React, but don't try to predict the future

The primacy of this memory is odd, given all the competition from other strong work in the show. Perhaps that's because of what I wrote in my review. "The shabby, domestic crack-up of hearth and home in [Rubin's] mountainous pile of wrecked mobile homes and ruined water heaters startles with blunt force, but little resonance follows the initial, gee-whiz impact." The "yes-but" observation came in a section of the review describing disappointments. A sculpture I can't forget is one I criticized as unmemorable.

Gee whiz.

Six years ago, MOCA acquired a monumental Rubins sculpture, this one wired together like an improbable industrial tree and now "planted" on the museum's main plaza. Its eccentric, branching form had taken shape according to the available spatial dimensions of the gallery that first showed it, adding the intangible space of its construction to its heady accumulation of commanding physical materials. Descriptively titled -- hang on -- "Chas' Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson's Airplane Parts, About 1,000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, and Gagosian's Beverly Hills Space at MOCA" -- it is a powerful amalgam of rusted and rust-proof metal shards, clinging to a central post yet resting lightly in space. A strange and formally beautiful force-field, it gives me a thrill every time I walk by.

I do think the newer piece is better and more resolved than the "Helter Skelter" work. But the lesson from 1992 is fundamental: No prognostication allowed. Art is experience, which needs to be trusted as it unfolds. The better part of criticism is in understanding that.

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christopher.knight @latimes.com

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