Art Reviews : Sam Durant Takes a Look Back(ward) at Social History

Over the past several decades, contemporary art has increasingly been regarded as a commentary on its context. In sharp contrast, Sam Durant treats art as a powerful social force, a participatory event out of which new contexts unpredictably emerge.

Titled “Altamont,” his audiovisual installation at Blum & Poe Gallery takes as its point of departure the 1969 Rolling Stones concert that marked the end of the utopian 1960s, when a gun-toting fan was stabbed to death by Hell’s Angels, who had been hired to provide security.

On the gallery floor, a pair of monitors plays--in reverse--the Maysles brothers’ famous film documentary of the concert. On juxtaposed screens, everything happens backward: The film begins at the end, a sunset looks like a sunrise, the audience walks backward to their cars and drives home in reverse.

The only segments of Durant’s through-the-looking-glass view of the concert that appear to be normal are those of the crowd swaying to the music. But even these scenes have an inaccessible, alien quality. The music sounds like a thumping Northern European dirge, as if the Stones’ fiery, menace-laced tunes had been transformed into a plodding Scandinavian requiem.

When the camera focuses on individual band members and concert-goers, language breaks down completely. At first, the gibberish they utter is comical. But the more time you spend before the strangely mesmerizing videos, the more hauntingly foreign they become. After a while, you can’t help but feel that what you’re watching took place not only 30 years ago but far off on another planet.

Drawing equally on the history of popular culture and the history of postwar American art, Durant’s other pieces each have their feet firmly planted in worlds that rarely cross paths. In Durant’s hands, signature sculptures from the late 1960s by Linda Bengalis, Robert Morris and Robert Smithson join forces with remixed versions of Stones songs to demonstrate that fine art and pop music are two sides of one coin.

Rather than acting as if artists are merely alienated observers who stand back from the social world to offer dispassionate analyses of its problems, Durant’s disquieting meditation on the past’s place in the present insists that art is as adept at solving problems as it is at creating new ones. Rumbling with discontent, his double-edged show drives home the point that historical knowledge is no guarantee that history’s tragedies won’t be repeated.

* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Oct. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Under the Sea: Takako Yamaguchi’s paintings on paper are extraordinary objects. Measuring nearly 7 feet by 4 feet, these six masterfully crafted depictions of fantastic aquatic realms at Jan Baum Gallery invite viewers to get lost in a profusion of underwater flora and fauna, while never letting us forget that what we’re looking at is as artificial as low-fat creme bru^lee.

Each of the Japan-born, L.A.-based artist’s sumptuous images has been painted on a fastidiously burnished layer of metal leaf, whose neatly arranged rectangles of gold recall the yellow brick road Dorothy followed to Oz. Fabulously lavish, the shimmering grounds of Yamaguchi’s hyper-stylized paintings do not retreat to the background like shy wallflowers but jump to the foreground with eye-popping verve.

Forming alternating bands of side-by-side triangles, concentric diamonds, spirals and scallops, these golden shapes transform richly tinted skies into dazzling halos. They also outline bright starbursts and give billowing cumulus clouds the weighty substance of solid bronze icons.

Promiscuously mixing abstraction and representation, Yamaguchi’s paintings also mix traditional styles with contemporary computer graphics. Extravagant Byzantine patterning, the simplified motifs found in Mexican murals and the sinuous linear elements of Art Deco freely commingle in works whose laser-sharp contours and seamlessly fused elements evoke the high-tech magic of digital manipulation.

One of the most amazing elements of Yamaguchi’s highly refined art is its embrace of chance and accident. Almost all of the artist’s deliriously beautiful works include jagged, irregularly shaped sections that resemble the end papers of an old book, in which whorls of metallic and matte pigments mix like oil and water.

These fluid swirls--into which some of the metal leaf appears to have dissolved--were splashed on before the rest of the images were rendered. Evoking a maelstrom of protoplasm, Yamaguchi’s chaotic splotches are painterly metaphors for the primordial soup, out of which her version of hard-edged Romanticism rises like a fever-dream.

* Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea Ave., (323) 932-0170, through Oct. 23. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Reshaping a Tradition: Goro Suzuki’s playful tea bowls, water jars, stacking boxes, serving dishes and flower vases are so casual in bearing and format that they make the highly formalized tea ceremonies for which they were crafted seem like relaxed gatherings of friends. At Frank Lloyd Gallery, 30 pieces by the master ceramist from Japan transform a style of pottery that flourished in the 16th century into a fresh, utterly contemporary element of social life.

The majority of the vessels follow the Eoribe style, named after an artisan who, because of some dishonor, was compelled to commit ritual suicide more than 400 years ago. To this genre, Suzuki brings a series of personal symbols, using black glazes to add cartoonish images of lightbulbs, crows and fences to loose geometric patterns. Dense green glazes play off grounds of pink and tan, framing and accenting the swiftly sketched pictographs.

Structurally, Suzuki’s hefty, thick-sided jars, bowls and nesting boxes have an architectural presence. You feel the pull of gravity and the resistance offered by the unfired clay that the artist himself must have felt when he made his asymmetrical vessels, whose uneven sides and undulating covers still convey a sense of droopy ease.

A pair of oddly cylindrical flower vases and several water jars resemble squat little houses to which additional rooms have been added, forming chimney-like stories and idiosyncratic silhouettes. A plump incense burner with three spindly legs and an open dome looks like an old-fashioned spaceship, especially since it’s accompanied by an egg-sized storage pod.

In a sense, Suzuki does to pottery what Frank Gehry does to architecture. Transforming rigid grids and right angles into swooping contours and rolling planes, the talented ceramist demonstrates that traditions live by changing.

* Frank Lloyd Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through Sept. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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In-Between Time: “Tokyo Girls Bravo” presents more than 150 small to mid-size paintings, drawings, photographs, laser and inkjet prints by Chiho Aoshima, Aki Fujimoto and Aya Takano. Organized by artist Takashi Murakami, this exhibition at George’s Gallery uses the whiplash mood swings of adolescents to describe the ups and downs of modern life.

Striking a pose of childish innocence, Takano’s acrylics on canvas look like they could have been drawn in the margins of a schoolgirl’s notebook. But these hastily rendered depictions of asexual astronauts and nude nymphs without genitals still don’t embody the idealized sexlessness of preteens.

Fujimoto’s remarkably mature photographs portray teens hanging out with their friends, whiling away time in parks and cafes. In contrast, Aoshima’s inkjet prints of cartoon-inspired adolescents use a dreamy style of saccharine-sweet fantasy to describe a world in which adult-size tragedies regularly occur.

As a group, the works in “Tokyo Girls Bravo” treat adolescence as an imperfect buffer zone between innocence and experience. Ranging from sweet sentimentality to deadpan intractability, its jam-packed display of figurative imagery takes viewers on an emotional roller-coaster ride. Peaking with evidence of wisdom beyond their years while dipping to lows of utter cluelessness, its diverse works make a mess of the idea that childhood is a time that exists beyond the complications and desires of adulthood.

* George’s Gallery, 1766 N. Vermont Ave., (323) 666-9447, through Oct. 17. Open daily.