Art with no worries -- and no real pieces

“What would artists make if they were free to give in to ambition without constraint? If they were not limited by material circumstances, nor by anxiety over their work’s reception, nor by their own faculties and resources?”

These are the central questions posed by curators Greta Byrum and Annabel Daou in “aporia:aporia,” an exhibition of “impossible artworks” -- works conceived without regard for material, technical or cultural limitations -- at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. A more pertinent question for viewers may be: Just how much frustration does it require to make a curatorial point?

Because as compelling as the premise may be, it’s buried in a web of theoretical (or, at times, pseudo-theoretical) chatter that takes quite a bit of patience to penetrate. The show, which first appeared at the EFA Gallery in New York last year, consists of 15 hypothetical projects, each presented as a single, museum-style wall label, with the name of the artist and the piece, a list of materials and a short commentary.

These placards -- all hung at eye level around the gallery -- are the only objects in the room. There is also an audio guide available for listening to on an iPod (you can borrow one at the front desk if you don’t have your own) featuring fragmented snippets of interviews with the artists.

Many of the projects are very intriguing. Karen Margolis, in a piece titled “See My Qualia,” imagines attaching microchip electrodes to the scalp of every willing New Yorker to monitor emotional responses and project a coded range of colored auras. Daniel Bozhkov’s “Gagarin Astronaut Honey” proposes the establishment of a honeybee colony aboard a commercial spacecraft.

Sarah Oppenheimer’s “Intersection (A cast of (hundreds of (thousands of)) thousands)” -- the most conceptually elegant of the lot -- envisions an elaborate public performance in which the activity at a given intersection is recorded at a given time and repeated at the same time on subsequent days with an exponentially expanding number of actors.

These basic kernels of information -- the how, what and why of each project -- aren’t easy to come by. In several cases, the texts bury the concept of a work in heaps of largely vapid art-speak. (In Joan Banach’s “The Third Term,” for instance, “the layering of meaning through the accretion of images begins to suggest the impossibility of identity: a coil of being that is forever pointing to something before or after the present moment.”)

Some texts simply devolve into nonsense. In Tianna Kennedy’s “Eating Vampires Back,” the artist “performs a series of ritualized practices to revitalize the spirit, knowing full well that there will always be more vampires. And yet, Saltfish John licks his calluses, strums and begins Ti Yi Yippy.”

Others don’t even bother explaining. Treva Wurmfeld’s “Everything Here, Ongoing” is listed simply as “a filmic document [that] gives us something to look at.”

There’s parody in there somewhere, but it’s difficult to tell where that leaves off and the (apparently earnest) conceptual/ philosophical investigation begins. Which raises the question of what the curators are actually trying to accomplish.

Indeed, one often gets the feeling in these texts (the labels, the audio guide and the show’s two catalogs -- one of which is conceived, incidentally, as a children’s workbook) that the curators are intent on compounding the physical nonexistence of the works with obfuscation of even their conceptual form, leaving -- well, nothing really, except the sound of the curators’ own voice.

Longing to hear more from the artists themselves, I found myself gravitating to what seemed the most reliable evidence of their contribution: the lists of materials. Here I found some of the show’s real gems, such as this one, for Rochelle Feinstein’s “I MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE/WhiteHouse”: “The White House, tour guides, 30 paintings, 5 TV sets, environmental ‘Garden’ video, Barry White audio loop, 30 6-inch mirrored disco balls, 10 units hazer lights.”

Even without knowing that the work, in the words of the wall text, “explores the structures of mistake and redemption, using Barry White’s music to present ‘the promise of redemption, albeit through the sensual-sexual realm,’ ” it’s a pretty glorious thing to imagine. It makes as good a case as any in the show for “allowing the mind to escape the limitations of substance.”

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 957-1777, through Aug. 19. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. www.artleak.org

The heyday of L.A. assemblage

“L.A. Object and David Hammons Body Prints,” at the Roberts & Tilton Gallery, is an anomaly in this languid season -- a group show with substance, devoted not to what’s hip now but to an underexposed vein of Los Angeles art history: 1960s and ‘70s assemblage. Curated by gallery co-owner Jack Tilton (it first appeared at his New York space, the Tilton Gallery, last fall), the show seems to have been a labor of love, with most of the nearly 50 works culled from private collections.

It’s a museum-worthy endeavor that would benefit greatly from a little more space (it’s awfully cramped) and a catalog -- but that shines here nonetheless. Few genres speak to the material experience of the 20th century -- the most stuff-laden century in history -- more astutely than assemblage. Few American cities played so big a role in the shaping of that material experience as Los Angeles, with its ties to the automobile, the aerospace industry, suburbia, fast food and popular media.

Assemblage didn’t begin or end in L.A., but these works suggest it was practiced here with a kind of heightened awareness that feels, in many cases, quite prescient. The selection of artists -- 24 in all -- includes such well-known figures as Ed and Nancy Kienholz, George Herms, Wallace Berman, Betye Saar and John Outterbridge. There are also many less familiar names, including Alonzo Davis, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Dale Brockman Davis and La Monte Westmoreland, to name a few. All make worthy contributions.

Even among this distinguished company, however, the 12 Hammons prints -- made while the artist was living in L.A. in the early to mid-’70s -- stand out. Each revolves around the imprint of a face or other body part in pigment on paper. The effect resembles that of a hand or a face copied in a Xerox machine around which Hammons has built up layers of collage.

They’re intense works, unabashedly sensual and intimate yet strangely totemic, with an almost supernatural air. Created at a time of heated race and gender relations, when so many male artists were recoiling from the tactility of Abstract Expressionism into the disembodied spheres of Minimalism and Conceptual art, their frank -- and frankly black -- physicality is a powerful statement, no less potent now, 30 years later.

Roberts & Tilton Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 549-0223, through July 28. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.robertsandtilton.com

Still exploring an unlikely pairing

The painter iona rozeal brown has been circling the same relatively narrow territory since completing her graduate degree at Yale five years ago: the unlikely -- or at least counterintuitive -- intersection of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints (traditionally produced between the 17th and 20th centuries) and contemporary American hip-hop culture. It is the sort of niche that could confine an artist as easily as distinguish her.

But Brown hasn’t yet reached that point, judging from her third solo show at Sandroni Rey. With an increasingly complex pictorial structure and a more confident approach to line and pattern -- elements essential to the ukiyo-e tradition but undoubtedly difficult to master casually -- the seven paintings assembled here suggest that her engagement with her subject is deepening rather than stabilizing, as she supplements the hip factor of pop culture associations with dedicated art historical study.

Sandroni Rey, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 280-0111, through Aug. 11. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.sandronirey.com

An intimate view of destruction

The paintings in London-based artist Clare Woods’ second solo show at the Karyn Lovegrove Gallery are landscapes on the verge of disintegration, viewed not from the comfortable distance of a vista but from about the level of a foxhole. In the foreground, one discerns the post of a fence, perhaps, a mangled gate or the suggestion of grasses and leaves. Behind this, pictorial chaos reigns.

Distinct shapes devolve into aimless brush strokes, unlikely colors smear into one another, and the sense of spatial perspective evaporates. The effect is disorienting and vaguely ominous. This is the vantage point not of a predator -- of a hunter gazing across an open field or a hawk circling above -- but of prey.

Woods complicates the effect with inorganic but exceptionally seductive materials -- enamel and oil on aluminum in the four large works (all roughly 6 by 4 feet) and enamel on paper in the two smaller pieces (35 by 25 inches). The surfaces are glossy, luscious, candy-like, and the various permutations of her forms -- whether controlled or spontaneous -- are deeply absorbing.

They’re paintings you can get lost in. This is also, after all, the vantage point of the dreamer dozing in the grass, immune to the tumult waiting over the next hill.

Karyn Lovegrove Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., No. 8, Los Angeles, (323) 525-1755, through July 28. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.karynlovegrovegallery.com