James Lee Byars, "La figura de la pregunta," 1986.

Unless you really take Lent seriously, and I don’t know many Protestants who do, Easter is a quick event. It’s especially so if you consider all it encompasses: betrayal on Thursday, death on Friday, mourning on Saturday, new life on Sunday. To condense all this into one weekend feels very Christian. We’re fixated on efficiency and the finite. The world is 6,000 years old and the rapture will probably come soon.

The Easter service I attended this April started at 6:30, but should have started earlier. “Pretend it’s still dark out,” said the pastor before asking the music leader to light the logs in the fire pit. “Someone more coordinated should do this,” said the music minister, passing the matches on to a young man in a windbreaker. It was an outdoor service, held in the backyard of a Presbyterian cathedral on Wilshire Boulevard, and they must have known not many would come out so early, because the nomadic, participatory itinerary would have been unwieldy with many more. We’d progress from one station to another, starting at a fire pit like the one the disciple Peter must have sat at when he infamously denied the newly condemned Christ: “I don’t know him.” In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s version, Mary Magdalene, the prostitute Jesus mentored, calls him out: “Peter, don’t you see what you have done, you’ve gone and cut him dead?” “I had to do it, don’t you see,” Peter replies, his singing voice whiny and fearful, “or else they’d come for me.”

Our fire pit must have already burned out all traces of denial, because we used it to light the big Paschal candle (“So much wax,” said the girl next to me), a stand-in for Christ as light of the world. Then, from the Paschal candle, we lit little candles for each of us to hold. We proceeded over to a wooden cross leaning against the easternmost fence. Someone had thought to wrap fishing wire around this cross, and we took turns sticking lilies through the wire after the gospel reading. Some of us tried to slide flowers through with candles still in hand, and hot wax dripped on our fingers.

We moved finally to the baptismal station, where more gospel was read and the Paschal candle officially baptized, bottom down so as not to put out the light of the world. Then we all baptized our small candles in the same manner, and put holy water on each other’s foreheads, saying “may you have new life” while making the sign of the cross with our fingers. A few of these rituals had roots in something traditional; others were likely invented that morning.

James Lee Byars taking questions on TV in Brussells, 1969.

The James Lee Byars exhibition at Overduin and Kite in Hollywood opened on Easter, which seems appropriate. Byars, a nomadic artist who lived in L.A., Germany, Japan, Egypt, and elsewhere understood sacredness as powerful. During Lent in1995, two years before his death, he installed The White Mass in the Church of St. Peter in Cologne. It consisted of a white ring right in the middle of the altar and then four marble pillars with signs inscribed on them: Q.R., I.P., O.Q., Q.D. Each set of letters stood in for a tenet of Byars’ Philosophy of Questioning, a belief system that really did just center on the conviction that questions — not answers — were all we humans had to push us onward. Q.R. meant “The Figure of the Question is in the Room” while O.Q. referred to “The Figure of the One Question.” No one could enter the installation unless they were participating in the mass.

James Lee Byars, "The Chair for the Philosophy of Question," 1996. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

At Overduin and Kite, a collection of marble “books” shaped like sun and stars and encased in glass are like relics from some tasteful, medieval cult. In the adjoining room, a gold nail hammered into the wall recalls the crucifixion, and the Chair of the Philosophy of Questioning is installed inside a red silk tent. It’s not clear what one would do if sitting in that ornate chair; I suppose one would preside over the question-asking of anyone who ventured into the tent. “Basically I try to solve essential questions with questions,” Byars once said. But that makes his questioning feel particularly ritualistic; he’s living out his religion by refusing to ever answer.

Matt Ashjian, "Then, They Told Me That The Most Current Theory is About a Rejection of Theory. . .," studio debris.

A grad school classmate of mine, one of the more resourceful people I’ve met, had a studio that looked like a carpenter’s shop. Though not clean per se, it was functional and organized, with shelving units and a storage loft above a small couch. When he got stuck or couldn’t decide why he’d gone to art school or wondered whether there was any use in having a “critical discourse” around his work, he’d build something useful: a surf board, a book shelf, a cabinet.

One late evening, I walked past his studio, and from a distance, it looked like everything was gone. Then from the doorway, I could see that he’d piled it all — his old paintings, the surf board he’d crafted, his metal shelving unit, wood, his office chair — up against the back wall.  I sort of loved it. It seemed more like piled up frustration then outright anger, and the pile itself spoke the language of the art world it reacted against: two painted rectangles on the floor and the small, perspective-driven paintings at the base led into a towering triangle of stuff, all the trappings of a studio breakdown built up into a handsome structure.

Math Bass, "Body No Body Body," 2011. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

It was a not-quite-rejection, a sculpture made by someone who really just wants to make stuff, but can’t quite get out of the realm of art-as-idea even if it frustrates him (“Then, They Told Me That The Most Current Theory is About a Rejection of Theory. . .” is what he titled the pile, once he’d decided it warranted a title). The New Museum’s Unmonumental show in 2008 grappled, I think, with a similar problem: can you be unheroic, unambitious and still genuinely thoughtful?

Not-quite-rejection art has popped up from time to time these past few years but, right now, it seems suddenly rampant in this city. For Overduin and Kite’s current exhibition, Il Regalo, the artist Math Bass made a series of overturned and sideways wood frames that look like easels, chairs or sawhorses and covered them in canvas, painted with picnic-umbrella-worthy stripes. “Body No Body Body” these sculpture/paintings are called. In Brian O’Connell’s exhibition Ways and Means, on view at Redling Fine Art, the artist combined balsa wood and cement in oak frames, and the balsa and concrete butt up and over the edges like they’re uncomfortable in their allotted space. At Carter and Citizen in Culver City, David McDonald’s Self-Portraits are all strangely structural hodge-podge combines of netting, cement, re bar, paint, Palm Tree wood.

Brian O'Connell, "Concrete Painting no. 17," 2011. Courtesy Redling Fine Art.

There’s an essay by jack-of-all-trades feminist Katie Roiphe that appeared in the Sunday Review of Books the first week of 2010. Roiphe was writing about how the male novelists of today (David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers) have given up on that charged, power hungry sexuality of the male writers of previous generations (Roth, Updike, Mailer, etc.), and I think of her argument in relation to art surprisingly often (certainly, art’s got its own great army of former chauvinist kings). If you take out the words “male” and “sex,” you’re left with something pretty generalizable. “Even the mildest display of . . . aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un­toward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé,” she writes. To her this should be taken negatively, as evidence that we’ve lost real resolve and desire has been replaced by  perpetually replenishing ambivalence. But I guess I think being a conquering hero is passé, and I’d rather look at art that’s trying to find a new model even if that means swimming around in ambivalence a little longer.

Larry Sultan, "Boxers, Mission Hills," 2000, from the series The Valley, chromogenic print. Courtesy Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, © Larry Sultan

When photographer Larry Sultan was growing up, his mother hired a decorator to “cozy up” their new San Fernando Valley home with its marble floors and 12-foot fireplace. The decorator had red hair, tight pants and lipstick that always spread beyond the limits of her lips. She brought in shag carpets, candelabras, lots of gold leaf. So Sultan remembered when writing about the houses he saw in the 1990s while working on The Valley, a series of photographs tracking San Fernando’s biggest business.

The porn industry gravitates, it seems, toward the sort of homes with candelabras and fake chandeliers, like the “real mansion with an incredible view” a production assistant told Sultan he’d just love.  “It’s been customized with dark wood paneling, overbearing stonework, marble counters and other features that give it the appearance of the ‘good life,’” Sultan wrote. “Wandering from room to room, I get the feeling that something went wrong, that the owners have left suddenly in the middle of the night.”

Kaari Upson, "Untitled," 2011, smoke on aluminum panel. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

Kaari Upson grew up in San Bernardino not San Fernando; still, it’s the world of Sultan’s un-embarrassedly glitzy, vaguely smutty photographs I think of when walking through Upson’s exhibition at Overduin and Kite in Hollywood. The whole self-titled show is pink and black, made mostly of smoke, charcoal, latex and wax. The black is aggressive and self-effacing, like on the smoke-darkened aluminum panels that hang in the back of the second gallery. They’re smeary and angsty and look like what could’ve resulted if a chain-smoking diva set her house on fire with a wayward cigarette, then wandered through the rubble, trying helplessly to rub away the grime now coating her many mirrors. The pink is fleshy but industrial. Upson’s long latex fence poles and chandeliers drooping from the gallery ceiling, all painted in that fleshy hue, could have come from the same house, damaged in the fire then left to melt in hot summer sun.

An installation view of Kaari Upson's exhibition. Courtesy Overduin and Kite.

Yet in this show, there’s an elegance and tastefulness to the presentation that contradicts the ruined kitsch of Upson’s objects. No red-headed decorator in overzealous lipstick would space sculptures so evenly or think to juxtapose the stocky wall-hanging black rectangles, each shaped by impressions of the artist’s body (“Fisting and Knees,” “Head and Knees” are subtitles), with melting pink that loops down from above.

What role does such tastefulness play? Does it give Upson and us a safety net, assuring us that it’s art we’re looking at? “Ambiguity is a luxury,” said artist Collier Schorr a few years back, and Upson indulges in that luxury, staying in an in-between state, referencing a world of faux-finery and emotional roller-coasters while still falling back on the confident, visual restraint of a minimalist. But that’s an observation, not really a criticism–ambiguity is something art makes space for.