Clash of new tech forms and old

We hear about the information glut -- the nonstop deluge of data, knowledge, advice, entertainment, news, facts and lore that washes over us every day in our electronically wired world. But what exactly does it do to us? How does it affect experience?

If that forest seems obscured by the trees, go directly to the Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park, where you’ll find a pithy show that’s the kind of eye-opening, in-from-left-field exhibition that neither the Museum of Contemporary Art nor the L.A. County Museum of Art ever seems to get around to doing. For 20 years, L.A. artist George Stone has made kinetic sculptures that operate in the gap between the fading machine age and the arising age of information. The bracing Barnsdall survey offers a glimmer of the nausea that rises from the abyss.

“Fault Line” (1986-88) is an enormous, creaking contraption that likens the modern information glut to the steady shifting of tectonic plates beneath our feet, where the terra isn’t always firma. A 32-foot-long wall, painted black, runs the length of a narrow, corridor-like space. The black wall is covered with descriptive data about Los Angeles -- the names of neighborhoods, politicians, civil service programs, etc. -- all written in chalk. Loosely it recalls the classroom-style demonstrations that German artist Joseph Beuys made famous in the 1970s.

Set in front of this long wall are 15 plates of glass, mounted on mechanical arms. They undulate slowly -- and noisily. Text is also written across their transparent surfaces, but because it’s backward and in constant motion, the text is illegible.

The mechanical sculpture is flooded with overhead light, which passes through and reflects off the glass. Its mirror-like qualities are enhanced. As a result, your body and the surrounding walls are subtly transformed into an eddying pool of fugitive information -- of floating shadows and flashes of illumination. Stand in the space to peruse the work, and in no time you begin to feel woozy.

Now, imagine everything cranked up to warp speed -- Paul Klee’s classic painting of a gentle “Twittering Machine” morphed, as it were, into a roaring beast. Stone’s sculpture is, after all, a machine -- old technology, languishing in a sleek digital era of evanescent electronic media. His work is at the fault line between industrial and post-industrial societies -- cultural earthquake territory -- which is inescapably violent, disorienting and full of pathos and possibility.

The coming of a new age

Forty years ago, Leo Marx described the 19th century push of industry into the natural landscape with the fierce metaphor of the machine in the garden. His phrase suggested sharp conflicts between the era’s pastoral and progressive ideals. In Stone’s work, the pastoral garden is long gone, the progressive machine a brute husk. It’s on its way out, hardware replaced by the software of information technologies.

Still, the industrial vocabulary remains the inherited language we understand -- at least nominally. Stone’s 1993 sculpture “Unknown, Unwanted, Unconscious, Untitled” couldn’t be more blunt about it.

In this potent work, among Stone’s best, five rectangular bags made of black neoprene rubber writhe on the floor, the contours of hidden torsos and limbs thrashing into view. A long black cord tethers each to a power source hidden in the ceiling, like an infant’s umbilical or a space-walking astronaut’s lifeline. As the bags flail, it’s easy to project social situations onto their otherwise abstract forms. Made in the aftermath of the first U.S. war against Iraq, for example, and seen now amid the latest conflict, they suggest body bags from which cryptic figures struggle to escape.

Or psychological metaphors come to mind. Perhaps these thrashing, dark masses represent the hidden, secret turmoil of the unconscious. Even if we can’t identify just what awful trauma has been repressed and tucked away -- out of sight, out of mind -- the ordeal inevitably generates observable physical consequences.

As with the mechanical apparatus that makes up “Fault Line,” however, we do finally know what’s inside Stone’s morbid rubber sacks. There is no real mystery. Reading into the abstractions is fun, but they’re obviously mechanized robots, plugged into the power grid overhead. The machine in the garden here gives way to the machine in the body bag. Witness the death throes of an industrial way of living. Watch it twitch and quiver.

The Barnsdall exhibition, organized by guest curator Carole Ann Klonarides and initiated by the Fellows of Contemporary Art, a local support group, includes nine mostly large-scale sculptures. It also appropriates a 10th work -- the artist’s most widely seen piece that’s a permanent 1999 installation in the nearby Metro station at Beverly Boulevard and Vermont Avenue. Stone, working with architects Anil Verma Associates, re-created the geological formations originally found underground at the subway site. Into the architects’ glossy, built environment he inserted enormous fiberglass, steel and concrete copies of boulders and slabs of bedrock.

Given the large size of much of Stone’s work and the relative modesty of Barnsdall’s gallery space, the show suffers a bit from overcrowding. The whirring of electric fans that blow aside empty pages of open books, the snap-crackle-pop of a live microphone swinging on a pendulum and the sudden cracks of gunfire often overlap in assorted installations. “Unknown, Unwanted, Unconscious, Untitled” has even been halved from the 10 body bags it included when first shown a decade ago at a Santa Monica gallery.

But the difficulty is more than compensated for by the opportunity to see a survey of important work by a significant artist who hasn’t been shown in a substantive Los Angeles solo show in 10 years. (The catalog is also enlivened by a savvy essay by CalArts professor Norman M. Klein.) Which is not to say Stone isn’t uneven as an artist. A set of early sculptures -- “Circle of Deceit (The Last Game)” and “The Medium” from 1983-84 -- are sculpturally awkward and conceptually obvious. The first is a riff on old-fashioned mechanical toys -- in which a child’s game of marbles is here merged with atom-smashing nuclear power to suggest juvenile human behavior and the chaos it’s capable of unleashing. The second consists of a live television tube placed atop a steel table, as if some latter-day crystal ball, its randomly programmed channel-surfing likened to phony messages from the dead.

Old work gets public debut

But there are wonderful surprises too. Stone’s first mature work, “Pacer” (1978-79), has never been shown in public before. Originally a film animation, it was reconfigured for the survey as a video projected onto the floor, oozing out beneath a knee-high, 30-foot-wide opening in a blank white wall. Shadow figures pace back and forth, like anxious domesticated ghosts seeping into the gallery.

The shadow of an eagle morphs into a generic figure of a man, which then alternates with images of a coyote, a bear, a deer and a mountain lion. Finally the man turns into a pigeon-like bird, which struts across the floor and flies away.

These passages of nature, filtered through shifting images of humankind, can be read two ways: as a wild symbol of freedom that concludes with an emblem of urban grit, or a stern icon of war that becomes a gentle dove of peace.

Stone’s most recent sculpture, “Paparazzi Garden (hybrid),” is equally compelling -- if likewise sobering. Three graceful tree branches are suspended from the ceiling, like artful limbs cascading across a Japanese or Chinese landscape painting. The wood is paralleled by electrical conduit, which leads to heat-sensing devices wired into the branches’ tips. As you pass into the sculpture’s sphere of influence, the tips turn and scan the spatial intrusion, suddenly blossoming into “flowers” made from bamboo and paper parasols. The event charms and alarms.

A century or two ago, Americans routinely idealized technology as a way to rebel against authoritarianism and achieve social and political liberation. Hiroshima put an end to that. Yet new forms like the Internet rekindle mighty yearnings. Stone’s sculpture aptly overlays those familiar stresses and strains onto the high-tech culture of Japan, and the huge and ancient society of China, now deep in the throes of a delirious technological romance that dwarfs anything in human history.

We can ask what we want of technology, but inevitably the answers lie in a burdened field. On one side it’s a deadened landscape of mass surveillance, on the other the blossoming of a thousand cultural flowers. Stone’s heat-seeking parasols, welcoming you at the entrance to his exhibition, deftly reconcile the conflict.

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‘George Stone: Probabilities, a Mid-Career Survey’

Where: Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., L.A.

When: Wednesdays-Sundays, noon-5 p.m.; first Friday of the month,

noon-9 p.m.

Ends: Nov. 16

Price: Adults $5; seniors and children $3; younger than 12, free

Contact: (323) 644-6269