Contrasting Windows on Consumerist Concept

While the Los Angeles County Museum of Art continues to transform the interior of the historic May Co. building into offices and galleries for future use, a series of artists has been invited to install works in the former department store’s front windows. At the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, a pair of installations by Jody Zellen and Roy Dowell could not be more different in appearance, intention and effect.

Rooted in the design principles of Russian Constructivism, Zellen’s text-heavy display adds yet another layer to a long history of recycled graphic designs that are intended to criticize consumerism. Like the Situationists from the 1960s and Barbara Kruger from the 1980s, Zellen’s art favors a palette of black, white and red.

Set in front of a bright-red backdrop, which is once again called on to signify revolutionary fervor and urgency, three fabric banners hang from the ceiling. Divided into grids and covered with grainy, computer-generated images of buildings, streets and texts, the banners resemble random collections of blown-up photographs lifted from old newspapers.

Archival and bookish, they’re too blurry and crowded-together to be read from a passing car or bus, even when stopped at the traffic light. Demanding to be seen up close, Zellen’s installation rejects the most common mode of transportation in Los Angeles, in favor of the old-fashioned idea that modern city life consists of pedestrians coming face to face with one another on bustling sidewalks.

This 19th century, Europe-based fantasy of urban living goes hand in hand with the messages spelled out in the overlapping and variously scaled texts Zellen has affixed to the curved bank of windows. To read her untitled image-and-text work is to be subjected to a series of buzzwords and phrases derived from authoritative texts by social critics of a generally Marxist and Freudian bent.

Abstract and disembodied, Zellen’s formulaic meditation on life in the big city doesn’t deliver much in the line of experience or excitement. Its overused formats and cliched references to critical theory demonstrate that formerly disruptive styles have become so thoroughly institutionalized that their edgy transgressions are entirely lost on the present.

In contrast, Dowell’s sequence of three smaller windows begins by pretending to be nothing more than a diversion, a jolt of bright colors and bold shapes that grab your eye as you whiz by at 35 mph. Rather than condescending to passersby from a position of supposed moral superiority, the artist uses the tactics of window dressers to offer some thoughtful reflections on the similarities between stores and museums.

Indebted to the formal structure of Picasso’s and Braque’s collages, as well as to the supersaturated palette of Stuart Davis’ paintings, Dowell’s 3-D triptych looks like a low-budget window display done by an insane person. You have no idea what’s being advertised, much less sold inside, and this lack of knowledge creates just enough conceptual turbulence to set you to thinking.

Big abstract shapes, painted in vivid splashes of orange, green, blue, red and yellow, cover parts of the windows. Similar shapes inhabit the background, often echoing those in the foreground. As you drive by, these two picture planes momentarily align, creating the impression that Dowell’s otherwise loose compositions have briefly interlocked, or suddenly snapped into focus before instantly falling out of order.

In each window’s shallow space, the artist has pasted fragments of billboard imagery on homemade traffic signs. Around these often indecipherable abstractions, he has stacked such everyday objects as used car tires, plastic buckets, cans of soup and canisters of iodized salt and Ajax cleanser.

Dowell’s straightforward display of ordinary products pays homage to the advertising strategies employed outside urban centers, where the influence of Madison Avenue is less important than the fact that items are available for purchase. His choice of budget-priced Great American Chicken O’ Noodle Soup likewise acknowledges his debt to Warhol, whose images of Campbell’s Soup cans took the bite out of the old-fashioned idea that real art stands apart from the marketplace.

Superficially playful, Dowell’s savvy installation contends that real art, like real soup, is a form of bodily sustenance. Like salt, it adds spice to life. Like car tires, it moves you.

As for the museum’s role, it functions like a big plastic bucket, serving as a container for objects that provide a wide range of participatory pleasures. Museums also preserve and maintain art, functioning like salt (a simple preservative) and Ajax (a common cleanser that keeps households presentable).

One of the best things about Dowell’s installation is that it’s free. You don’t have to buy anything or even pay admission to see that provocative ideas are not the exclusive property of artists or museums, but that they’re out in the street, available for anyone inclined to entertain them.

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* LACMA West, 5809 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through September. Open daily.