Happily, LACMALab Leaves Much to Imagination

A press release from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art describes the museum’s new educational initiative, LACMALab, as an experiment in engaging audiences with art--”particularly children, teens, college students, parents and seniors.” As one who doesn’t fit into any of those demographic categories (I’m just a plain old adult), I may not be the right person to comment on the experiment.

But what the heck: LACMALab’s debut project, an exhibition called “Made in California: NOW,” is unusually good. Why? Because it successfully represents a subtle but important shift in thinking about education programs at art museums.

As laid out in the Boone Education Gallery at LACMA West, LACMALab is not about professionally trained interpreters explaining works of art to an uninitiated audience, especially kids. That’s the usual procedure for museum education, because museums often blithely accept the commonly held proposition that art is alienating and a dose of hard fact will demystify the experience.

In reality, the best art finally eludes rational exposition; furthermore, it deepens, rather than detaches us from, social experience. So art and audience are simply brought together at “NOW” and left to their own devices, without a meddlesome middleman.

Plenty of information is readily available about the exhibition, the artists and how their works were developed. (In fact, there might even be a bit too much didactic material at hand.) But the sharp focus is elsewhere and exactly where it should be--on direct experience of works of art.

In other words, imagination gets privileged over knowledge. Imagination is the fuel of art, the engine of growth and the frank pleasure of life. No less a brainiac than Einstein insisted that imagination is more important than knowledge, yet most folks--education bureaucrats or not--seem to shudder at the thought. In our modern Information Age, imagination regularly withers from neglect.

But not at “NOW.” A good chunk of the art world in the last decade has been mired in academic dullness, busily downgrading imagination as art’s central value. But here you won’t find work by any of those self-important bores. LACMALab director Robert Sain has instead been careful in choosing artists whose past work has been pointed in advancing the mind-bending value of imaginative play.

Eleven artists were commissioned for “Made in California: NOW.” The oldest is Allan Kaprow, 73, who collaborated with his 11-year-old son, Bram, on a revised version of a famous 1960s Kaprow work, “The Garden.” A climb-in cage filled with automobile tires has been reconfigured as a room stuffed with pillows, becoming a safe zone of exuberance, aggression and reckless abandon.

The youngest artist is Jacob Hashimoto, 27, who has recently drawn attention for clusters of fragile sculptures of folded paper suspended from the ceiling, but who turned the tables here. Hashimoto offers an undulating, floor-bound landscape covered in artificial turf and punctured with portholes; the doors can be opened to find hidden surprises. Think of it as a holiday landscape, where the gifts are moments of delighted discovery rather than the usual material objects.

“NOW” also succeeds because the artists have essentially made work that is finally little different from what they typically show in galleries. Forget condescension, dumbing down or the lowest-common-denominator ethos, which rule mass culture. You won’t find that here.

Jim Isermann has made lounge spaces with furniture since the mid-1980s, and last year he began to produce elaborate, die-cut vinyl decals that function as Pop-Minimalist wallpaper. Both are brought together in this show, with a complex sequence of decals along the immense entry concourse, which unravels its secrets in an interior kids’ lounge with movable cushions.

Jennifer Steinkamp has punctured Isermann’s concourse with a dazzling portal of projected video, which lets visitors enter the space through our modern electronic looking glass. Inside she’s hooked up a set of swings to a computer-animated video projection, with electronic sound composed by her frequent collaborator Jimmy Johnson. One swing controls striations of hot colors, the other cool colors, so that pairs of swingers (so to speak) can interact through manipulations of electronic light and sound.

In a gallery exhibition last year, Martin Kersels showed homemade versions of sound-effects devices used for movies. These jerry-built sculptures settled at the opposite pole from the high-tech spectacles of mass media, and here he’s made more of the same--except kid-sized. Kersels also opened up a gallery wall, making a window onto a Fairfax Avenue bus stop outside. You can provide sound effects for the silent passing scene out the window, to the curious delight of waiting bus passengers.

As a witty introduction to his contribution, Victor Estrada has installed a 1950 Jackson Pollock drip painting in the gallery--the quintessential target of those unimaginative put-downs of modern art that go, “My child could do that!” Out the window on the adjacent lawn you can glimpse the sandbox Estrada designed, basing its shape on another Pollock painting. The sight of kids gaily digging deep into the shifting sand slyly ricochets off the Abstract Expressionist legacy of primitivist urges and Jungian psychology.

Two artists have contributed static sculptures, which are handsome if less immediately engaging than the rest. John Outterbridge’s big three-masted ship is a heartfelt homage to the famous Watts Towers, built by Sabato “Simon” Rodia and shown in photographic enlargements. Like Rodia’s great towers, the ship encourages dreams of adventure. Yet, as a homage pointing us in the direction of those towers, it suffers from intimations of the classroom lesson-plan.

Eleanor Antin’s “The Voyage of the Freebooters” melds two famous disaster paintings--Gericault’s 1819 shipwreck scene “The Raft of the Medusa,” ripped from early newspaper headlines, and Copley’s 1778 “Watson and the Shark,” a painted predecessor to our own cinematic blockbuster, “Jaws”--into a cartoonish fiberglass sculpture. Kids love to be scared, and the sight of 10 noticeably empty yellow children’s boots atop a tattered raft encircled by toothy sharks in a heaving sea might make for an indelible nightmare or two.

The dark side of childhood is also stoked by Erika Rothenberg, who unabashedly panders to the horrors of youthful narcissism. “Hey, kid, wanna be famous?” is the beckoning title of her theatrical stage, complete with microphone-jammed podium and live-feedback video screen. Young wannabes are invited to come up and be instant pseudo-celebrities, their blathering also simulcast to a garden bench outdoors. It’s darkly effective but, rather disappointingly, the piece is virtually identical to one Rothenberg made for the Santa Barbara “Home Show” in 1988.

Two other projects will unfold slowly during the run of this invigorating show. Dave Muller, known for collaborative events slyly dubbed “Three Day Weekends,” will arrange a series of performances with invited artists and musicians. Michael Asher has invited a local 11th-grade class and an eighth-grade class to study the 19th century art in one of LACMA’s permanent collection galleries, then reinstall the paintings and sculptures in the room according to their own prescriptions. Chucking the stories museums traditionally tell with art, they can make up their own.

Imagination over knowledge. LACMA has here chucked the educational story museums traditional kely tell, and it works like a charm. Even plain old adults can benefit from the exercis * LACMA West, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through Sept. 9, 2001. Free admission. Closed Wednesdays.