Tourist sites, vaguely viewed

Zen simplicity meets corporate efficiency in “Buried Treasure: Taro Shinoda.” Handsomely installed in Walt Disney Concert Hall’s Gallery at REDCAT, the trifling exhibition also plays up to an American fascination with behind-the-scenes diaries and tell-all confessions popular in politics, business and entertainment. As art, Shinoda’s overproduced installation is troubling because it falls in line with the outpourings of bloggers who believe that everything that happens to them is interesting and worthy of an audience, just because it happens to them.

Shinoda has parked a flatbed trailer in the middle of the large gallery. Signs posted at the entrance direct visitors to remove their shoes before entering. Round and rectangular slabs of shiny white Plexiglas, like synthetic space-age stones, form a path from the door to the trailer, the platform of which is covered with 1/4 -inch-thick sheets of the same milky plastic.

The floor of the gallery has been painted pastel blue. So has the bottom one-third of the walls. The right angles ordinarily formed where the floor meets the walls and where the walls meet one another have been transformed into seamless curves, like skateboard ramps. This softens the architecture’s harsh geometry and evokes the idea that the white trailer is a cloud adrift in a dreamy blue sky.

Like a surrogate sun, two rows of vertically oriented fluorescent lights wrap around the gallery’s sole pillar. Their cold glow casts a pallor of squeaky cleanliness that suggests what it must be like to stand in a gigantic refrigerator on a showroom floor, its empty shelves intimating infinite possibility and its chilly, air-tight atmosphere hinting at deathly stillness.

To breathe some life into this antiseptic setup, Shinoda has printed a single line of text on the white walls just above their pastel blue portions. His ellipses-punctuated sentences tell a generic story about time’s passage, nature’s cycles, meaning’s elusiveness and the beauty of discovering one’s place in the cosmos.

Such insights can be profound. They can also be cliches, especially when printed on greeting cards and in pop-psychology paperbacks.

Unfortunately, Shinoda’s text tends toward the latter. Its phrases recall the messages printed on the walls of the Philippe Starck-designed Mondrian Hotel, which invite guests to “dream,” “enjoy” and “relax.”

Starck and Shinoda draw on Conceptual art’s long-celebrated de-materialization of the art object, particularly Lawrence Weiner’s lean poetry, which he has stenciled and printed on walls since the 1960s.

To distinguish “Buried Treasure” from the interior decor of a hotel, Shinoda piles on art references. His fluorescent tubes play off Dan Flavin’s signature works. His curved corners mimic Douglas Wheeler’s light and space installations. And his customized trailer borrows from Andrea Zittel’s homegrown campers and Joep van Lieshout’s mobile crash pads, bringing the veneer of John McCracken’s sleek sculptures into the mix.

The point of Shinoda’s installation is that art’s value resides in experiences, which are fleeting, and not in objects, which can be bought and sold, collected and fetishized. The problem with “Buried Treasure” is that its objects are too anodyne to produce experiences that are more than vague recapitulations of compelling ones generated by other artists’ works.

The muddled thinking at the heart of Shinoda’s undeveloped art comes into focus on the lobby wall just outside the gallery entrance. Here, seven entries from the Tokyo-based artist’s journal have been printed, along with six line drawings that illustrate, stick-figure style, the day’s events.

From Dec. 12 through 20, Shinoda took two four-day trips from Los Angeles with his trailer. On the first, he traveled with someone named Marty, stopping in Joshua Tree before meeting Kelvin in Flagstaff and visiting a nearby site sacred to the Navajo. On the second trip, he toured Yosemite with Dewey, a Hopi, sleeping under the stars on the trailer, seeing coyotes, eating at a Chinese restaurant and stopping at Cal Arts to weld a broken muffler before returning to REDCAT.

In the diary, Shinoda refers to his trailer as an engawa, a wooden meditation platform that separates a traditional Japanese home’s interior from a Zen rock garden.

Each day of both trips, the peripatetic artist climbed atop the trailer to behold the beauty of the Western landscape. Neither as harmonious nor as formally composed as a rock garden, Shinoda nevertheless saw beauty in it. The insights he recorded are as superficial and formulaic as those of any other tourist in a rush.

The narrative details -- of groggy mornings, breakfast pork chops, impatient traffic cops, glorious sunsets, all-night drives and slipshod mechanics -- overshadow the contemplative insights the old-fashioned platforms were designed to deliver after long hours of solitary pondering. Worse, Shinoda’s self-centered travelogue trumps whatever ephemeral experiences a visitor manages to eke out of the show’s objects and physical features.

Designed to be read like a sign, each of its carefully researched components stands in for abstract ideas that look good on paper -- especially in academic essays and grant applications.

But these ideas wear thin too quickly when you visit. The impossible-to-grasp magic of life lived in the present plays too small a part in Shinoda’s installation, which becomes a story about his trip, not an invitation to take off on one’s own.

*

‘Buried Treasure: Taro Shinoda’

Where: Gallery at REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles

When: Noon to 6 p.m. (or curtain time) Tuesdays through Sundays; closed Mondays

Ends: April 3

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 237-2800; redcat.org