Intriguing Mural Eludes Conventional Interpretation

New York-based artist Jesse Bransford’s “Corner 02: Hollyhock (re: Transition)” (2001)--a temporary mural installed in the lobby of the UCLA Hammer Museum--reads like a cross between an esoteric illuminated manuscript and a diagram found on an abandoned spacecraft in an old episode of “Star Trek.”

In this acrylic, graphite and marker drawing, a pair of giant geometric forms, rendered in crisp mechanical perspective like diagrams for some futuristic machine, float amid rockets spewing clouds of green and gray smoke, astronomical charts and a model of our solar system. A blocky, Modernist ziggurat-like building hovers near the top of the lobby stairs beneath a mysterious symbol that resembles an overturned question mark. A crowd of life-sized figures assembled from different stages of history--including characters from ancient Greece, medieval and Renaissance Europe, and pre-modern Japan, as well as an angel and a few astronauts--descend the stairs, led by a rollicking band of skeletons, while a rabbit-like creature with a tall horn sprouting from its forehead watches passively from the adjacent wall.

“Corner 02” is not the easiest work to make sense of, packed as it is with obscure symbols. Decoding an artwork can be a tricky business in any case: Symbols are all too easily overblown, underestimated or misinterpreted.

In the case of Bransford’s work, however, an accurate interpretation may not be crucial. The dizzying assortment of images and the crowded, seemingly unmediated composition suggest that intuition might bring one closer to the essence of the work than concrete clues.

For those who may be uncomfortable with a purely intuitive reading, however, a thoughtful essay by assistant curator Claudine Ise in the museum’s brochure on the work does point out a few of the central allusions. The machine-like forms are based on a motif employed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, which is itself based on pre-Columbian Mexican architecture. The skeletons, personifications of Death, come from a medieval woodcut. The glyph above the ziggurat is based on the astrological sign for Saturn and has appeared, with the building, on the covers of albums by the 1970s proto-metal band Blue Oyster Cult.

These clues clarify the vaguely identifiable themes that echo through the work, including architecture, science, technology and history. That Bransford has a degree in the history of science from the New School for Social Research as well as a bachelor’s degree from Parsons partially explains such thematic interests, as well as his sharp, almost scientific drawing style.

The looming Hollyhock House motifs and the cold ziggurat, whose colored glass walls reveal glimpses of uninhabited interiors, suggest the impersonal monumentalism of modern architecture as well as the enduring authority of Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision.

The figures, on the other hand, suggest the persistence of history. Mingling with museum-goers like a ghostly tour group--some in sharp black outlines, others in a more faint gray, blue or green--they are the work’s most engaging element, compelling the viewer to consider historical progress and death in the same equation. Who were these people? Where are they being led? And what has become of their worldly accomplishments?

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Ultimately, the threat of the viewer’s misinterpretation seems integral to the experience of Bransford’s gratifyingly complicated mural: The ambiguity it implies balances precariously with the specificity of the symbols. Similar oppositions occur on other levels as well, as between the scientific precision of Bransford’s forms and the chaotic character of his overall composition, and between the concrete accomplishments of the modern world (architecture, the astronauts and the rockets) and the fainter ghosts of history.

One might read the work as one would read a dream: packed with fragments from a world of meaning but unbound by any order. In the staid lobby of the Hammer Museum--a building that itself embodies the monumentalist tendencies of modern architecture--it provides a welcome dose of irrationality.

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UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 443-7000, through Sept. 16. Closed Monday.