Art as a shared experience

Tom Friedman once made a work of art consisting of an ordinary piece of paper that, according to its title, had been stared at for a thousand hours. Converted into workdays, that would be 25 weeks worth of nonstop staring at a blank page.

Talk about labor intensive. The piece gives new meaning to the term work of art.

The improbability that Friedman alone had done all that staring also shifts the focus. The art becomes the locus of accumulated looking -- by the manufacturer of the sheet, by anyone who happened upon it in passing, by the artist and the dealer and the audience that came to look at it. Friedman’s paper is blank, except for all that buildup of shared perceptual experience.

This sense of sociability -- an acknowledgment that art is experience, shared by a company of strangers -- ranks among the most appealing aspects of the Massachusetts artist’s work. It is much in evidence at Gagosian Gallery, where Friedman is having his first Los Angeles solo exhibition in seven years. In fact, a big collage titled “Art” radiates sociability as more than a mere subtext.

A picture composed of pictures, like any collage, “Art” also asserts its tangibility as a physical object. The framed work is about 11 feet tall and 8 feet wide, but it is tipped to the left so it seems to rest on the floor on one corner of the frame. Friedman is a sculptor, after all, even if Conceptual art is the avenue his object-making takes.

The huge collage is composed of hundreds of head shots, which seem to have been clipped from art magazines. Artists such as Charles Ray and Salvador Dali mingle with Mark Rothko and Eva Hesse, as if it were a gigantic cocktail party attended by the living and the dead. And isn’t that Venice Biennale curator Rob Storr over there, hanging around near critic Dave Hickey? And that woman with a cigarette looks familiar, although whether that stuffy man with the hat is a collector or a dealer is hard to tell.

Bisecting the torrent of scrapbook photographs, Friedman has lined up clipped fragments of magazine text. The lower half of the picture is occupied by row after horizontal row of slivers that say things like “relationship of the self,” “inhabiting the space acoustically” and “intensely sensory experience.” In Friedman’s hands this familiar critical jargon both describes and embodies art, while also wickedly functioning as a rising sea of meaningless cocktail-party chatter. And it slyly amounts to a stinging rebuke of today’s art magazines, which mostly operate as gossipy agents of publicity.

With 31 works, the exhibition is large and ambitious. It’s also rather more raucous than other Friedman shows, although no less rigorous.

Some strategies are familiar, such as the artist’s penchant for using crumpled sheets of paper as a potent form. But he’s resolutely inventive: One wad of paper, placed atop a pedestal, turns out to be composed from a scrunched sheet of dried acrylic paint, which Freidman cut up and further painted to mimic a page torn from a spiral notebook. Is this work a drawing, a sculpture or a painting -- or all three at once?

Three other paper wads, lined up side by side, seem uneventful. Then you notice that precisely the same sequence of creases, folds and bends in the paper is repeated from one to the next. They’re essentially identical.

Usually a crumpled paper ball is a sign of discarded frustration -- a random form that results from the rejection of a failed idea. These objects are exactly the opposite. Ideas flow back into them. They plump with the fullness of art.

A 4 1/2 -foot-tall box is made from actual Excedrin packaging that Friedman (who studied commercial graphic design as well as art) has sliced-and-diced and then reassembled to create one gigantic, blurry analgesic package. He’s used that technique at least once before, to make a giant box of cereal ironically named “Total.” Here the visually fuzzy box that results is enough to give a viewer the headache that its contents purport to relieve.

Perhaps the show’s most disconcerting piece is a strip of 10 framed sets of 10 drawings, which line several walls and run up the stairs to a second-floor gallery. As you peruse the line drawings sequentially, it soon becomes clear that each is a page from an animation flip-book. When you get to the end -- yes! -- a video projection puts the drawn animation into motion. The moving picture, even upon first viewing, is oddly filled with an uncanny sense of static deja vu. The voluminous drawings and the final video are titled “ream,” but a satisfied viewer feels anything but cheated. Friedman’s work is almost always too generous for that.

Take “Vanishing Point,” a marvelous photogravure that arranges pictures of assorted personal objects -- shoe, wallet, belt, jeans, dollar bill, credit card, socks, cigarette lighter, etc. -- into a visual demonstration of the illusionistic power of one-point perspective. On one hand it recalls a cartoon-like striptease, clothing and material goods shed as the artist exposes his hidden self while disappearing into the distance. With Friedman, however, there is also “but on the other hand.”

Disconcertingly, the scale in the photogravure is wrong for objects laid out in an apparent demonstration of train-track linear perspective. If the cigarette lighter and jeans were actually placed next to each other in real space, rather than in the fictive space of art, this lighter would be gigantic and those pants would be tiny. A viewer keeps stepping forward and back to scrutinize the sheet and parse the perspective, engaging in a literal dance. Friedman’s minuet is as perceptually enlightening as it is engagingly sociable.

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Dec. 2. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www .gagosian.com

And now, scenes from a revolution

Before Modernism wiped the slate of classical education clean, artists used Bible stories and mythology on which to hang their erotic visions. Today, Susannah and the Elders and St. Sebastian are being replaced by hippies, the Summer of Love and period pornography.

The 20 effective ink on paper drawings and two acrylic canvases by Tracy Nakayama at Acuna-Hansen Gallery are spiced by randy scenes that recall the sexual revolution -- but with one important difference. Gone is the misogyny that stubbornly clung to that insurrection, a misogyny that undergirds so much of our social, political and cultural discourse today.

The Brooklyn-based artist instead presents sex as alert but guileless play. Period accouterments such as psychedelic patterns, beads, woven God’s eyes and macrame are juxtaposed with the androgyny of Mick Jagger. Nakayama’s palette is mostly monochrome -- oddly, a reddish-brown ink that lies somewhere between dried blood and nostalgic sepia-toned photography. It lends her work a charming innocence, tinged with inescapable gravity.

Acuna-Hansen Gallery, 427 Bernard St., Chinatown, (323) 441-1624, through Dec. 2. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.ahgallery.com

It’s a message that fits the moment

“Faustus’s Children,” an appealing single-channel video designed by Michele O’Marah, scripted by David Jones and with funny special effects by Tim Jackson, could use some judicious editing. After half an hour it was time to go (the gallery posts no running time), the stylized narrative having worn thin.

But like the Marlowe play, “Faustus’s Children” convenes a cohort of pampered plutocrats who are not damned because they have sold their souls. Instead, bereft of options, this aristocratic crew is soulless because it is already damned. It is a message fitting to our rather grotesque moment.

Against this sleek and lustrous world, the artists channel Cindy Sherman to offer a bracing dose of handmade aesthetic inspiration. The play’s two stage sets, assembled from thrift store castoffs and papier-mache, fill the front room at Sister Gallery.

And the video out back cheerfully represents the play’s critical episodes of supernatural magic with twinkly colored lights reflected off mirrors, which would happily embarrass Industrial Light & Magic. It’s a strangely optimistic spectacle.

Sister Gallery, 437 Gin Ling Way, Chinatown, (213) 628-7000, through Nov. 11. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays. www.sisterla.com

These reliefs have an alien quality

Assembled from chopped lumber and scrap plywood, Jared Pankin’s brash sculptural wall reliefs suggest bionic landscapes. Gorges, cliff-faces, rock formations and other wilderness sites visually merge with space stations crafted from junk in some Hollywood prop shop.

The eight reliefs in Pankin’s second solo exhibition at Carl Berg Gallery dispense with the realistic miniature elms, palms and redwoods that crown his earlier work.

No longer elaborate pedestals for something else, the reliefs are more compelling as the main event.

Cantilevered from the wall as much as 7 feet, they probe the gallery space as if scouting an extraterrestrial world. Pankin deftly restores a salutary quality of alien strangeness to views long since domesticated by national park postcards and Ansel Adams calendars.

Carl Berg Gallery, 6018 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 931-6060, through Nov. 22. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.carlberggallery.com

christopher.knight @latimes.com