Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon work together seamlessly. Hipnostasis, their collaborative installation at the Armory, is a one-minded project. Yet it’s more opaque than work I’ve seen either artist do on his own. Pettibon’s raw scrawl is there without its pop-infused narrative and Okon’s unpretentious social commentary has become mythological.

I first saw Hipnostasis through a chain-link gate. I had to ask to be let in, and while I know the gate exists to secure the video monitors, I still think about what it means to have this thin strip of a gallery with industrial carpeting, occupied by filmed beach bums, a towering vessel, and sheets torn from literary classics, under lock and key. The restriction of the space drives home the point that Hipnostasis is about marginalia.

The six channel video hanging on the main wall makes noise, both auditory and visual. Aging shirtless men with craggy beards sit on rocks, presumably near the ocean, and the waves, wind, and feedback coming from the monitors fill the gallery with an anxious undercurrent. The blue sky in the background and the exaggerated reds in the men’s weathered skin are as blatant as mug shots. But, while there’s no softness to the videos, there is rhythm.

Far from a perfect diagonal, the monitors descend left to right. The men keep rubbing their skin awkwardly and eating something unidentifiable. At one point, the faces on all six screens harmoniously turn right, looking toward the wall on which book pages have been fugitively pinned.

The pages come from Kipling, Kerouac and others, and Pettibon and Okon have written messages of their own, some of which challenge literary devices because the preordained structures of stories often don’t tell enough. Reads one paper, in all caps, “I’D HAVE TO ADD A SUBPLOT.” Contextually, this assertion makes sense: The weathered men on the six monitors seem deviant because they fit no culturally embraced plot.

On the other end of the room, a human-sized vessel—it looks like an oversized ceramic vase—projects onto the ceiling the word “Dead.” At first the font is big; as it gets smaller, “Dead” turns into “End.” Yet taking a Dead End seriously is hard to do when it’s being predicted by an oversized phallic symbol. It seems instead that Hipnostasis fishes around for new beginnings and new legitimacy. The Dead End stigma of stasis (embodied here by the aging beach bums) could perhaps be turned on its head and made into a rich sub-plot that values inaction as much as mobility.

The The explosion at the end of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point transfixed me when I first saw it.  Then it transfixed me again and again as I re-watched. Antonioni's young heroine stares at the architectural embodiment of everything she's rejected, an aloofly minimal desert chateau, wishing to sever herself from its banal austerity. It's a sort of self-purging: her stare causes the chateau to blow in slow motion, debris psychedelically swimming to the music of Pink Floyd. No existential messages need to be pulled from the ruin. We're simply invited to lose ourselves in the scene's kinetic fiction. Immediacy matters more than poignancy.

Gary Lang's swirling discs are to Antonioni's explosion what utility poles are to lightening rods: different in purpose but parallel in effect. Lang's circular canvases, with bands of color spinning out from the center, toy with perception so kaleidoscopically that transcendentalism seems hopelessly irrelevant. Who needs a Turrell skyspace when radial color patterns cause head trips?

Hung close together in Ace Gallery's sprawling Beverly Hills space, Lang's discs are visual co-conspirators that push and pull in and out of one another. They're meant to be together. Alone, some might seem happily decorative, fun experiments that make for good background noise (others would better hold their own as mind-benders). But together they are a cultural repository of patterns-Full Circle recalls hippie headbands while Chance Circle evokes ‘90s pop-and a testament to painting's ability to instantaneously alter perception.

Lang's discs exhibit no monumental ambitions, no addiction to fetish finish, no illusionism. From close-up, the craftsmanship is readily apparent, and while it's far from pristine, it's precisely calculated.

Goliath, titled in acknowledge of its 13' diameter, presides over the gallery. Its colors are subtle. Flesh-tone pinks and quiet grays pull all the way through the painting's radius, ending in a soft glow around the disc's outside edges. This is the one I keep going back to because it reminds me that instant gratification can still be poetic.

-Catherine Wagley

(Images from top to bottom: Goliath, 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 13' Diameter, Ace Gallery Beverly Hills; Roam, 2008, Acrylic on canvas, 9' 5" Diameter, Ace Gallery Beverly Hills; Knome, 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 6' Diameter, Ace Gallery Beverly Hills)