When 2 art forms intersect

Has there ever been a major architect who did not also possess a profound sculptural imagination? Whatever the answer, the intersection between sculpture and architecture has been a burning issue at least since Frank O. Gehry became a “starchitect.” In the forecourt at Materials & Applications, a center for exploratory architecture in Silver Lake, a fanciful installation by Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues deftly navigates the sculptural junction.

A vortex of more than 500 golden metallic Mylar “petals” is suspended from cables and raised at a 45-degree angle to the ground. The canopy is surrounded on three sides by stucco buildings and on the fourth by a busy street.

The triangular pieces of Mylar are held together with grommets, but they curl at the ends, undulate with the breeze and shimmer in the light. The Mylar, both reflective and translucent, is reinforced with bundled nylon and Kevlar fibers that make it seem at once structurally strong -- almost like plated armor -- yet organically fragile. (Imagine the flower on a Cup of Gold vine.)

The material also cuts the passage of ultraviolet rays while letting through abundant light. As a result, the temperature beneath the golden canopy is considerably lower than it is out on the street. It beckons as a place of refuge.

At the center of the looming vortex, a narrow channel dangles almost to the courtyard’s gravel-covered floor. The structure seems to suck in the ambient sunlight from above, channeling it down to this manageable, harmless, playful bundle within the courtyard. An existing fountain at the entrance might provide an analogy: Think of the sculpture as a sunlight cascade, funneling fluid beams of illumination the way a man-made fountain derives from nature’s waterfalls, turning them to domesticated ends.

The sculpture also has a witty Pop dimension. Ball and Nogues have titled the piece “Maximilian’s Schell,” and a text explains its ostensible relationship to the old Disney movie “The Black Hole,” in which Maximilian Schell played an eminent -- and possibly deranged -- scientist. (Ball is a former film production designer, Nogues is a designer in Gehry’s office.) But camp science-fiction movies are not the vernacular source I have in mind.

“Maximilian’s Schell” is, in effect, a gigantic patio umbrella. In addition to exploding the scale, Ball and Nogues give that ubiquitous artifact of the suburban American dream a hefty dose of urban edge and cosmopolitan sociability. Their engaging sculpture cajoles, contends and plays with the sun, rather than casting it as a hostile enemy.

Materials & Applications, 1619 Silver Lake Blvd., (323) 913-0915, through November. www.emanate.org.

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A new opiate for the masses

More than a century ago, German economist and political philosopher Karl Marx famously declared that “religion is the opiate of the masses.” Since then the drug of choice keeping ordinary citizens in a perpetual stupor, able to be jiggled by whatever Geppetto currently pulls the strings of power, has been attributed to everything from TV to the voting booth.

Canadian artist Bruce LaBruce has a far more sensible and, finally, convincing alternative. His exhibition at Peres Projects firmly declares that “heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses.” It’s a sentiment with which it’s hard to argue.

Unexpectedly, LaBruce lobs it like a grenade into the complacent and constricted conversation about global politics that, ever since 9/11, has been the norm in the United States. His film “The Raspberry Reich” uses sexuality as a raucous sociopolitical wedge, and the cheery result is a kind of “Chelsea Girls” for our time.

Rex Reed called Warhol’s infamous 1966 film a “3 1/2 -hour cesspool of vulgarity and talentless confusion,” and I’d happily apply that review to “The Raspberry Reich” (although it’s less than half as long). The difference is that Reed meant it derisively, while LaBruce’s movie, like Warhol’s, is a travesty of the best kind -- a smart, satirical swipe that smacks its subject squarely between the eyes.

The artist’s contemptuous raspberry is directed at nothing less than the war on terrorism, which emerges as a deadly struggle being waged between two narrow-minded ideologies that, whatever their stark differences, both espouse repressive beliefs. In the film, LaBruce fuses the Red Army Faction -- the 1970s German terrorist outfit otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof gang -- with gay pornography, its stylistic conventions dating from the same period.

The narrative is slight. An all-male group of thugs led by blond-bewigged Gudrun, a nymphomaniac psychopath, kidnaps the son of the head of a major bank. Along the way, she encourages her adoring male cohort to have sex with one another -- an anti-bourgeois gesture to be indulged for the sake of the revolution -- and hilarity, not to mention considerable pornography, ensues. (No one under 18 is allowed in the show.)

Sparks fly. They are further amplified by flash-cut editing, lurid color and supertitles that spell out such political gems as “The arrogance of the strong will be met by the violence of the weak,” “The revolution is your boyfriend” and “Madonna is counter-revolutionary.”

The “Reich” of the title is as much Wilhelm Reich as it is the old German state, and it refers to the Austro-Freudian psychoanalyst imprisoned in the United States in the 1950s for his unconventional ideas. Reich wrote perceptively about how ordinary Germans embraced their own enslavement in the Nazi era; LaBruce, with his anti-radical-chic wit, makes much the same point for the predicament we find ourselves in now.

Twenty film stills are being shown in the upstairs gallery, but they’re more like souvenirs than effective works of art. The main event is the video, appropriately projected in a sweltering basement room. The acoustics could be better, but the underground locale is ideal for both a terrorist hide-out and a homemade blue movie.

Peres Projects, 969 Chung King Road, Chinatown, (213) 617-1100, www.peresprojects.com, through Aug. 13. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Thinking about the art of L.A.

“Think Blue” is an art exhibition-as-exhale. Relaxed and refreshing, with nary a clunker among the diverse works by eight artists, it’s also savvy. The show creates an ideal summer pause in which to -- well, think about “the home team.”

Thirteen paintings, drawings and sculptures are installed at Blum & Poe Gallery. Only three of the artists -- Sam Durant, Mark Grotjahn and Dave Muller -- are represented by the gallery (a spokesman says the show was assembled from work on consignment). But they and the others -- Evan Holloway, Jason Meadows, Laura Owens, Jorge Pardo and Monique Prieto -- are all significant figures in a now-established L.A. generation that came of age artistically in the late 1990s.

Almost everything here dates from 1998. (Durant’s welded stainless-steel boxes, which suggest schematic furniture while confounding ordinary perceptions of Minimalist space, were made in 1997; Holloway’s split tree stump on two tables, which mimics a pair of “natural” movie projectors wittily throwing images of synthetic plywood on adjacent walls, was made in 1999.) A year earlier, “Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A., 1960-1997” became the first European museum exhibition to survey the rise of Los Angeles as an international artistic powerhouse.

None of the “Think Blue” artists were in that landmark exhibition, but none of them make work that’s conceivable without the many precedents it chronicled. It wouldn’t be wise to push the casual premise of the gallery’s show too far; but in addition to the abundant pleasures offered by its individual works, it does start one musing on where L.A. fits now in the larger scheme of artistic things. And, is any museum wondering?

Blum & Poe Gallery, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 836-2062, blumandpoe.com, through Aug. 20. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Chilling images of an icy beyond

The great Rudolf M. Schindler House in West Hollywood rarely works well as a gallery space, but the current exhibition is a marked exception. The large-scale digital photographs in “Isaac Julien: True North” almost seem made for these rooms.

Six photographs and two triptychs show figures in ethereal, wintry landscapes. They are exquisite stills from a short film shot in Iceland, but their inspiration was the North Pole.

Matthew Henson (1866-1955), the black American servant who accompanied British explorer Robert Peary to the pole, wrote an account of being one of the first people to reach that strange node nearly a century ago. Julien, a black British artist having his first L.A. solo show, creates an exploratory examination of spatial incongruity, in which being adrift in an alien landscape is akin to rapture of the deep -- at once blissful and scary.

The most beautiful piece is a triptych, which shows a black woman in a diaphanous white dress encountering a mysterious ice floe washed up on a rocky shore. Chunks of ice are scattered about like diamonds. Julien’s camera juxtaposes a mid-shot, a close-up and a long-shot, as if probing the gorgeously bizarre scene with a lens would somehow “reveal” it. If “true north” describes how to get one’s bearings in the world, these photographs suggest it’s only through the intersection of natural and preternatural, mundane and uncanny, science and art.

Guest curator Lauri Firstenberg has installed several single photographs so that they’re exactly framed by the vertical window-slits in Schindler’s concrete walls. Light streaming in from both sides literally forces you to peer closely into these pictures, undertaking your own disoriented journey through the visionary house.

MAK Center at the Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, (323) 651-1510, through Oct. 23. www.makcenter.org. $7. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.