On the walls and in your face

In the time it takes to walk from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s main buildings down the street to LACMA West, consider this: Art is a set of a propositions rather than a fixed visual decree; your response is integral to its meaning. Addressing these propositions need not be a hushed, hands-off affair, but can be noisy, messy, open-ended.

By the time you reach the front doors of the museum’s western annex, you’ll be in the proper mind-set for “Consider This ... ,” the latest offering of LACMALab, the museum’s “experimental arm.” And by the time you leave the show, maybe even to return to LACMA’s more conventionally outfitted galleries, you might recognize that those notions aren’t new. Art has always been a two-way street; the traffic simply moves faster now. We’re more impatient than ever, and artists and viewers both blare horns as a standard form of address.

The LACMALab show, organized by a team of curators, educators and programmers, responds aptly to this condition. It turns the volume up to get our attention and sustains interest by keeping things moving. Its strategies are congruent with popular culture and mass media: Surfaces are smothered with words and images, and the space is relentlessly dense with sound. The show oscillates between prompt and assault. At times it provokes and invigorates and at others merely exhausts.

Six artists were commissioned to create work for the exhibition, which was designed (graphics, installation and packaging) by Barbara Kruger. Since the 1980s, Kruger has coupled words and images, fusing the formal brevity of advertising with an oblique mode of public address. “Consider This ... “ bears her imprint inside and out.

Huge bold letters spell out “POWER,” “BELIEF,” “MEMORY,” “FAME” and more in LACMA West’s storefront windows. The staccato shouts, white on green, have only fleeting effect. They are hot-button topics left unpushed in a gratuitous list.

On several walls inside, Kruger has printed quotes that trigger reflection and resonate with the themes of violence, cultural identity and preservation that course through the show: “BLIND IDEALISM IS REACTIONARY” (Frantz Fanon) and “MY COUNTRY IS THE WORLD, MY RELIGION IS TO DO GOOD” (Thomas Paine).

All of the installations are participatory, if only as room-size sculptures that must be walked around or through to be experienced. Margaret Honda’s “Hideout” looks like a fabric-walled shanty. Peepholes afford views -- startling at first -- eye-to-eye with a taxidermic deer, dolphin, polar bear or tortoise. An adjacent build-it-yourself clubhouse feels more bereft than playful, and the installation itself is slightly ominous and sadly poignant, a shabby shelter for species we’ve likely crowded out of their natural environments.

Dorit Cypis identifies several intriguing themes -- the likeness between a young Palestinian suicide bomber and one of her Jewish Israeli victims; the power of sculptural surrogates to stage a dialogue of sorts between the dead and living -- but her installation of photographs, mirrors and videos diffuses them. Mark Bradford’s work, too, evokes atmosphere, with its videos of street life in Cairo and L.A., mirrors, posters and incense, but the installation is a physical and conceptual dead-end.

Bruce Yonemoto presents two videos, the first an innocuous extended portrait of a teenager’s birthday party, and the other a more moving meditation using footage of Nazi book burnings, cross burnings and self-immolation to link the state of the individual soul with humanity’s legacy of hate and social protest.

The most involving works come from Mario Ybarra Jr. and Philip Rantzer. Both encourage visitors to make their own marks upon the walls of their installations (with provided materials). Ybarra’s examines the fate of a local site, “The Belmont Ruins,” a train tunnel turned graffiti mecca adjacent to a field where an adapted version of a pre-Columbian ballgame is played. The installation weaves together documentation and homage with humor and outrage.

Rantzer, the only artist in the group not from L.A. (he lives in Tel Aviv), shifts the conversation to the allegorical in his stunning sculptures, “The Five Continents.” The figures, young boy to old man, each about one-quarter life-size, are extraordinarily crafted in Plasticine and situated in strange circumstances: standing on a wheeled building with a bloodied scarf around the neck, wearing a backpack with horns; lying on a bench inscribed with cryptic writings, back arched over a towel bundle, legs soaked red up to the knees.

The sculptures generate a flood of questions, which Rantzer paints across the works: What’s written on the bench? Why this? What’s the meaning of that? The questions repeat on the walls, where visitors can respond (on the plywood floor, as well) using markers.

Rotating throughout the long run of the show will also be several additional “Project Studios.” The first went to Clayton Campbell, who mounted photographs of his teenage son holding placards with words he learned, or learned new meanings for, since 9/11: “dirty bomb,” “duct tape,” “unilateral” and so on. Over four weekends, Campbell photographed willing visitors with their designated words and incorporated the pictures into the installation, making a mildly interesting version of a glossary of the zeitgeist.

Kruger’s design envelops the artists’ individual projects so that the whole feels like a nesting doll of installations within an installation. In one section, visitors are invited to create and display cut-paper collages, reiterating the collage aesthetic of the show.

“Consider This ... ,” with its elliptical title and ever-evolving installations, has an appealing lack of fixity. Boundaries seem fluid, and authorship of the whole feels shared, sourced in an energy that’s compelling even though contrived. However staged the spontaneity, writing on museum walls is an enticing act of subversion. Judging by the knotty jumble of contributions within Ybarra’s and Rantzer’s installations, visitors are relishing the opportunity to participate. The irony of the situation was not lost, though, on one person who scrawled across the sanctioned space: “It isn’t really graffiti if you are allowed to do it!”

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‘Consider This ...’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Wednesdays

Ends: “Consider This...,” through Jan. 15; Clayton Campbell, “Words My Son Has Learned Since 9-11,” through June 30

Price: $5 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000; www.lacma.org