They’re just trying to pass the time

“Marking Time,” an elegantly cohesive exhibition of film and video at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, is aptly titled: Each of its 12 works approaches the issue of time as if with a pair of calipers, measuring out a particular stretch and exploring the intervening experience of duration. They’re spare, concentrated works that speak to the essence of their media and leave a sharper sense of each passing moment.

The exhibition is a model of curatorial economy. It was organized by Glenn R. Phillips, a curator and research associate at the Getty Research Institute, to coincide with the institute’s 2004--05 scholar year theme of “Duration.” The show spans several countries and more than four decades without feeling fragmentary or overdrawn, thanks to a tight conceptual focus and disciplined selection of works.

These works are evenly divided between the 1970s (or 1980 in one case) and the last decade, though no explicit comparison is made and any conclusions are left to the viewer. Wall texts are similarly restrained.

In an understated feat of installation, all but one of the works appear in the same large room, and they come off the better for it, as it sets them in conversation with one another and allows the viewer to float freely among them.

The 1970s work, made in the first flush of video’s popularity as a medium, is generally the strongest, characterized by a stimulating combination of conceptual clarity and visual potency. Particularly striking is Vito Acconci’s 1971 “Watch”: a black-and-white Super-8 film transferred to video in which we see a close-up shot of the artist’s face watching the slow revolutions of a second hand on an off-screen clock.

Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1973 “Clockshower,” another film transferred to video, takes a more humorous approach to the same object, portraying the artist brushing his teeth and showering while clinging to the face of a clock tower in Manhattan.

Joan Jonas’ mesmerizing “Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll” lends a metronomic rhythm to the exhibition, presenting black-and-white video footage of a costumed female body as filmed on a television screen, fragmented by a continuous vertical roll and accompanied by a loud clanging noise every time the roll hits the bottom of the screen.

Allan Kaprow’s “Then” and Terry Fox’s “Children’s Tapes,” both from 1974, are slow and deliberate though playful works documenting miniature “happenings”: an ice cube melting between a man’s teeth, a candle dripping wax, water pouring into a bowl.

The most rigorous and haunting of the early works is Tehching Hsieh’s “One Year Performance 1980--1981 (Time Piece),” in which the artist punched a standardized timecard in his studio once an hour, 24 hours a day for a year, documenting each occasion on a single frame of film, which he then strung together to form an eerie six-minute loop.

The recent works, though true to the theme of the show, are less consistent in quality. Several -- Jennifer Nelson’s “Car Sunrise/Car Sunset,” Burt Barr’s “Slo-Mo,” and Kimsooja’s “A Laundry Woman -- Yamuna River, India” -- are essentially watered down versions of ‘70s-era concepts: spare and dry but simpler than the earlier works and lacking potency.

Lia Chaia’s “Desenho-Corpo,” in which the artist scribbles on her bare flesh continuously until the pen runs out of ink 51 minutes later, and Erwin Wurm’s “One Minute Sculptures,” an interactive installation that encourages the viewer to assume a variety of absurd positions (which the artist hilariously demonstrates on a video monitor), both stem from the ‘70s tradition as well but stand capably on their own.

The one truly contemporary-feeling work is also the show’s most powerful: Brock Enright’s “Coming of Age,” a two-channel piece in which manipulated footage of the artist as a child, aping for the camera, plays on one monitor, while a close-up shot of the artist’s adult face, gazing into the camera while clearly masturbating, plays on the other, directly facing. The former is violently frenetic, infused with an alternately humorous and unnerving pre-adolescent machismo, while the latter is thoughtful, melancholy, nostalgic. The loop between them speaks volumes.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777, through May 8. Closed Monday and Tuesday.

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Essential viewing for Fischinger fans

In describing the work of Oskar Fischinger (1900--1967), it’s difficult to avoid synesthetic terminology. “Optical Poetry” is the title of his 2004 biography by William Moritz. His films epitomize the premise of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Visual Music” exhibition, in which they figure prominently. Art critic Peter Frank, curator of the Fischinger paintings show at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, describes the films as “paintings set in motion to music.” The paintings could just as easily be described as motion and music set to paint.

The show, which includes 54 paintings made from 1934 to 1966, as well as four slightly earlier drawings, is essential viewing for fans of Fischinger’s films and anyone who enjoyed the MOCA show.

Fischinger considered himself as much a painter as a filmmaker or animator, and it’s the intelligence behind that breadth of imagination that is most striking. Throughout the paintings (all of which are abstract), one finds the artist churning through forms: geometric, curvilinear, impressionistic, hard-edged, soft-edged, smooth, textured, pointillist. Some works suggest a dialogue with other artists of the time; some feel closer to Disney and popular science fiction. Others look entirely contemporary, affirming Frank’s characterization of Fischinger as “grandfather of the digital arts.”

Even the clumsiest are lively and inquisitive, and the best achieve a rare and deeply satisfying resonance.

Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 938-5222, through May 28. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Abstraction brings many rich rewards

At its worst, contemporary abstraction can feel like trendy cop-out: a sanctioned way of avoiding the messiness of the real world, with its complicated networks of symbols and codes, and a shirking of the artist’s responsibility to communicate something identifiably meaningful.

At its best, however, abstraction opens up new worlds, gathering the energy of the known and projecting it into the unknown without forsaking the sensibility or interests of the average viewer.

The recent paintings of San Francisco-based artist Darren Waterston, now at Michael Kohn Gallery, fall decidedly into the latter category. In these works, Waterston abandons the repertoire of iconographic elements that dotted earlier compositions -- flowers, vines, birds, monkeys, insects and the like -- leaving only ambiguously organic suggestions of form floating against fields of watery pigment.

Far from seeming vague or obscure, however, the result feels only richer, more precise and more roundly seductive.

The key is a vigorous formal sensibility and a breathtaking mastery of technique. These are thoroughly absorbing paintings, filled with spatial and textural variety, and continually surprising: hard-edged slivers of black scatter across blurry, luminous pools of green; soft, broad, feathery strokes alternate with perfect, hair-thin outlines and craggy silhouettes; circular lumps of white paint cling like barnacles to thin, translucent washes; human fingerprints pop up occasionally throughout.

The result is a strange and enchanting landscape in which it would be easy to lose oneself indefinitely.

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 658-8088, through April 9. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Fine technique ties images together

The work of San Francisco-based artist Valerie Jacobs, at Bert Green Fine Art, revolves around what appears to be an earnestly cultivated, carefully tended collection of symbols: an ancient Greek war helmet, a pair of boxing gloves, a ship, a drum, a swing and a noose, to name a few. Some are obvious, even simplistic, in their implications, others more obscure, and most have political undertones, generally pertaining to violence and war. What ties these images together and saves the work from mere didacticism is Jacobs’ fine technique, honed over the course of a 40-year, mostly Bay Area-focused career. (This is her first solo show in L.A.) The works -- all drawings and paintings, some incorporating mixed-media elements -- are naturalistic and elegantly rendered. The best have a deep, meditative quality that personalizes the symbolism and lends gravity to the politics.

One of the loveliest is a modest, 14-by-12-inch oil painting of a ring-shaped buoy floating on sparkling blue and green water. Also memorable is a delicate, enigmatic drawing called “Figure With Three Hearts,” in which the silhouette of an airborne water-skier appears suspended above three diagrams of a human heart.

An eloquent portrait of the artist emerges in an oil-on-canvas triptych in which a beautifully rendered but comically irreverent image of her face (she’s sticking out her tongue) is flanked by a seemingly paradoxical pair of images -- rose-colored glasses at the left and a school of barracuda swimming through brilliant turquoise water on the right -- suggesting a sensibility that is poetic and fiercely determined.

Bert Green Fine Art, 102 W. 5th St., Los Angeles, (213) 624-6212, through April 2, 2005. Closed Sunday and Monday.