attempts it from the inside out.

“(It all comes together in) Ruckus L.A.” sets the cold, anonymous, often indifferent power of officialdom against the playful, makeshift, idiosyncratic expression of individual men and woman. Tensions between public and private quietly resound.

Tobier’s sculpture consists of a large, low platform on which an aerially photographed map of L.A. spreads out. The fascinating map is detailed enough to allow you to identify a variety of local landmarks. They’re not the functional but fragmented glimpses you glean from thumbing a Thomas Bros. Guide. Hitherto obscured patterns of movement through the city and otherwise invisible relationships among balkanized neighborhoods come into surprising focus.

There’s a creepiness too, a chilly quality of surreptitious surveillance from above. It hints of powerful forces left unseen (God? NASA satellites? United Nations black helicopters?).

The aerial map recalls the famous panorama of New York City commissioned by transportation czar Robert Moses for his city’s 1964 World’s Fair, a vision that’s still on view at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadow. Rather than Moses’ awe-inducing expanse of scale-model buildings, though, which gives a crisp, carefully tooled, bureaucratic gloss to the monumental map, the three-dimensional buildings scattered around Tobier’s map are out of scale, randomly placed and the products of variously skilled handicraft.

That’s because the artist invited museum employees, from curatorial staff to guards, to select any building they wished anywhere in L.A. and construct their own models from cardboard, glue and Popsicle sticks. The playful results, which range from private homes to Randy’s doughnut shop, with its signature giant pastry above the San Diego Freeway, exude an elementary school charm.

The eccentric, toy-like little buildings standing bravely atop a high-tech surveillance map are at once poignant and defiant. Tobier’s model of L.A. actually maps the atrophy of the public world, represented as much by the corporatization of art museums as by corporate financing of Congress. It oozes loss.

Also at LACMA as part of the Contemporary Projects Series is a second, considerably less successful installation by New York-based artist Rikrit Tiravanija. “(Dom-Ino Effect)” (1998) is a rather prosaic stage built inside a gallery for presentation of musical performances, poetry readings and such (the artist will cook and serve curried rice there on July 31).

The stage takes the form of a scale model of Le Corbusier’s 1914-15 design of a simple prototype for mass-produced housing, the famous Maison Dom-Ino. Three horizontal platforms are stacked on six pillars, with a staircase between floors at one end. In plan, the free-standing columns are like domino dots, while an aggregation of these houses would recall dominoes in play.

Tiravanija’s model is built of wood, not the reinforced concrete proposed in Corbu’s industrial classicism, giving the stage the aura of a suburban backyard play house. Piles of dominoes are strewn about, so museum visitors can in fact enter and play.

The intent is plainly to break down institutional barriers that separate museum and audience, undermining institutional authority through art employed as an interactive medium of exchange. But the uninventive structure, which looks like the sort of rich-kid’s playhouse you might find in a Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalog, is too slight for that. The disappointing effect is more one of Beverly Hills noblesse oblige.

* LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through Aug. 29. Closed Wednesdays.

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Busted Blocks: In a compelling American debut, Madrid-born, Mexico City-based sculptor Santiago Sierra has given 1970s Process art a 1990s twist. At Ace Gallery, the product of his process isn’t a sculpture, it’s an exhibition.

Sierra’s “exhibitionism” consists of two-dozen poorly cast, crudely formed concrete blocks, weighing in at 1 1/2 tons apiece. Six feet long and 2 feet square, each human-scale block is reminiscent of a coffin. They’re strewn about among two large rooms, two small ones and a hallway, in an arrangement whose possible pattern or logic is not immediately apparent.

What is apparent is the herculean effort that was required to navigate all this mute, brute tonnage into place. Sierra left all of his crew’s debris in place: Steel crowbars, work gloves, wooden shims and hand-trucks are scattered hither and yon, while empty soda bottles and junk-food bags are piled on several blocks, or else casually tossed on the floor.

Normally pristine gallery walls have been gouged and bashed in, while grit from crumbling concrete crackles beneath your feet. Scraped marks across the concrete floor are like narrative diagrams, showing where bocks were dragged into place and shoved into position with a surfeit of sweat-equity.

The endless, toilsome process of display becomes the most prominent subject of the savvy piece, which is titled “Remunerated Workers.” (A wall label informs us that the artist hired 10 laborers to move the blocks around continuously for one day.) Sierra leavens the Sisyphean installation with an edge of absurdist humor, while slyly setting the pretensions of art against the ordinary dignity of labor.

At 33, the artist has never known a time when blockbusters weren’t the art-world’s conventional standard. Like a highly condensed version of the extravagant exhibitions that, once rare, are the norm today, his chaotic array of busted blocks creates an endearing post-Process vanitas.

* Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 935-4411, through Sept. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Nature and Culture: Alexis Rockman is known for lush, elaborate paintings of animals both common and endangered. At Works on Paper Inc., the New York-based artist shows a project in which the material fits the theme.

The handsome group of 35 small paintings on paper shows flora and fauna retrieved from the La Brea tar pits, just up the street from the gallery. The bats, ticks, raspberry, centipede, condors, mastodon and such have been rendered on gessoed rag-paper with a toxic paint made from various solvents mixed with tobacco-brown tar scooped from the pits. Each is displayed framed and behind glass, in a manner that recalls a shadow box.

Rockman has great illustrative skill, while his relatively straightforward compositions exude an aura of anthropological classification. The chief exception is the single large drawing, in which the viewer assumes a somewhat melodramatic vantage point within the tar pit, looking up at a rearing mammoth as avian predators circle overhead.

What’s most compelling about these otherwise slight drawings is the odd tension circulating among the plant and animal species depicted (several of them extinct), the valorizing aspects of art and the unusual drawing material--tar being composed of hydrocarbons that act as preservatives. The dangerous, sometimes volatile intersection of natural processes with cultural ones is deftly conveyed.

* Works on Paper Inc., 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 964-9675, through July 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays.