ART REVIEW : MIXED SHOW AT THE POMPIDOU CENTER

The view from the top of the Georges Pompidou Center may be the most complete prospect of Paris. Loftier vantage points and more sweeping panoramas are available at the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, Sacre Coeur Basilica and that contemporary abomination, the Maine-Montparnasse Tower, but none of those pinnacles offer as provocative a blend of old and new.

The Pompidou, fondly dubbed the Beaubourg after the neighborhood it dominates, is a big steel-and-glass box wrapped in brightly painted pipes and crisscrossed by escalators in transparent tubes. Visitors who ride to the top of the audacious building emerge on a fifth-floor landing with their backs to a center of contemporary art and culture while facing a tapestry of monumental landmarks woven into historical neighborhoods.

On the plaza below, sword swallowers, fire-walkers and mimes entertain contented crowds against a backdrop of old buildings converted into eateries and shops. Off to the left, the giant heart, lips and whimsical animals in Niki de Saint-Phalle’s and Jean Tinguely’s sculpture whirl amid sprays of water in a fountain near St. Merry Church.

The spectacle can cheer the weariest traveler in July’s muggy heat. When the weather is fine and the mood reflective, the scene from the top of the Beaubourg seems an epiphany of the fullness of life. It suggests that we can have it all--history and progress, art and life, the sacred and the profane, while ordering another cafe au lait.

This expansive attitude seems to infiltrate the Pompidou center as well. The industrial-style building not only houses the National Museum of Modern Art and its daunting schedule of programs, it shelters the Public Information Library, the Industrial Design Center and (in an adjacent underground space) the Institute for Acoustic and Musical Research. While the museum organizes a wide range of exhibitions, those remembered as typical Beaubourg shows are massive surveys or a series examining Paris’ cultural interchange with New York, Berlin and Moscow.

“L’Epoque, la Mode, la Morale, la Passion,” the museum’s current offering (through Monday), is at first glance characteristically ambitious. With a title that pretty well covers the waterfront, the exhibition sets out to present “aspects of art” of the last decade in painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video and film. Static works by 60 artists from the United States, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy and Belgium fill two floors of galleries. Another 22 individuals and teams are represented on video, 41 more on film. And, of course, the whole enterprise is documented by a doorstop catalogue that costs nearly $65 (in paperback) and weighs 7 pounds.

Once the accounting is done, however, it’s obvious that “L’Epoque” is not as inclusive or definitive as it appears. Rather like the massive “Individuals” exhibition at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, the static component of “L’Epoque” meanders along through a somewhat unpredictable array of work that we sort out for ourselves.

Not that this laissez faire attitude leaves us entirely bereft. The inclusion of such acknowledged masters as Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Frank Stella, Pierre Soulages and the late Philip Guston, for example, establishes a level of respect for long-term achievement and an interest in more than who’s hot now. The presence of Donald Judd’s partitioned aluminum boxes, Jean le Gac’s art historical narratives and Robert Combas’ grotesque, cartoon-like paintings in the same show indicates an effort to cover the range of serious art today. Two profoundly moving paintings by Anselm Kiefer remind us that the international movement known as Neo-Expressionism brought us this decade’s master of tragedy along with various flashes in the pan.

It’s possible to analyze this exhibition in terms of time, style, morality and passion--as the title suggests--but one theme that overlaps all those categories asserts itself: immaculately crafted gloom. While this elaborately produced, predominantly American work may speak in tones of ironic humor, hip alienation or political rhetoric, the collective message is not that we are going to hell in a handcart, but that we’ll arrive in a leased Rolls-Royce.

Hans Haacke is most emphatic in a crypt-like room called “Les Must de Rembrandt.” Patterned after Cartier’s jewelry store, the installation takes its Franglais name from “Les Must de Cartier,” a selection of baubles considered essential, and from the Rembrandt Group, an association of powerful companies in South Africa that includes Cartier. In the catalogue, Haacke enumerates the firms’ connections to an oppressive economy, but it isn’t necessary to read much French to get the point of this imposing and very effective artwork.

We enter the thick-walled room through a Cartier-canopied door and face a huge photograph of restive South African miners framed by metal plaques listing the Rembrandt companies and their products. Below the photograph is an account of the black miners’ grievances and their employer’s answer to the problem: replacing the troublemakers with more submissive people from the masses of unemployed.

Jenny Holzer also occupies a whole room. It recalls a simple chapel, except for an electronic panel flashing phrases where the altar might be. The “pews” are granite benches engraved with vague accounts of violence. Neil Jenney’s worries are more subtly stated as he frames an expanse of atmosphere and labels it in block letters, as if preserving a specimen of clean air for future generations.

Superimposing phrases on found, photographic images and playing words against another, Barbara Kruger sets us to looking for ominous meanings behind banal appearances. Here again, it’s the packaging--sleek, cold, intimidating--that tells us we should pay attention to our fits of paranoia.

If we’re feeling guilty and want to confess, Richard Artschwager offers relief: a beautifully crafted confessional booth that simultaneously spoofs religious authority and enshrines the notion of human imperfection.

Robert Longo’s two-part painted and constructed wall panels exude feelings of human impotence. “Pressure” has a painting of a brooding young man in white clown makeup positioned directly below a relief of a gleaming white building. In “Body of a Comic,” three massive dark cylinders rise above the lap of a drummer. Literal translations of Longo’s stylish work usually sound simple-minded, but the oppressive tone of urban decadence is persistent.

As if to bring the whole thing down to specifics, Jeff Wall’s color photograph, “Abundance,” gives us a theatrical pair of bag ladies. Obviously not the real thing, one rummages in a big cardboard box while the other coyly displays her treasures: several layers of clothes and a fistful of hats. Prepared for all occasions and wearing a stern expression, this woman appears quite touchingly fragile--not unlike some of the people we pass on the street as we leave the museum and blend into the spectacle that is Paris.