Beguiled by ‘Longing and Memory’

Stan Douglas is a scene stealer. As he has before, the Canadian artist has contributed a film installation to a group exhibition--”Contemporary Projects: Longing and Memory,” which opened Thursday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--that effortlessly draws you into its mesmerizing sphere. The guy’s got a gift.

The small and beguiling show includes 30 paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings and mixed-media works by seven international artists. As articulated in a brief brochure by LACMA curator Lynn Zelevansky, its theme is how certain artists currently “indulge in the evocation or fantasy of the past,” especially by exploiting “a beauty and poignancy that elicits longing.”

Douglas’ is the only piece that predates the 1990s. “Subject to a Film: Marnie” (1988) is based on the 1964 Alfred Hitchcock movie about a compulsive liar and chronic thief, released when Douglas, now 37, was just a toddler. (Appropriately, Marnie’s kleptomania is traced to events in her own early childhood.) In a darkened room a silent, scratchy, six-minute black-and-white loop replays ad infinitum, with only the sharp crackle of static and the whir of a projector amplified on the soundtrack.

The scene is a critical one in which a young woman, preparing to leave the office for the day, instead ducks into the ladies’ room as most of her colleagues file into the elevator. She returns to the office, unlocks a desk, opens an envelope to peruse a list of numbers and then glides quietly into another office nearby.

There, she kneels to open a safe, as the camera slowly pans away, back into the outer office. Seamlessly, the loop begins again.

Cinematic experience is the work’s haunting subject. You have to watch the elegantly filmed scene a few times before you begin to pick up subtly disorienting clues.

The hair and clothing say 1960s, for example, but the prominent desktop computer terminals announce today. The visuals are oddly familiar, but that young woman isn’t Tippi Hedren and this can’t be an actual clip from “Marnie.”

And what, after all, is the tantalizing but undisclosed treasure locked inside the safe--the secret meaning hidden away inside the captivating image? Douglas deftly exploits the easy, seductive qualities of film to unravel the way movies have become our culture’s collective memories, surreptitiously shaping expectations of social experience.

The fleeting, ephemeral nature of cinema is even a kind of leitmotif for the exhibition. A sense of theatrical distance and, especially, inevitable loss is pervasive.

Jack Pierson employs scavenged, beat-up letters left over from used commercial signs to make wall-sculptures that “advertise” decay and disappearance. (“STAY” implores one of his sculptural signs, assembled from forlorn fragments.) Argentine Guillermo Kuitca’s paintings of an empty theater and a room with subtly disheveled furniture evoke moments of vanished drama.

Britain’s Rachel Whiteread shows several of what I’ve come to regard as her “ghost sculptures”--casts of mundane objects in plastic, rubber or dental plaster. A black-plastic row of 40 books, spine-side against the wall and thus seen as if inside-out on a shelf, is like a black hole of literate knowledge hungrily draining mental energy from the room.

Elizabeth Peyton’s mostly small, loosely brushed portraits of youthful, punkish pop stars of the recent past (Kurt Cobain, John Lydon) and yesteryear’s young royals (Princess Elizabeth, Ludwig II) are like fashion sketches rendered in a demode style. On the floor nearby, a little pile of men’s clothing (jeans, jersey, underpants, socks, shoes) in Jim Hodge’s “What’s Left” is anchored to the wall by a fragile spider-web made from skinny silver chains--a glistening crown for the prosaic remnants of a vanished life.

The most arresting image in the show is Sharon Lockhart’s big (6-by-9 foot) color photograph of a young man, hand on hip, standing before a wall of windows. Reflected in the glass is a neat, slightly formal bedroom--perhaps a hotel room--that mingles with the shadowy city skyline at twilight, glimpsed through the darkening window. The man seems strangely suspended, physically and psychologically, in marginal time and space.

The horizontal scale of Lockhart’s big photograph recalls a movie screen, while the discomfiting sense of drift and suspension conveyed by its image is at least a distant cousin to the ruminative anxiety of Douglas’ film installation. What’s unusually appealing about Lockhart’s and Douglas’ works in this show is their crisp visual acuity, which could so easily have been swamped beneath an onrushing ennui.

The curator attributes the wistfulness and nostalgia evident in much of this work to a possible end-of-the-century urge toward retrospection. Furthermore, Zelevansky writes in the brochure, their preoccupation with transience and loss “is also a means of negotiating the hyper-stimulated environment of the 1990s, where time and events move so quickly that the sense of authentic experience is often jeopardized.”

I confess I find millennial tremors to be highly overrated as an operative impulse for much of anything--except maybe the perpetual fund-raising on fundamentalist TV. The unprecedented acceleration of modern life has also been an artistic staple at least since 19th century Impressionist painting.

For the latter, take a look upstairs in LACMA’s permanent collection at Camille Pissarro’s knockout urban landscape, “La Place du Thea^tre Francais” (1898). A giddy aerial view of crowds and carriages flowing through a traffic circle like corpuscles through a vein, this end-of-another-century work of art is keyed to the novel speed and clamor of modern life, here composed into a dense visual ballet held in suspended animation.

Other, equally plausible topical explanations for a current preoccupation with transience and loss could be made. They include the on-going devastation wrought by the AIDS epidemic and the unnerving recent collapse of a Cold War status quo, which had securely defined so many of the terms of life in the second half of the 20th century.

Yet, it’s important to remember that, artistically speaking, topicality is more likely to provide the dialect or patois for customary conversations that are far more basic than any passing event. Mortality and death are simply counted among the big subjects for any era, millennial or not. With varying degrees of skill and conviction, they are broached yet again by most of the artists in “Longing and Memory.”

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Sept. 7. Closed Mondays.