Durant’s Pretend Theme Park Sends History Rockin’, Rollin’

Sam Durant’s installation at Blum & Poe Gallery turns the world on its ear by turning history upside-down, sideways and inside out. A topsy-turvy melange that treats modern masterpieces (of sculpture, set design and installation art) as if they were as exciting as foot-stompin’ rock ‘n’ roll songs, “Proposal for Monument in Friendship Park, Jacksonville, Florida” pokes fun at much contemporary art for taking itself too seriously.

But that’s too much like shooting fish in a barrel for Durant’s low-budget theme park, which has much bigger scores to settle. Giving viewers more power than we usually have when we visit a gallery (or go to Disneyland), his participatory piece of do-it-yourself theater says, “Yes, history is written by the winners. But life is not a zero-sum game. Your victories will outnumber your defeats, provided you cast the past in your own terms, making it conform to your vision of the future.”

To this end, Durant has covered the back wall of the gallery with roughly cut scrap lumber, forming the facade of a swamp shack complete with front porch, corrugated aluminum roof, rope doorknob, newspaper-covered window and three homemade rocking chairs. In the foreground, he has arranged a dozen fiberglass rocks (ordinarily used on movie and stage sets) in the manner of an amateurish Zen garden. In the center of this awkwardly serene setting stands a pristine, two-tone trash receptacle, similar to ones found in public places all over the country.

Audio speakers have been hidden inside the rocks and trash bin. Visitors are free to select LPs from four plastic milk crates on the porch and play them on two sound systems. While one turntable functions properly, the other has been rigged to spin in reverse, starting at the end of each song and ending at its beginning.

There is no limit to the back-and-forth variations you can create. Some haunt. Others annoy. Still others mesmerize. With surprising frequency, the garbled anthems and ballads that bounce off one another enact a poignant tug of war between the past and the present, in which incomprehensible gibberish sometimes makes more sense than clearly articulated statements or oversimplified sound bites.

Durant’s open-ended concert, in which each viewer can be DJ-for-a-day, provides the perfect background music for the wide-ranging sources of his mongrel monument. In the early 1970s, Friendship Park was the site of Sunday jam sessions, where the band Lynyrd Skynyrd was inspired by the Allman Brothers and Southern rock was born. In Durant’s hands, raucous rock music leads to harmoniously composed rock gardens, which recall Isamu Noguchi’s Modern sculptures.

Noguchi, it so happens, built the sets for Martha Graham’s dance performances “Frontier” and “Appalachian Spring.” Durant takes things full circle by transforming cheap, mass-produced chairs into rockers that mimic Noguchi’s designs, while paying sly homage to a generation of rock stars, some of whom have aged gracefully but most of whom have burned out fast and furiously.

Durant’s wooden shack also recalls Robert Smithson’s “Partially Buried Woodshed,” a celebration of entropy from 1970 that was overshadowed by more ominous events at Kent State University. With Durant for a guide, recent art history is not a cut-and-dried subject you read about in textbooks. Rummaging through the proverbial dustbin of history, his intellectually rowdy installation turns the past into a flash point where high and low sources collide. Sparks fly in every direction.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Dec. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Elusive Figures: No one likes a co-worker who sits down on the job, obliging you to do more than your fair share of labor. Few people in the United States like contemporary art, and our economic system prevents all but a handful of artists from treating what they do in the studio as a job--a daily endeavor that pays the bills and provides some security against poverty and sickness. Consequently, few things are more despicable to Americans than works of art that sit down on the job, shirking what little responsibilities we assume they are privileged to have.

At Patricia Faure Gallery, Salomon Huerta’s two largest paintings appear to sit down on the job. But rather than eliciting scorn and disdain, they do their work indirectly, provoking viewers to become acutely aware of the reciprocal relationships that take shape between our bodies and works of art that actually work, drawing us into ambiguous dramas while keeping us wondering about where illusions end and reality begins.

Both of Huerta’s images depict a person seated in an ordinary folding chair with his back turned to viewers. From far away, these seated figures recall museum guards, who ignore you until you enter the gallery they watch over.

The surfaces of Huerta’s meticulously painted, nearly symmetrical and oddly abstract pictures are beautiful. As they pull you in for close scrutiny, strange things happen.

The closer you get, the more you feel like an ill-intentioned intruder sneaking behind the back of an unsuspecting individual. Huerta intensifies this effect by hanging his squatly proportioned canvases only a few inches above the floor. You literally tower over his sitters. Extreme proximity induces an experience of vertigo, especially when the wall beneath the painting is blocked by its bottom edge. The ground seems to slip out from beneath your feet.

Hung at eye level, three approximately one-foot-square paintings depict only the heads and necks of similar subjects. These secular icons defy the conventions of traditional portraiture to amplify the vulnerability of their faceless sitters. Set against royal purple and fiery orange grounds, Huerta’s nearly life-size heads make the hair on the back of your neck bristle in anxious anticipation of the unknown.

Seven modestly scaled paintings of free-standing, lower-middle-class homes likewise obscure some details to intensify the impact of others. Painted in a vibrant palette of saturated azures, lime greens, bubble gum pinks and pale oranges (which Huerta has borrowed from fashion magazines and music videos), these taut, often symmetrical compositions are fraught with tension. Infused with desire and dread, they make the American dream look like a fantasy that holds viewers in its grip most strongly when it eludes us.

* Patricia Faure Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1479, through Nov. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Colorful Details: Greg Rose’s eye-popping paintings look as if they were made by a pastry chef who does double duty as an automobile detailer and flower arranger. Delicious, squeaky clean and decorative, the nine canvases in his solo debut at Richard Heller Gallery meld these unrelated activities into snazzy pictures whose unnatural palettes and stark compositions are appealingly queasy.

Visually, there is nothing subtle about Rose’s images, which come in three sizes. The smallest ones measure 2 feet on a side and are based on ikebana, the Japanese art of arranging cut flowers in precise compositions.

Rose’s versions float on flat, monochromatic grounds of aqua, lavender, pale blue, plum and rose. Each bud, leaf and stem is basically a silhouette, with very little shading or representational surface modulation. Instead, each of these abstract shapes is a solid chunk of color that appears to have been cut with a laser from a thick layer of paint and fused to the canvas like a skin graft.

At 4 feet on a side, Rose’s mid-size works include areas applied with airbrushes and squeegees. Where his small works resemble tightly contained fireworks displays, these spread out, slow down and take on the appearance of schematic landscapes. Like bonsai, scale is ambiguous, adding to the enchantment.

A 5-by-7-foot painting titled “Reflecting Pool” steals the show. On a delicately modulated ground that gently slips from aquamarine to purple, Rose has arranged the silhouettes of various flowers, rocks and leafy foliage, all reflected in the water’s glassy surface. Birds of paradise, yuccas and towering palm trees are interspersed among plants commonly found in vases and tabletop pots.

As visually gripping as it is conceptually supple, this painting invites viewers to consider what happens when a landscape becomes a still life. Fusing these genres, Rose’s unsentimental image compels us to look at the present from a far off future, when seemingly momentous events become tiny details of a much bigger picture.

* Richard Heller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Nov. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Pieces of the Whole: At Newspace gallery, an abstract sculpture by Tiffanie Morrow cuts through space with such grace and authority that a fair amount of time passes before you notice that it’s the only work in the show. When you realize that there’s only one piece to see, you don’t feel the least bit shortchanged. With her eighth solo show since 1990, the 55-year-old sculptor shows herself to be one of the very few contemporary artists who is capable of making a compelling exhibition out of a solitary work.

It takes some time to determine that “Some Where” is a single sculpture because it is made of four parts. Each consists of a thin strip of metal that runs along the floor. Measuring less than an inch wide and about a quarter-inch thick, these materially slight, uniformly white sections have the presence of elongated highway stripes.

Similarly proportioned segments extend vertically from each. The longest one reaches all the way to the ceiling, where it is crossed like a spindly capital T. A pair of Ys and undotted i’s sprout from a couple of others, sometimes reaching shoulder height and at other times going only as high as your ankles. The most complex free-standing component forms an angular lower-case h (or, the abstract silhouette of a chair).

Despite the tendency to translate Morrow’s linear structures into elements of the alphabet, you do not read them like letters. Rather than perceiving the entirety of each in an instant (as a unified symbol), your eye speeds along each part of each line as if it were cruising down the highway--at well over the speed limit and without a worry in the world.

No matter where you stand in the gallery’s three spaces, it’s impossible to see all of “Some Where” at once. Its four sections appear to zip through an interior wall, linking separate spaces and dividing the largest gallery in half. Making parts seem like wholes and wholes seem to be a whole lot more than the sum of their parts, Morrow’s architectural sculpture generates whiplash scale shifts that can only be described as sublime.

* Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., (323) 469-9353, through Dec. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.