A Web of Illusion

The mammoth entry hall at London’s new Tate Gallery of Modern Art features a monumental bronze sculpture of a spider--a classic subject for octogenarian artist Louise Bourgeois. Poised on spindly legs, the august arachnid is ready to deposit its elegant gift of Brancusi-like marble eggs, becoming a surreal metaphor for the darkly personal nightmares that lurk within industrious creativity.

A big spider is also currently featured in the front room of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, but this one is of a rather different order. Liz Craft’s shiny black widow, ominously titled “Crosshairs,” is fabricated from fiberglass polished to a high gloss, like the hood of a sports car. Fifteen feet across, her venomous bug is positioned upside down, legs akimbo, as if it’s about to expire. Stretched out in a string hammock provided nearby--which suddenly looks very much like a spider web--a visitor gets to be the relaxed, self-satisfied fly in Craft’s dreamy little drama of reversal, eyeing the glamorous black widow in its agonized death throes.

In the time-honored tradition of younger artists, Craft, who is 29, has made a compelling sculpture that functions as both homage to and demolition of a famous precedent. Indeed, a good bit of artistic matricide (and patricide) is going on all over “Mise en Scene: New L.A Sculpture,” the terrific exhibition in which her spider is installed. Happily, in this lively and absorbing show, artistic suicide doesn’t turn up at all.

Instead, the level of accomplishment is high. Sculpture by six young artists, all around 30, has been assembled by guest curator Bruce Hainley and the museum’s curator, Carole Ann Klonarides. All but one is a relatively recent graduate of the MFA program at UCLA, and while the six don’t represent a united front, shared sympathies can certainly be sensed. One is a healthy respect for the sculpture of the established generation of L.A artists just before them: Charles Ray, Mike Kelley, Liz Larner and several others. Another is a willingness to retrieve, renegotiate and remake older sculptural forms, from Anthony Caro to Richard Artschwager to Chuck Arnoldi.

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The most bracing gallery show of the year so far was Jason Meadows’ debut solo exhibition in May at Mark Foxx Gallery, and here the sculptor continues to demonstrate a savvy sophistication with the formal properties of sculptural space as articulated in Minimal and Postminimal art. Then, he yanks the rug out.

Meadows’ two Home Depot-style sculptures are guided by a structural logic of simple assembly, with one built from fiberboard, lumber and metal brackets, the other from aluminum stepladders that have been sliced and joined. Despite the logic, though, both seem to visually warp space in surprising and precarious ways. On the aluminum stepladders, the prominent manufacturer’s decals warning consumers of the dangers inherent in their use become a wry commentary on Meadows’ sculptural sleight of hand, as your perception takes a nasty (if exhilarating) spill.

Geometry and systematic structure is also important to other works here, including Jeff Ono’s pod-like sculptures, Torbjorn Vejvi’s tabletop cube and Paul Sietsema’s 19-minute silent film “Untitled (Beautiful Place).” Nature makes an appearance as well.

Ono builds his organic forms from unlikely materials--paper towels and construction paper in one case; plastic straws, Scotch tape and what looks like chewing gum in the other--and these items endow the squat forms with an ad hoc, low-tech, one-decision-at-a-time humility. Combined with their temporal feel, which suggests the sculptures have a fragile life span, an equally unlikely sense of latent consciousness bodies forth.

The tabletop cube by Swedish-born Vejvi might be the most eccentric sculpture here. The outside of the foamcore box is lined with pasted-on rows of cutout trees. The trees are arrayed in diminishing size to suggest recession toward a vanishing point. But the linear row continues into a rectangular tunnel, cut between two sides of the cube, so the trees really do vanish into space as you walk around the table. Space, picture and solid form seem to pass through one another, like a kid’s game of skin-the-cat. Landscape shivers into memory.

In the back room, Sietsema’s unassuming silent film has the presence of an otherwise startling, tactile bit of anti-video. He forgoes the slick and slippery ether of currently fashionable video projections, luxuriating instead in the reflected light, whirring sound and clunky equipment of a Warholesque home movie projected on the wall. This gorgeous film merges portrait, still life and landscape in eight short sections, through its close examination of a sequence of delicate plants.

The daisies, succulents, narcissus, passion flowers and other bits of flora that submit to the camera’s staring scrutiny eventually reveal themselves to be artificial. But it’s no disappointment--anything but. The flowers picture the artificiality of filmic vision. Carefully fabricated from paper and paint by the artist, their sensuousness only gets more intense.

The “beautiful place” of the film’s title is not some absent environment recorded in the movie image; it is the image, as well as the apparatus that makes it. It’s the space of art, and it’s a place that unfolds in real time (and reel time) before you.

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Sietsema’s uncanny transformation of a movie into a sculpture serves as an apt metaphor for all the work in “Mise en Scene,” and it’s also reflected in the show’s wittiest object, which likewise takes a swipe at video projections. Evan Holloway has hacked out a crude projector from a wood log, balanced it at a table’s edge and aimed its lens at the floor; there, the “image” being projected is a square piece of quarter-inch plywood.

Feel free to build something with it. And if you want to add color to your humble construction, hit it with Holloway’s “Color Theory Stick.” Pure rainbow hues are painted on the branching limbs of a tree, jamming the circuits of most any theoretical apparatus you might think of.

A leitmotif of “Mise en Scene” is the way ephemeral images become fully sculptural, while the material world continuously recedes into imagery. The curators trace the impulse for this transformation in recent L.A sculpture to the pervasive ethos of our resident monster: Hollywood. You could add to that precedents in art made here, such as Billy Al Bengston’s “Dentos” from the late 1960s, in which gorgeously lacquered metal sheets sporting two-dimensional insignias were happily beaten up with a hammer. Most of these artists were born around the time Bengston made those now under-recognized works.

But it’s best not to regionalize the impulse too much; not today, when everywhere is Hollywood and everyone lives in a landscape of mass media. These user-friendly artists are making real virtualities, not virtual realities. See the show and stub your toe on the wonderfully imaginative effects.

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* Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 586-6488, to Aug. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays.