Re-edited history presents L.A. anew

Drew Heitzler‘s new triptych of three appropriated Hollywood films re-edited and transferred to video is an elaborate, highly stylized bit of historical theater. Think of it as mass-media kabuki.

The piece was originally planned as part of the Focus series for the Museum of Contemporary Art, a show canceled in the wake of last year’s fiscal crisis. In the second-floor gallery at Blum & Poe, the work is projected on a wide wall, its three parts layering the subtle shifts between the Beat Generation and the Pop era as the early 1960s unfolded. Hollywood B-movie shockers form the melodramatic raw material.

“The Wild Ride” (1960) has Jack Nicholson as a tragic troublemaker at the dirt-racing track. Dennis Hopper is obsessed with a carnival mermaid in “Night Tide” (1961). And Warren Beatty pursues mercurial Jean Seberg at a sanitarium in “Lilith” (1964), as fellow patient Peter Fonda commits suicide in despair. Heitzler’s multiple screens, choice of black-and-white pictures and youthful movie stars together seem meant to recall Andy Warhol’s films, which he began to make in 1963.

In the jumbled, fragmented, radically condensed narrative, love on the rocks bleeds into insanity, interspersed with postwar American car culture. Oil, the gasoline fueling the crazed American dream whose nightmarish underside is on syncopated display in the weirdly mesmerizing triptych, oozes into view in adjacent galleries.

A small room shows a short, 46-second video loop of a pumping oil derrick in Ladera Heights, briefly cut with a brilliant sunset sky punctuated by palm trees. A large room is lined with scores of inkjet prints of archival photographs of 20th century Los Angeles, both factual and fictitious.

Celebrities, tabloid news and civic corruption are prominently featured in found photographs that chronicle everything from the Black Dahlia murder mystery to the black gold of the campy “Beverly Hillbillies” television show. Oil seeps into several pictures, filling up a suburban swimming pool or running into the street, courtesy the artist’s application of dense black ink.

A large drawing connects these disparate photographic subjects, including the Keystone Kops, zeppelin warfare, the Ku Klux Klan and Patty Hearst. Each is tied to one of three locations: Baldwin Hills’ oil fields, Venice Beach and the La Brea tar pits. A cross between a police detective’s chart of criminal suspects and a conspiracy theorist’s flowchart, with shades of a film director’s elaborate scenography thrown in for good measure, the drawing provides the perfect, loopy star map to a spectacular era of stunning dissolution.

Blum & Poe, 2754 La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-2062, through Jan. 30. Closed until Jan. 5. www.blumandpoe.com

Rage concealed yet in plain view

“Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence,” the great American writer James Baldwin observed in 1953, “and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever.” An African American living in a small Swiss village, where he grappled with Old World racism that illuminated the New World form he knew so well, Baldwin was carving out space to regard quotidian reality with furious anger.

For a group of 20 text-paintings at Regen Projects, New York artist Glenn Ligon has employed an excerpt of Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in the Village,” the last piece in his celebrated collection “Notes of a Native Son.” Ligon has used the excerpt before. The new paintings were made from a silk-screen of an earlier version.

What the exact excerpt says is impossible to decipher, however, since a combination of pitch-black coal dust and smeared screen-printing obscures the words. Instead the text, tactile and coarse, flows like lava down the canvas’ surface. The contradictory result is a gorgeous suite of unexpectedly elegant, even glamorous abstractions.

Ligon’s works cover the spectrum, flocking the soot on canvases painted black, white and silvery gray, as well as each of the primary colors plus hot pink. Although smaller, they recall Andy Warhol’s 1979 “Shadow” paintings -- his first abstractions, which seem to contain hidden secrets that never will be deciphered.

If we’ve seen this work before, however, the show’s real news is also Warholian -- a short film in which the artist reenacted the final scene from Thomas Edison and Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 silent movie “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” One of the first American movies to tell a full narrative, the Edison-Porter collaboration adapted a racist blackface stage show familiar to audiences in its time.

The final tableau has the “noble hero,” penned by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, preparing for heavenly salvation, thanks to the intervention of white Christians. Ligon’s version of the filmed novel is, like the paintings, entirely abstract -- a series of smudged blurs, flashes of white and ragged black shapes, all set to a piano soundtrack.

Often the flickering imagery looks like an X-ray of a human body, set in jittery motion. The cinematic struggle between black and white, dark and light, transforms social strife and moral conflict into an exquisite space for contemplation.

Regen Projects, 9016 Santa Monica Blvd. and 633 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through Jan. 23. Closed until Jan. 2.

Images that set things in motion

Projected as wall-size murals, three videos by Berlin-based artist Takehito Koganezawa emphasize the essential abstraction inherent in camerawork. A fourth projection makes an unexpectedly disturbing gag of it.

The silent, untitled murals focus on shimmering flashes of dazzling sunlight reflected on the surface of water, like diamonds randomly being strewn across black velvet; flocks of dark birds swooping rhythmically back and forth across a bleached-white sky, as if a Japanese screen-painting had been set in motion; and, in the longest loop (at 22-plus minutes), elaborate neon signs flashing and unfurling in vivid rainbow hues against nighttime blackness. All three are hypnotic and gorgeous.

They also emphasize Koganezawa’s compositional skills. At the scale of a wall, the video’s pixel-grid is enormous, forming a net-like armature that briefly captures constantly shifting hues. Absent any linear narratives, time and space collapse.

The neon projection is especially fine, a continuous sequence of almost imperceptible fades and cuts that never allows a viewer the chance to stop and read the changing, Ginza-type signs. Instead zeroing in on the movements and interactions of colored light, the projection is a video action-painting, more delicate than the muscular works of Sarah Morris to which they bear some comparison.

In the rear gallery, a video tightly projected into a corner shows the artist on the far wall attempting to catch indeterminate projectiles skimming along the side wall. Small dark blurs, “shot” like little missiles from a video projector set on the floor, race toward the image of the artist; he grabs at them as best he can. Most elude his grasp.

Occasionally, though, Koganezawa appears to catch one, dropping the captured image to the floor. In the gallery’s corner a small pile of thin, black, cut-out silhouettes (animals, ghosts, abstract shapes, etc.) seems to accumulate at the artist’s feet, like Peter Pan’s disconnected shadow.

A sort of modified video game, the work suffers a bit from narrative gimmickry. But the suggestion that elusive digital imagery also has concrete behavioral and material ramifications is certainly compelling.

Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through Jan. 9. Closed through Monday. www.cgrimes.com

Hard to see, but the world is there

For his second solo show at François Ghibaly/Chung King Project, Dan Baylesbuilds on the merger of landscape and abstraction that characterized his imaginative paintings of U.S. Embassy buildings in Baghdad. Those pictures were based on plans for the Green Zone leaked on the Internet. They balanced on an epic knife-edge between construction and dissolution -- not unlike their subject. The new ones do too, but in a more intimate way.

In six large and medium-size canvases, Bayles paints picture windows whose view to the outside world is obscured, whether by Venetian blinds, apparently dirty glass, security bars or visual debris in the form of confetti-like chunks of drifting color-shapes. (Formally they’re like a mash-up of Jasper Johns and Kevin Appel, who teaches at Bayles’ alma mater, UC Irvine.) Often, the view seems apocalyptic -- a smoldering vista of indiscriminate ruin, painted in dirty grays, taupe and pale putty, with smoky white wisps rising like smoke from an unseen fire.

Distinctions between outdoors and indoors are not clear, however, which gives the work quiet resonance. The sense of claustrophobic calamity is as much psychological as actual, internal as well as external, rendered on these somber paintings’ heavily worked surfaces. The cautionary tone of Bayles’ previous work has been likened to Thomas Cole’s elaborate, 19th century lament for “The Course of Empire”; these new paintings bring that bleak yet fitting theme closer to home.

François Ghebaly/Chung King Project, 510 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 221-2300, through Jan. 23. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.chungkingproject.com

christopher.knight @latimes.com