ART REVIEW : EXPLORING A HOUSE THAT FLOATS

“Certainly a house cannot float?” Peter Shelton states/asks in the catalogue for his current show at UCLA. Visitors to the Wight Art Gallery learn the answer to that sly query when they remove their shoes and enter a Japanese-style house that quivers with every footstep.

The wood flooring seems firm enough at the entry to the central corridor, but even the ultra-light-footed may fear that The Big One is coming as they continue through the branching structure. The more plentiful the inhabitants and the more forceful the action, the more the house wiggles. Translucent paper walls and latticework remain rigid, but the loose-jointed angles can’t be trusted. Since the action is directly related to movement and weight of people inside the house, the experience of walking through it is rather like witnessing a minor earthquake directed by the victims.

A psychologist could have a field day watching the timid try to tiptoe through the house and the intrepid yell, “Hey, man, let’s get this thing going.”

The house in Shelton’s installation, called “floatinghouseDEADMAN,” doesn’t actually float, but it doesn’t touch ground either. The wood-and-paper building is suspended a few inches above the floor by an elaborate system of cables and sculptural counterweights.

The concept of making a stationary object move might satisfy some artists, but Shelton--one of the most consistently interesting young artists to emerge in the last decade--has taken it much further. He has anchored the structure to 14 massive cement or metal objects that function as counterweights. One of the largest--the “DEADMAN” in the title--is a six-foot, squared-off concrete figure that lies flat on the brick entry outside the gallery. It’s attached by cables to a metal apparatus cantilevered to the building.

The other counterweights are scattered around the house in the spacious gallery. Among them: a seven-foot sledgehammer, a pair of “bigfeet,” a lifesize metal skeleton, a canoe-like “deadboat,” a pile of letters from the alphabet, a bed, a chair, a chest of drawers, some angular pieces that fit into corners and a square pool containing a miniature “DEADMAN.”

What does it all mean? Certainly nothing simple?

In part, the ambitious installation undermines what we know about familiar structures and objects, while continuing sculpture’s habit of, as Shelton puts it, “constantly trying to bring the dead to life.”

“floatinghouseDEADMAN” is also a playful pairing of contradictory ideas: the light and airy against literal dead weights; the luminous presence of an Oriental-style “floating” space against the dark, material reality of Western sculpture. But beware of such easy comparisons. The house and the concrete corpse outside the gallery actually have similar “footprints,” for the floor plan of the building is based on the shape of a person lying on the floor with outstretched arms and legs. Doors at the end of one “arm” and one “leg” allow visitors to enter and exit.

One can also make a strong case for the relationships between apparently disparate parts of the installation. Though the “bigfeet” look as if they might have been borrowed from a Breugel painting, their rounded contours echo those of the boat and a tall hollow structure called “bbell.” The skeleton’s open form corresponds to the skeletal structure of “floating-house.” Like Shelton’s past work, all the parts of this latest piece are based on human forms, shelters or objects constructed for human use.

Oddly enough, Shelton puts one in mind of light/space sculptors, but only because his work effects a heightened awareness of our relationship to space and objects in it. His art actually represents the flip side of light/space school, for he is committed to the hard, physical proof of sculpture. He says he likes the idea of grounding his ideas in matter. Fortunately, his provocative dead weights are springboards to a universe of ideas.

“floatinghouseDEADMAN,” originally designed for the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, remains on view through March 8. A catalogue published by UCLA is available at the gallery.