ART REVIEW : THERE IS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT IN ‘LIVING SPACES’

The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art is working hard to turn its lack of a permanent gallery into a virtue. Once constrained by debts, the institute sold its building and now operates out of an office, sponsoring exhibitions in unexpected places. The latest is a forlorn little house in Santa Monica, temporarily occupied by a show called “Living Spaces.”

Eight artists have moved into the Spanish style bungalow at 1544 Berkeley St., each choosing a room or patio space for a separate installation. One of the last single-family holdouts in a row of apartment buildings, the cottage is having its last hurrah as an artwork before being razed and supplanted with low-cost housing.

Unfortunately, this intriguing concept comes off as a cute idea and the hurrah registers as a whimper. What curator Jerry Wellman had in mind was quite different: a high-minded examination of the place of the house in the American dream and the way art figures into it--as decor or cultural trophy.

The issues are alive and well, for those determined to unearth them, but they tend to get buried in a confusing array of installations that overwhelm the house but don’t really transform it. Instead we see eight personalities that put us in mind of a wildly heterogenous family.

Nina Mastrangelo might be Mom, sweetly singing in the kitchen amid her pastel cabinets and hand-painted tiles. Kim MacConnel, the likely candidate for Dad, has taken over the living room with the vengeance of a kitsch collector whose taste runs to winged Naugahyde chairs, clown paintings and piles of thrift-shop stuff from the ‘50s.

Two of the girls occupy the bedrooms. Colette, the weird one, has succumbed to decadent excess in a room completely draped with shirred pink satin and inhabited by spray-painted palm fronds that bear a creepy resemblance to giant birds. Virginia Hoge, the dreamer, has painted her sheets, pillow cases and lamp shades with stereotypical visions of a woman as a bride and various exotic personages.

Between the two bedrooms, Gillian Brown suddenly brings the scattered show into focus as she turns the turquoise-and-yellow bathroom into a page from a photo album. Blowing up a black-and-white snapshot of a man shaving, she has painted the image as if it drapes across the sink and runs up cabinets and a back wall. Recorded sounds of gurgling water emerge from a tape deck hidden in a drawer.

Meanwhile, the boys are building and dismantling things. Alwy has raised the floor of a tiny breakfast nook with a plywood platform and planted a futuristic white table in its center. A couple of walls in the dining room are covered with rickety panels of lattice and wall paper, as if to expose the fragile structure of human dwellings. This work by Joe Grant would be effective if the room weren’t serving as a makeshift office and largely filled by a table of LAICA literature.

Things get no better outside, where Keiko Kasai, the family monk, has installed a rock garden--complete with dripping water--on a concrete entryway. It should lend a peaceful, contemplative touch, but it can’t compete with the exterior form of the house and the bedlam inside it.

Many aficionados of contemporary art like nothing better than to find art where it’s least expected. That attitude is fueled by a belief that art outside of museums and galleries is somehow smarter, more relevant or more immediately involved with the community. Best of all, it seems to be free of a system that impedes it.

“Living Spaces” taps into that spirit and solidly grounds itself with artists who often work with themes of habitation, but the project self-destructs in a morass of conflicting sensibilities. Instead of making us think about the art issues lurking in the rooms of this little house, we feel rather sorry for it.

The house remains open through June 15. Hours: Wednesdays through Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.