Into it for the shock of his life

Picture Woody Allen in a wetsuit swimming with sharks and you begin to grasp the contradictions embodied by Los Angeles' resident highbrow argonaut, Joel Tauber. The 32-year-old Conceptual artist can't brew a decent cup of coffee, and he uses the wrong remote control to bring down the volume on his TV because he's been, for some time now, preoccupied with weightier concerns.

"I have these pantheistic leanings," he explains, standing in the kitchen of his cave-walled mountaintop apartment in Eagle Rock. "If there is a divine, I think it probably lies in everything around us, so I've been trying to figure out ways to have these profound experiences for myself, and I've also struggled to figure out ways to chronicle it."

The quest for transcendence began four years ago when Tauber began studying film and video at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design. First came the "Holes Project." Tauber dug himself into the ground in a variety of positions, at one point burying himself naked, neck deep in the dirt. He failed to find God but did contract a case of poison oak rash. Later he distilled his endeavors into a video installation, "Seven Attempts to Make a Ritual."

Next, inspired by Don Quixote and the noble failures of medieval monk Eilmer, Tauber tried to fly using only his arms. He plummeted 150 times from a desert cliff onto a mattress. "I was trying to mentally prepare myself to think that I actually could do this, like a 2-year-old, without any pre-assumptions," Tauber says. "I wouldn't jump until I was convinced I could fly. Each time, when I hit the crash mat, it was a shock. I ended up pretty bruised."

It's all documented in his video, "Searching for the Impossible: The Flying Project" (2002-03), which can be seen at Orange County Museum of Art's 2004 "California Biennial" through Jan. 9.

Tauber eventually attached himself to a platoon of helium balloons that allowed him to sail across the desert while blowing into a set of bagpipes.

For his latest piece, "The Underwater Project: Turning Myself Into Music" (2004), on view at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Tauber learned to scuba dive. Accompanied by a video-camera-toting companion, Tauber made 40 dives off the Southern California coastline and later translated the depth data into dance music. Drones and bleeps provide a soundtrack to a portrait of the artist as a frequently flummoxed diver, costarring an assortment of fish, crustaceans and seaweed.