A BODY OF ARTISTIC EVIDENCE; LACMA PUTS HUMAN FORM IN MODERN MOLD.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Not every art exhibition needs to be the cultural equivalent of an Outward Bound adventure. Blockbuster art shows, like blockbuster movies or blockbuster Broadway musicals, are expensive, time-consuming and can leave you suffering from sensory overload.

A good example of a show with modest ambitions but plenty to ponder is on view through April 27 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. ``From Head to Toe: Concepts of the Body in Twentieth-Century Art'' takes a provocative look at how modern and contemporary artists have reconceived the body as a collection of parts, frequently abstracted, disjointed or otherwise alienated from the human beings they ostensibly belong to.

Assembled by Carol S. Eliel, LACMA's curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition makes judicious use of the museum's permanent holdings of paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, fashion design and ceramics. Instead of trying to lure throngs of patrons with sexy imports (like its upcoming Van Gogh show), LACMA seems to be redoubling its efforts to present its own collections in arresting new combinations. It's a smart marketing move that could help make museum-going a regular habit instead of a once-a-year blowout for millions of Angelenos.

``Head to Toe'' takes its departure from Picasso's 1909 ``Head of a Woman.'' Generally considered the first cubist sculpture, this fluidly jagged bronze silently argued that the human face, like human identity, could be splintered into multiple dimensions. As Eliel's wall text summarizes, Picasso and other artists began to use metaphor ``to suggest rather than depict the body.'' Fragments of the human form began to ``stand in for the whole.''

We see those notions firmly take hold with Edward Weston's photograph ``Dunes, Oceana'' (1936) and Victor Brauner's painting ``Suicide at Dawn'' (1930). In the former, Weston used heavily sculpted natural lighting to make waves of sand dunes resemble the curving backsides of naked women. Brauner's painting depicts a gaunt white man being riven in two as a devilish, blood-red doppelganger - his alter ego? his id? - leaps through his chest.

While Freud and his followers were pioneering theories of the divided psyche, artists were picking up the cue. Matisse's beautiful stencil prints for his illustrated book ``Jazz'' (1947) transformed human torsos and limbs into vital abstractions. Sculptors Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti stretched and inflated their subjects' heads, bodies, noses and limbs until they looked more like redwoods or giant legumes than people.

After World War II, consumer culture and advertising began to metaphorically chop up the human body and sell it back to us as fashion. A new generation of artists began manipulating this slick, new human iconography. Tom Wesselman's ``Nude'' (1965) presents a truncated pop-art view of a bathing beauty's topless chest, her revealing tan line reminding us of those peekaboo Coppertone ads. Ed Kienholz brutally spoofed the mass-market ideal of feminine beauty with his skin-crawling assemblage of junk parts, ``A Lady Named Zoa'' (1960).

Other artists insisted the human body still could be beautiful, if no longer easily recognizable. To create his ``Anthropometry'' series, Yves Klein dressed in white tie and tails to ``conduct'' nude female models as they smeared themselves in blue paint, then imprinted their bodies on white paper. Twenty years later, Robert Mapplethorpe achieved a similarly anonymous intimacy with ``Raymond'' (1985) a delicately lit abstraction of a man's back and buttocks.

``Head to Toe'' brings us neatly up to the present with Jim Shaw's ``Computer Degenerated Self-Portrait,'' Vito Acconci's rudely funny ``Prototype for Virtual Pleasure Mask'' (1992) and Kiki Smith's ``Tombs,'' a grouping of small, hazy, rectangular mirrors that split the onlooker, fun-house style, into multiple selves. They leave a strong impression here in the world capital of tummy tucks and liposuction.

THE FACTS

What: ``From Head to Toe: Concepts of the Body in Twentieth-Century Art.''

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Wednesdays. Through April 27.

Admission: $6 adults, $4 students 18 and older and seniors with ID, $1 ages 6-18, free for children 5 and under. The second Tuesday of each month is free to all. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1) Is the body a weapon? Or its own worst enemy? Victor Brauner's ``Suicide at Dawn'' (1930) dips into metaphor.

(2) In ``My Trophies (Mes Trophees)'' (1987), a gelatin-silver print modified with acrylic, charcoal and pastel by Annette Messager, body parts serve as the canvas for further artistic exploration.

(3) ``From Head to Toe: Concepts of the Body in Twentieth-Century Art'' includes this dress from designer Issey Miyake's ``Staircase'' series (1994).