Staking a claim for an idiom of Los Angeles

With just 24 paintings -- four each by six artists -- “The Los Angeles School” is a thumbnail sketch of a powerful period for Abstract art. On the 40th anniversary of the landmark survey exhibition, “California Hard Edge Painting,” organized in 1964 for the old Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art) by the insightful and influential art critic Jules Langsner, the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design has assembled the show as a small but potent homage.

The earliest work is an untitled 1952 geometric composition by John McLaughlin (1898-1976), which uses squares and rectangles of flat color to divide planar space into a field of dynamic equilibrium. The most recent painting is a 1983 work by Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999), whose flat, undulating shapes in tones of gray and peach recall a quiet landscape populated only by the observant viewer. (The painting is titled “Wetlands II,” and it does suggest a watery marshland stretching toward the distant horizon beneath a flat gray morning or evening sky.) McLaughlin’s pure abstraction and Lundeberg’s allusion to the visible world are both achieved with uninflected color laid down in crisp, clearly defined shapes -- hence the term “hard-edge” painting.

The show’s sweep of three decades demonstrates how long this type of painting endured in Los Angeles, and it implies how influential it was to be on subsequent artists of very different means. However, guest curator Dave Hickey has dispensed with the established term “hard-edge” painting, and it’s easy to see why. He wants to emphasize this art’s emergence as a distinctly local idiom -- as the vernacular dialect of postwar art in Los Angeles.

Langsner originally coined the term in 1958, in an essay for an exhibition called “Four Abstract Classicists” that stood as a stark contrast to the gestural, painterly qualities of Abstract Expressionism. Since then, however, hard-edge has been absorbed into wider critical discourse as a generic description for a painting method, typified by such artists as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland. By contrast, calling it the Los Angeles School stands in sharp distinction from the New York School.

The Otis show employs savvy installation design to articulate the work. The gallery walls are painted a deep taupe-green, rather than standard-issue white, and the color stops at a strip of molding several feet below the room’s high ceiling. Three cubic alcoves have been built within the rectangular space of the room so that each artist is separate and can be seen as a distinct voice. The alcoves are placed in an asymmetrical pattern (two on one wall, one on the other). No labels interrupt the walls, but a printed handout maps the installation for a visitor.

In short, the installation divides the planar space of the gallery with color, creating a dynamic equilibrium, while text is subordinate to perceptual experience. Design is elevated as a value. These are intrinsic qualities of Los Angeles School painting, and they drive the extrinsic environment in which they are being displayed. From there it’s a short hop, conceptually speaking, to the Light and Space art of Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler and other artists who are a legacy of the show’s hard-edge painting.

The paintings by the six artists are installed in suggestive pairs, opposite one another in the room. McLaughlin holds one end-wall, with the equally pure abstractions of Frederick Hammersley at the other. Lundeberg is opposite Karl Benjamin, whose interlocking forms suggest architectonic landscapes rather than her organic ones.

Finally, intimations of motion and expanding space created without traditional devices of Illusionist painting describe the final pairing of canvases, by Lorser Feitelson (1898-1978) and June Harwood. In their work, surface shapes kiss, peel away and twist in space, solely through calibrations of color, scale and design.

“The Los Angeles School” is a fully satisfying exhibition, not least because it resonates against the provocative abstract painting being made today by such younger artists as Monique Prieto, Kevin Appel and Darcy Huebler. Still, it cries out for a full-scale retrospective consideration by a major museum; the Los Angeles School, Light and Space art and recent Abstract painting describe an important, if overlooked aesthetic arc over the last half-century.

Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, 9045 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 665-6905, through Jan. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays (and Thanksgiving weekend). www.otis.edu

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Immersing himself into his artwork

In his 2003 video, “The Flying Project,” Joel Tauber made a witty and poignant meditation on the spiritual and aesthetic yearning for transcendence. With “The Underwater Project: Turning Myself Into Music,” he’s at it again. Soaring aloft tethered to helium balloons and powered by bagpipes has now been replaced by deep sea diving with scuba gear and electronic sounds. Still, the idea of leaving terra firma behind animates this wistful and whimsical effort.

At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, a chart that looks something like a Dow Jones stock market report accompanies Tauber’s three-channel video installation. Forty jagged lines in assorted colors record the depth and duration of 40 scuba dives Tauber made in the Pacific Ocean. In a manner loosely related to the sound and image works of Steve Roden, these dive parameters became the structural basis for an eccentric Minimalist musical score depicted in one projection.

Another projection shows Tauber swimming underwater amid bursts of air bubbles. The third displays what he saw as he swam through the sea. The former is digitally altered so that his body seems to glow, while the latter mixes the ethereal (rhythmically waving sea grass, a magisterial sea turtle) with the mundane (trash from fast-food restaurants, a dead crab tossed by the current). The driving, repetitive music creates a sense of adventure, but the mounting anticipation isn’t followed by a climax.

In matters of the spirit it’s the magical quality of the journey that counts. Tauber has a definite gift for changing your frame of reference on the trip, turning the commonplace into the strange.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, through Dec. 25. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.vielmetter.com

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Making some graphic statements

Among graphic artists who engage political subjects, Sue Coe is a national treasure. For her first L.A. solo show in 13 years, the New York artist offers 23 drawings and prints from the last 20 years at Overtones Gallery, many on the theme of war.

Stylistically and through occasional quotation of imagery, Coe makes nods to a host of impassioned artistic predecessors who chronicled state corruption, public and private wickedness, and human folly, including Goya, Daumier, George Grosz and Max Beckmann. One result is a vivifying sense of perpetual depredation met by enduring resistance.

Like Beckmann, whose 1921 “Jahrmarkt” prints used a carnival theme to examine the human condition, Coe sets the current Bush administration in a circus atmosphere. One pencil drawing shows soldiers riding an amusement park Ferris wheel that has run amok, giving it echoes of a medieval torturer’s Catherine wheel. Another describes the latest razzmatazz on TV, with media baron Rupert Murdoch shown draped with a dead fox as he beats a war drum, while a row of shackled lambs lines up at his feet. These drawings are from Coe’s recently published book, “Bully! Master of the Global Merry-Go-Round.”

In that context earlier prints assume new topicality. Among the most powerful is “We Will Not Go Back” from 1992. The blunt black lithograph, blotted with crimson gouache, shows a skeleton dressed in judicial robes, with a woman curled in the fetal position at his feet. With bloody hands he raises a coat hanger aloft. Coe’s stark translation of the grim reaper’s traditional scythe into a back-alley abortionist’s tool carries devastating visual and conceptual power. It’s like something out of Bruegel or Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Overtones Gallery, 11306 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 915-0346, through Dec. 4. Open Fridays and Saturdays. www.overtones.org.

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Will it all come crashing down?

Ritual is often a hedge against temporal fragility. Its repetitions speak of continuity and permanence. Patrick Hill is a sculptor who sets continuity and fragility against each other, sometimes in unusual ways.

The central work in his solo debut at David Kordansky Gallery is a low, wide, black-lacquered table draped with a purple tie-dyed cloth. It has the aura of an altar.

Standing atop the plinth is a sculpture composed of triangular and kite-shaped sheets of glass, which lean precariously against one another. The three glass sheets are hinged together with strips of more stained cloth.

These hinges suggest bloodied bandages, barely able to hold the heavy, leaning sheets of glass together. Sculpture traditionally concerns itself with mass and weight, but Hill’s transparent, reflective panels turn those elements into gossamer. As disaster looms, the ritual element of the altar table recalls the likelihood of disasters past.

Narrative isn’t what one always expects from Abstract sculpture, but it floats to the foreground here. Mortality assumes a strange shape in Hill’s sculpture, which will be worth keeping an eye on.

David Kordansky Gallery, 510 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 222-1482, through Saturday. www.davidkordanskygallery.com