Installation Art

Mike Kelley, an influential Los Angeles artist whose physically messy and psychologically complex projects laid the groundwork for present-day installation art, has died. He was 57. He was found dead Tuesday evening at his home in South Pasadena in what several friends described as a suicide following a serious depression. "We can't confirm a suicide pending an autopsy or coroner's report," said one of the estate's trustees, art historian John Welchman. Paul Schimmel, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, called Kelley a "great advocate for artists as well as a great artist," noting his role teaching at the Art Center College of Design.

Mike Kelley, an influential Los Angeles artist whose physically messy and psychologically complex projects laid the groundwork for present-day installation art, has died. He was 57. He was found dead Tuesday evening at his home in South Pasadena in what several friends described as a suicide following a serious depression. "We can't confirm a suicide pending an autopsy or coroner's report," said one of the estate's trustees, art historian John Welchman. Paul Schimmel, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, called Kelley a "great advocate for artists as well as a great artist," noting his role teaching at the Art Center College of Design.

Cosimo Cavallaro has created a Muenster. It's a room the Swiss Family Robinson could call home, a place as Gouda as it gets. It's a hotel room covered in 1,000 pounds of melted cheese: a mixture of shredded Gruyere, Swiss and other varieties. In Room 114, cheese drips from a ceiling fan. It is draped over chairs and the television. It blankets two beds and hangs from the overhead light in long strands reaching the floor. It covers an ashtray and two glasses.

It's just another day at the office for Billy Shire, but his work space is anything but routine. In a dimly lighted backroom that serves as headquarters for the godfather of Los Angeles' "lowbrow" art scene, three decades' worth of eye-gouging artifacts joust for attention. Here's a bug-eyed 3-foot princess doll encased in a shadowbox. There's a circus banner emblazoned with squirming serpents. A bass guitar and a surfboard, each embellished with red flames, lean against the artful clutter while a glittering pink- and turquoise-beaded skull perches inside a cherry-topped cage pretty as a birthday cake.

Installation art, the visual equivalent of fusion food, is a hybrid form that draws upon conventional ingredients and classic recipes but disregards the usual boundaries between them. As with its culinary counterpart, installation art has an anything-goes spirit that favors novelty. Refinement is harder to come by.

In November the Museum of Contemporary Art opened an impressive survey exhibition of the collection it has assembled over the last 30 years. (If you haven't seen the sprawling show of some 500 works -- it continues through the spring -- you're missing something remarkable.) For a long while the only major offering on the schedule after "Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years" was "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective," which just closed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That show, which reconsiders the work of the American painter who fled the 1915 Armenian genocide as a child, is on its way to London's Tate Modern before arriving in Los Angeles in June.

Quiet terror and a sense of foreboding run through the glassy landscape paintings of the great American master Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), and with good reason: The U.S. was either in the midst of wrenching civil war or tumultuous industrialization when he painted his most celebrated nature studies. Remarkably, Heade has never been the subject of a full-scale survey--a lapse that gets rectified by a touring exhibition arriving at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Sunday-Aug. 13).

Sometime late in 1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art here will move to a new home. Sleek, gridded and minimally adorned, the proposed design by Berlin-based architect Josef Paul Kleihues seems a natural for this architecturally exceptional city.

Upstairs at the California Museum of Photography, projected on the curving rear walls outside a little auditorium, computer-generated video imagery by artist Jennifer Steinkamp and recorded sound by composer James Johnson together transform the space into a weird and witty spectacle. Colorful images pulse, electronic sound seems to breathe and solid walls appear to dissolve, as if allowing a temporary, Superman-like glimpse inside their hidden innards.

It's just another day at the office for Billy Shire, but his work space is anything but routine. In a dimly lighted backroom that serves as headquarters for the godfather of Los Angeles' "lowbrow" art scene, three decades' worth of eye-gouging artifacts joust for attention. Here's a bug-eyed 3-foot princess doll encased in a shadowbox. There's a circus banner emblazoned with squirming serpents. A bass guitar and a surfboard, each embellished with red flames, lean against the artful clutter while a glittering pink- and turquoise-beaded skull perches inside a cherry-topped cage pretty as a birthday cake.

In November the Museum of Contemporary Art opened an impressive survey exhibition of the collection it has assembled over the last 30 years. (If you haven't seen the sprawling show of some 500 works -- it continues through the spring -- you're missing something remarkable.) For a long while the only major offering on the schedule after "Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years" was "Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective," which just closed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That show, which reconsiders the work of the American painter who fled the 1915 Armenian genocide as a child, is on its way to London's Tate Modern before arriving in Los Angeles in June.

In the Middle Eastern folk tale of Aladdin, a sorcerer tricks Aladdin's unsuspecting wife into turning over a wondrous magic lamp by posing as a merchant who offers a deal that's too good to be true. He'll exchange new lamps for old. Something of that enchanted storytelling is at work in a quietly engaging show by Camilo Ontiveros at Steve Turner Contemporary Art.

If you miss the 1990s, you'll love "Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists From Korea." Despite the forward-looking title, the new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art seems locked in a wheezing, pre-millennial artistic frame of mind. The 1990s is the decade when conceptually oriented installation art and space-and-time-swallowing video projections were thoroughly institutionalized. Installation art and video projections dominate LACMA's show. Even the small, modest ink drawings at the entry by Koo Jeong-A are enshrined as an installation, transformed by the artist into photographic images projected up close onto a wall.

Artist Doug Aitken is doing everything he can to liberate the 21st century message of his new book from the relatively staid confines of a Gutenberg-era medium. "Broken Screen" -- subtitled "26 Conversations With Doug Aitken: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative" -- is, after all, a group portrait of unruly creative mavericks disinterested in traditional narrative forms.

When sculptor Patrick Nickell has a show, it often looks as if the art has been put together from whatever could be scavenged out in the gallery's back room. Cardboard, rough plywood, crumpled newspaper, string, masking tape, glue, plastic wrap, house paint, marking pen -- the ingredients Nickell uses for his work all tend to have one thing in common. They're the materials most artists use to crate, pack and ship their sculptures (and paintings) to an exhibition. A sly polemic is at work here.

Herewith, in no particular order, the 10 most notable art exhibitions, events and episodes for Y2K: 1. Conner and McCarthy Shows Simultaneous survey shows (both still on view) at the Museum of Contemporary Art gave long overdue prominence to two exceptionally gifted Californians. The innovative assemblages--including films--of San Francisco's Bruce Conner opened doors for much subsequent art, while the performance-based work of L.A.'

When Merry Norris first walked through the door of the sleek Hollywood Hills house, she knew she'd found the perfect spot. "I always dreamed of living in a light-filled space that was contemporary in design," says Norris. But more than a place to call home, Norris, who serves as a director on the boards of several art and architecture institutions, was really looking for just the right backdrop for her collection of paintings, sculpture and installation art.

"Satellite Intelligence: New Art from San Diego and Boston" is an exhibition that employs a new twist on an old conceit. The two cities are within striking distance of the two most important artistic centers in the nation. They're "satellites" of Los Angeles and New York, respectively, and as such find themselves within the gravitational pull of those important centers. The show means to find out whether or not a center's pull affects the art that is made nearby.

Quiet terror and a sense of foreboding run through the glassy landscape paintings of the great American master Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), and with good reason: The U.S. was either in the midst of wrenching civil war or tumultuous industrialization when he painted his most celebrated nature studies. Remarkably, Heade has never been the subject of a full-scale survey--a lapse that gets rectified by a touring exhibition arriving at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Sunday-Aug. 13).

Installation art, the visual equivalent of fusion food, is a hybrid form that draws upon conventional ingredients and classic recipes but disregards the usual boundaries between them. As with its culinary counterpart, installation art has an anything-goes spirit that favors novelty. Refinement is harder to come by.