A take on comedy is out of the routine

There can be few professions with a more excruciating learning curve than stand-up comedy. A good joke is a delicate creation, forged in harsh and often inhospitable conditions: not in the shelter of a studio, like a painting, but on the no man’s land of a stage, though without sets, supporting players or, in most cases, even so much as a prop. If a painting fails, it stands a good chance of bluffing its way through at least the run of an exhibition. No one can really agree on what failure means in painting these days anyway. But if a joke fails -- and even good jokes often do -- there’s no question: The repercussions through a crowd are immediate and unmistakable.

“The Alchemy of Comedy ... Stupid,” Edgar Arceneaux’s third solo show at Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, is a discerning exploration of this familiar but complicated phenomenon.

The centerpiece is a routine by African American comic David Alan Grier that Arceneaux filmed on a few different occasions and reconfigured into a nine-channel video installation. At one end of the gallery, near the front door, are three plywood projection screens arranged in a triangle, with synced footage depicting the same performance from three different angles. Beyond these screens are five individual monitors, all resting on the floor, presenting footage of Grier in another venue, both performing and mingling with audience members. On the back wall of the gallery is a large projection focusing solely on Grier’s face, animated but silent. There is a soundtrack, but it’s scattered around the room, largely disconnected from any particular image. It’s possible to pick up fragments of individual jokes, but the overall comic effect is minimal.

The jokes themselves, however, aren’t really the point. Indeed, Arceneaux’s interest lies primarily, it seems, in what the pleasure of the punch lines tends to obscure: the fumbled words, the awkward gestures, the anxious glances. Fracturing the jokes just enough to disable the humor, he illuminates the cracks between them, exposing an economy of expression considerably more nuanced -- and fraught -- than the sort of comedic persona one typically encounters on television.

None of the camera angles, for instance, confer anything resembling celebrity status. They present Grier as merely one individual among others, trying (and not always managing) to hold their attention.

There are moments when the performance looks natural, but plenty when it does not, and these moments are especially revealing. It is a peculiar fact that very funny people often have very serious eyes, and Grier is no exception. Indeed, if you were to watch only the rearmost projection -- the close-up -- you might not think he was being funny at all: His face, divorced from bodily gestures and words, often looks downright distraught, racked with hesitation, insecurity, loneliness and need. A phrase painted onto a nearby wall -- “Fatherhood is strictly biological,” which was apparently something Grier’s father said to him as a child -- serves as a reminder of the pain that underpins most humor.

There are a number of additional strands to the exhibition, including several works related to the late Richard Pryor and multiple references to geometry and alchemy. Some of these feel a little disjointed, but when they do come together -- as in “The Burning Bush,” a drawing that combines references to Exodus, Pryor’s near-fatal accident with fire in 1980 and the self-immolation of Vietnamese monks, all in the context of a bad joke -- the effect is intriguing enough to give Arceneaux’s flights of fancy the benefit of the doubt.

If comedy is an alchemical process, what Arceneaux attempts here is something like the reverse: the elaborate dissection of something magical -- a good joke -- into its composite parts. The result may sound tedious, but what he reveals has its own fascination.

Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Dec. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

The haunted faces in troubled lands

The young photojournalist Jehad Nga has seen a lot in his still relatively short career. In the last four years alone, he’s covered the war in Iraq, drought in Somalia and Kenya, the Liberian civil war, the Darfur conflict, illegal immigration in South Africa, a beauty contest for HIV-infected women in Botswana, Ghanaian economic reform, Syrian political reform and the conflict in the Middle East.

His pictures, which have appeared in this paper and the New York Times, among other publications, are confident and engaging if fairly traditional expressions of the genre, in which background and foreground are held in a conscientious state of tension, with sweeping views of these volatile landscapes balanced against sensitive portrayals of the individuals who populate them.

For the work in his first gallery exhibition, however, at M+B, Nga has stripped this familiar formula down to just the latter component, depicting in each image a handful of anonymous figures -- all of them cafe patrons in unspecified regions of Kenya and Somalia -- illuminated by a single beam of light cast through the door of the cafe.

The images are haunting. The darkness surrounding the beam is pure black, and Nga’s dark-skinned subjects float in and out of it like ghosts. They are young and old, male and female; some are wrapped in colorful robes, some carry machine guns. Some smile; some have a pensive, contemplative air; some look away.

The profound simplicity of the arrangement speaks volumes: about the devastating effect throughout Africa of violence, poverty and AIDS; about the view we have of these issues as Westerners looking in; about the role of photography in communicating them to the world; and about the relationship, ultimately, of the individual face to the sweeping currents of history.

M+B, 612 N. Almont Drive, Los Angeles, (310) 550-0500, through Nov. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Casinos and myth of the frontier

“The New Frontier,” New York painter Lisa Sanditz’s first exhibition in Los Angeles, at ACME, takes its name from an old-school Las Vegas casino that recently underwent what the artist characterizes in the show’s statement as a largely futile face-lift. “It defends its prime real estate location on The Strip,” she writes, “but can’t hide the fact that it is a dinosaur. The frontier myth of eternal abundance has rendered this casino a mere building, while the newer casinos spread out as modern temples of the Entertainment Industry.”

This sort of architectural disjuncture is clearly of great interest to Sanditz, many of whose past works incorporated references to garish Midwestern tourist attractions. The paintings in this show revolve loosely around the concept of the casino, exploring the role that gambling palaces have come to play in the social and geographical landscape of the American West. It is an easy subject to caricature, particularly by someone from the Northeast, but Sanditz pushes past the obvious to reveal a subtle pictorial complexity. Though fanciful in many ways, the paintings capture precisely the quality that Western cities such as Las Vegas have of floating on the surface of the landscape, as if not completely fixed to the Earth.

On a formal level, there’s a dazzling ugliness to the work that makes it unexpectedly absorbing. Sanditz paints in brash, discordant tones, flipping with calculated recklessness among sugary pastels, harsh blacks and acidic primaries. Her strokes are insistent and agitated; the compositions tightly wound yet perpetually on the verge of disintegration. In one painting, “Imploding Casino,” the imagery literally does disintegrate, splintering in a cloud of black, gray and murky green.

It is a spectacle in which one can’t help but take a perverse pleasure.

ACME, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-5942, through Nov. 25. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Inaugurating an owner’s return

Jancar Gallery, which opened last month with an exhibition of paintings by Katy Crowe, is a tiny space on the top floor of a 13-story Art Deco office tower in Koreatown. The enterprise is a long-delayed reprise for owner Tom Jancar, who 26 years ago ran another gallery with partner Richard Kuhlenschmidt just five blocks to the east, where he exhibited the likes of David Amico, William Leavitt, Richard Prince and Louise Lawler.

The paintings in the inaugural show are pleasant but rather thin abstractions -- all variations on an argyle pattern, loosely rendered in handsome, muted tones. The best of them have a full, billowing feel, like patterned sweaters rippling in the wind; others just feel casual and haphazard, verging on lackadaisical. It is a simplistic motif, potentially elegant perhaps, but not terribly substantial or interesting in itself; one would like to have seen the artist push it a little further. As it is, the paintings are poor competition for the gallery’s spectacular views.

Promising coming exhibitions include shows by Kim Hubbard (who was the first artist to show in Jancar’s earlier gallery, in 1980), Robin Mitchell and Bobbie Oliver.

Jancar Gallery, 3875 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1308, Los Angeles, (213) 384-8077, through Nov. 18. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.