Joel Tauber

Artist Joel Tauber was captivated the first time he laid eyes on the little sycamore in the middle of the Rose Bowl parking lot. "It struck me on a metaphorical level," he says. "It just seemed like this forgotten figure in this sea of asphalt, and that seemed indicative of where we are environmentally." Since that day two years ago, Tauber has devoted his life and art to the tree. He began watering it and installed metal railings to protect it from cars. Now he is helping it reproduce.

THE term "caveman art" might bring to mind crudely rendered hunting scenes etched onto stone, but Joel Tauber is a different kind of a caveman, and his art is just as unusual. The 33-year-old fine-arts graduate of Yale and Pasadena's Art Center College of Design rents out living space that's been carved from the side of a hill in Eagle Rock, and seldom have human and habitat been so aptly joined.

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.