Constantly in Flux

In a 1988 work on paper, sculptor Liz Larner incorporated a portion of scientific text that makes reference to Leonardo da Vinci. Pondering the mysterious forces that generate life, the great Renaissance artist and scientist once proposed the analogy of a flame burning on a candle. The flame, he suggested, “is continuously maintained in its ‘resting state’ by a flux of material being dissolved from the mass of the candle and being burned at the wick.” Physically and metaphorically, the illumination provided by a vaporous flame is generated through the candle’s annihilation.

Two features of this reference seem significant to Larner’s own work, which is the subject of a concise but pungent survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. One is its obvious fascination with the constant flux, metamorphosis and decay that characterize life. The other is its more submerged sense of sheer ambition: If you’re a young artist (Larner was then 28) interested in complex intersections among art, science, philosophy and technology, the invocation of Leonardo as an inspirational model sure takes guts.

That healthy appetite is on display--stunningly so--in a new sculpture being shown for the first time in the entry gallery of the exhibition. It packs a wallop. Looking rather like the offspring of a meteorite and a 1957 Cadillac Coupe, Larner’s monumental sculpture is a tour de force of imaginative verve.

Twelve feet high, wide and deep, and fabricated from fiberglass panels over a steel armature, the untitled work luxuriates in its own state of “resting”; all the while its mass seems to shift, slip, slide and dissolve in space. Imagine a crisp, hard-edged cube tumbling through the void. Now, imagine that cube being slowly inflated while it tumbles, as if it were becoming a sphere. Larner’s shape-shifting sculpture is like a computer screen-saver made concrete and three-dimensional. It’s flux incarnate.

Cubic forms interpenetrate one another in this monumental object. Walking around it I counted six, but there could be more. The actual number is indeterminate, because the sculpture won’t stay still, even though it’s static. Light sets it in optical motion.

Larner has painted the piece with sleek, iridescent urethane. Depending on your angle of vision and the play of light, a panel will appear to be either deep purple or bright green.

If the surface is flat, the panel will suddenly change from one color to the other as you move past it. If the surface is curved, the change is more gradual. The purple that slides into green shifts seamlessly into green sliding into purple, and vice versa.

Like a scarab, which in ancient Egypt was a symbol for resurrection, the shimmering sculpture has the feeling of a talisman. Like a customized car, it exudes the pop sexiness of modern technology. Like a Rubik’s Cube tossed into the viewer’s eye and mind, rather than his hand, it places a premium on sculpture as an experiential phenomenon in real time and space.

This is a thread that runs throughout Larner’s work, but every rose has its thorn. Her sculpture often has a dark side, which is both poignant and inescapable.

In 1987, for instance, she put a pink orchid, some yellow buttermilk and a shiny copper penny in a petri dish filled with agar, the nutrient that laboratory scientists use to hasten the growth of bacteria. She photographed the dish three weeks later, after biochemical interaction had turned the items into a still-beautiful lump of rot, discoloration and decay.

In Larner’s sculptural experiment with process, exotic beauty (the orchid), rich sustenance (the buttermilk) and the glint of commerce (the penny) conspired with one another. The resulting putrefaction of the culture led to the emergence of a work of art.

A similarly grim volatility marks the first major sculpture in the survey, which was ably organized by former MOCA curator Russell Ferguson. “Used to Do the Job” is a pair of cubes, each roughly 2 feet on a side, one stacked atop the other. The base cube is made from lead and sheet metal, and it looks like the mold from which the cube on top has been cast.

That one’s made from paraffin, but it appears to have been contaminated with inexplicable stuff. (Think Leonardo’s candle filled with metal shavings.) A glance at the list of materials on the label shows that the paraffin has been mixed with copper and tin, the elements used when making traditional bronze sculpture, along with saltpeter, ammonium nitrate, sulfur and other ingredients used to make explosives. Is the sheet-metal pedestal the mold for the sculpture that sits on top, or is it the casing for a bomb? Larner’s “sculpture bomb” promptly detonates in your brain.

Not included in the show is one of my favorite early works by the artist--1988’s “Corner Basher,” an interactive temper tantrum of a sculpture that tears at the gallery walls. A steel ball at the end of a chain attached to a motorized post could be sent hurtling into the drywall, all at the simple twist of a dial. The art was created as the normally staid space of a corner was set in motion and the gallery was demolished.

A more subtle, intensely focused variation on this theme is found in “Wrapped Corner” (1991). High overhead, stretched around a convex corner between two rooms, 33 rows of steel chain are held in tension between metal plates. The chains are ratcheted so tightly that the corner has just barely begun to buckle under the stress. Know the feeling?

Examples of Larner’s provocative sculpture were included in MOCA’s landmark 1992 exhibition, “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” which helped catapult the city’s art scene into international prominence. But shortly thereafter she pretty much disappeared from view, and a gap of three or four years separates the early work from the recent sculpture in the current survey. Toward the end of the decade Larner reemerged with quirky sculptures in odd materials that set the stage for the big new meteorite-Cadillac.

Most of these works since 1996 employ the form of a cube, the quintessentially Modernist object that is a sculptor’s equivalent to a painter’s grid. But Larner makes the cube feel weirdly organic. These works make me think of Sol Lewitt, but Lewitt merging sculpture with wall drawings.

She does it in a variety of ways. The cubes are open-form and linear, not solid, so you look through them as much as at them. The 12 lines that describe a cube often wobble and meander. Many are wrapped with paper and painted with watercolor, which splits the difference between drawing and sculpture, fluid optics and constructed object. You are in the presence of a material thing, but it seems poised to slip away.

Cubes are frequently linked to one another, so the rigorous, sequential order you expect from a wall or stack of cubes falls apart. One lime green clump of little, interlocking open-cubes seems like a mathematically charted tumbleweed. The striped color on another clump that hangs on the wall permeates space, thanks to the open framework and in stark contrast to the flat stripes on a painting; visually, it causes the cluster to seem to breathe.

Everywhere the stasis implied by a cubic form is held in tension with a sense of extreme fragility. Evanescence is a focal point of Larner’s best sculpture, and the new work at the entry pushes it toward monumental scale. When a bulky, 12-foot sculpture made of steel and fiberglass seems poised to fade from sight like mist or smoke, undercutting the dominance that monumentality implies, your own sense of temporal being in the world is suddenly, deliriously vivified.

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“Liz Larner,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., L.A., (213) 626-6222, through March 10. Closed Mondays.