In the belly of the beast: Cecelia F. Klein on Jorge Pardo's exhibition design at Lacma.(SLANT)

IN THE AFTERMATH of the 1521 conquest of central Mexico, a Spanish Franciscan working in New Spain asked his Aztec informants about a place they called Oztotl, which in their language translates as "cave." The friar's sources replied that Oztotl was a place where "our mothers, our fathers have gone; they have gone to rest in the water, in the cave, the place of no openings, the place of no smoke hole, the place of the dead." The Aztecs believed that upon death they would be swallowed up by the earth, which was envisioned as a giant amphibian floating in an all-encompassing ocean. Through cavernous jaws the dead would descend to the innermost region of the creature's body. On the way down the deceased would pass through eight successive stations, or "layers," of the underworld, each presenting a unique challenge to the frightened traveler. The precarious journey did not end until the dead had finally reached the ninth and bottommost layer, a watery, cavelike "place of no exit" commonly known as Mictlan.

I am reminded of the Aztecs' travels to Mictlan each time I visit the new installation of pre-Columbian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Designed by the Cuban-born LA sculptor and designer Jorge Pardo at the request of Michael Govan, lacma's innovative director, the installation seems intuitively to capture some aspects of the ancient American belief in a compressed space located deep within the heaving innards of a living, breathing organism. I do not know whether Pardo knew about Mictlan before he began this project, or, if he did, whether he consciously tried to match his design to pre-Columbian cosmography. I think it fair to say, however, that although some aspects of his design seem disturbingly out of place in a gallery of pre-Columbian artworks, Pardo has captured something of the Aztec vision of a stepped, tunnel-like passage into the dark bowels of an aqueous, embodied earth.

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This impression largely derives from the layout of the gallery and Pardo's undulating wall forms, which are made of laser-cut, medium-density fiberboard. The forms frame and bend around the entrance to the exhibition space to pull, almost suck, the visitor into the first of three consecutive rooms devoted to the museum's substantial pre-Columbian collection. The entrances and exits of these rooms are aligned along a central axis so that we can see, from the first doorway, not only into the second and third rooms, but also beyond, into a darker, shallower, very different kind of space that appears to be our final destination. Each of the three pre-Columbian rooms is differentiated from the others by its color scheme, which further brings to mind the successive strata of the Aztec underworld.

In the first room, which is dedicated to the art of Mesoamerica, these organic, sand-colored fiber-board door frames transform seamlessly into bulging coverings for the lower halves of the walls, framing the rectangular wall cases containing the artworks. (The wall cases throughout the rooms have been arranged by lacma curator Virginia Fields according to themes such as "The Constructed Landscape," "The …