A rancid tableau sets the stage

Now that “spider hole” has entered the lexicon denoting a cramped hiding place where potential danger lurks, we might also apply the term to art. At least it fits an installation at LACE by Swiss artist Christoph Buchel -- his solo debut in Los Angeles -- which probes a recognizable aesthetic of paranoia.

Architectural in scale, Buchel’s untitled work obliterates any coherent sense of the gallery space. LACE’s storefront building on Hollywood Boulevard has been boarded up with plywood. Once inside you leave the white-walled realm characteristic of contemporary art.

In fact, you’ll be forgiven for assuming that the place might have gone out of business. An attendant at the door will let you in through the rickety door, but only after you’ve signed a liability waiver. The setup is the same as the one in use downtown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where a rather wan maze of tatty, dead-end rooms built inside the back corner of the Geffen Contemporary by young German artist Gregor Schneider is being shown.

Inside LACE, Buchel has constructed what turns out to be a sequence of seven rooms. Unlike Schneider’s installation, which meanders off in random directions, Buchel’s follows a linear sequence. You are being led on a calculated journey.

The first room -- a dark, smelly, trash-strewn space -- is unlighted, as if this were indeed a shuttered storefront in a derelict part of town. Beyond a door marked “Employees Only” lies a large, filthy bathroom. A jagged hole cut in the linoleum-covered floor exposes dirt beneath the building’s foundation, as if someone tried to escape.

Over in the corner stands a tall metal locker. Open its battered door and a narrow hallway is revealed. Here, in Buchel’s equivalent of tumbling down Alice’s rabbit hole, the going gets tough.

At the end of the hall, an opening just big enough for an agile body has been smashed through a wall, down by the floor. Light beckons from the other side. Wriggle through on hands and knees, and you emerge beneath a beat-up desk inside a tiny, unkempt office.

This Alice’s particular Wonderland is not surreal, just weird. The office door is ajar. Glimpsed through the crack, the waiting room outside is stacked high with munitions -- missiles, torpedoes and ammo crates.

Another door leads to a claustrophobic workout room, into which a weight machine has been wedged. Beyond that lies a hallway stacked with more munitions.

A theatrical stage set, the installation is excruciatingly precise. Call the ambience in this inner sanctum essence of Travis Bickle -- a rancid architecture of internalized fear, which has been constructed as a blunt caricature of masculine power.

You’re invited to snoop around Buchel’s acutely observed rooms. He’s used just the right cheesy wood paneling for the walls of the bomb-laden waiting room, which lends a low-budget sense of ordinariness to the environment. The two fluorescent lights in the ceiling above are slightly mismatched in color. The light is cold and sickly.

Open a file cabinet drawer in the tiny office and old cans of sardines rattle around. Idle scribbling fills the tattered notebook next to the telephone, recent magazines are tossed about and a dead plant straggles atop the TV set.

Buchel’s installation, like Schneider’s at MOCA, is related to the masterful architectural environments of Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, made since the 1980s. In different ways and to disparate effect, all three artists build rooms to evoke a sense of fading hope, psychological trauma and ambiguous possibilities. Kabakov’s work was born of decades of repression inside the old Soviet Union. Schneider’s reflects a vaguely Eastern European sensibility, where the future is difficult to glimpse through dusty layers of the past.

Buchel’s installation is different, if only because the architectural cues are inescapably American. (The Swiss artist is completing a three-month stay at the Hollywood Hills House, a private artist-in-residency program.) Buchel is perhaps best known for having auctioned off on EBay his invitation to participate in the last European Biennial, Manifesta 4. He sold his place in the show to an aspiring American artist for more than $15,000. Given the psychological orientation common to the work of Kabakov and Schneider, plus the Conceptual art credentials of Buchel’s Manifesta stunt, the piece at LACE might best be described as a three-dimensional picture of a state of mind.

In short, he has constructed the physical embodiment of a bunker mentality, with which Americans have been living for quite some time now. The piece is hard to like -- it’s as incommodious, inconclusive and dispiriting as that state of mind suggests -- but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

Also at LACE, L.A. film and video artist Kerry Tribe shows “Florida,” a projection piece that pairs audio reminiscences by elderly residents of nursing homes and retirement communities with video tracking shots of the natural landscape. The imminence of death slides over mythologies of the Sunshine State, land of the Fountain of Youth, like a nearly frictionless daydream.

The projection fills a large wall, floor to ceiling. Long, elegant tracking shots show swamps, waterways, sandy grasslands, orange groves and forests filled with gracefully dripping Spanish moss. These lovely, hypnotic pictures describe a world of beauty and decay, richness and desolation. Broad vistas of sandy dunes are linked to intimate glimpses of spider webs. The shots are never static. Tribe’s camera continually moves, as if to stop would be to die.

When her camera slides over the water, glimmers of sunlight and reflections of sky disorient the view. Occasionally, she dips beneath the surface to a murkier place, where shafts of light pick out water plants and algae swirls about.

The lush imagery provides a visual context for the spare soundtrack, although the words and pictures are unhinged from one another. Each plays on a separate loop, creating random conjunctions and heightening the visual sense of a floating world.

The monologues, spoken in shaky and aged voices, mostly recall mundane circumstances of the speaker’s advanced years. Philosophical ruminations about death sometimes emerge, as when a woman reasonably remarks, “If there is any hereafter, it’s in the minds of the people who knew you.”

Tribe has helpfully provided nine large and comfortable lounging platforms, where you can sit or recline to watch the piece. However, a small but nagging technical problem intrudes on the poetic meditation at the heart of “Florida.” Echoes in the large room frequently make the soundtrack hard to follow. Straining to hear the words, you lose focus on the imagery. A minor defect, it nonetheless introduces a note of dissonance in an otherwise absorbing work.

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 957-1777, through Sunday. Open Fri., noon to 9 p.m., Sat. and Sun. 12-6.