ART REVIEW : British Exhibit Dares Viewer to Understand

Some art wants to be loved; other art dares you to deal with it.

The work in “The Analytical Theatre: New Art From Britain,” a UK/LA ’88 Festival exhibit, is the sort that looks utterly pointless to the casual visitor and delights folks who know what “deconstruction” means. It is at the University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, to March 6.

If the “theatre” of the title lures you in, you soon discover it refers not to some Gielgud of the gallery but to a self-conscious method of involving the viewer in the meaning of the art--a tactic common to the 10 young or youngish sculptors, painters and other-media adherents in the show.

There is good work here, amid strutting and posturing, but you have to get with the program.

Richard Deacon, who won the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize last year, is the best known of these artists and perhaps also the best. He knocks together shotgun weddings of shapes and materials that look as though they yearn to be recognizable objects.

In “Boys and Girls,” lolling linoleum cone shapes fitted base-to-base disport with--and occasionally penetrate--a couple of big plywood discs. In “Art for Other People No. 19,” a painstakingly riveted brass shield (bent in half and resting on its vaguely humanoid, double-scalloped bottom) encloses an irregular disc assembled from remnants of blue linoleum.

Deacon approaches sculpture-making as a sort of cross between carpentry and writing poetry. (He has written about the way words in a poem flicker back and forth between their original meanings and the new sense they have in context.) Workaday materials and workmanlike means of construction are both bumptiously obvious and formally compelling; at the same time, peculiar shapes and conjunctions also offer slippery hints of metaphor.

Edward Allington exploits the hollowness of illusion. In “The Groan as a Wound Weeps,” he concocts a fakery of plastic tomatoes spilling from a “floating” curl of purple drapery. “Three and Four Steps,” with its debris of cones and curves under a sea-foam green stuccoed wood stairway that leads nowhere, is a cleverer-than-thou lament on the uselessness of trying to create anything of lasting importance with the ornamental toys of art.

Tony Cragg dispenses with metaphor entirely, preferring to allow ordinary objects to take the limelight by rearranging them in unusual ways or dressing them in new clothes.

Cragg’s “New Figuration” is fragments of plastic objects stuck on the wall to form the loop-the-loop silhouette of a human figure. It verges on whimsy. A set of household furniture uniformly covered with tiny, multicolor bits of plastic has a muffled, alien presence. Theatrical in anyone’s book.

James Coleman works in the fragile medium of slide projection to create enigmatic clues the viewer is expected to puzzle out. White squiggles on a black background in “Connemara Landscape” might be an amateur’s hesitant attempt at map-making or a specialist’s charting of wind patterns or topology.

John Wilkins engages in the curious business of isolating a detail of the picture on a shredded-wheat box and blowing it up a thousandfold to create red-and-orange watercolor blobs on a gold background. This enterprise requires that viewers be able to deduce from the titles (“Still Life: Returning Current,” “Still Life: Ceres”) that Wilkins is referring nostalgically to a landscape tradition debased by late 20th-Century commercialism.

Other artists in this show, assembled by Independent Curators Inc., New York, deal with such themes as feminist autobiography (Helen Chadwick), the “language” of scribbling and collage on a grand scale (Avis Newman), the Siamese twin-dependency of a simple painted image and its title (John Murphy), the photograph as a “decodable” piece of rhetoric (Olivier Richon) and the manner in which viewers have an art experience (Art & Language, a confab of anonymous artists).

Granted, you have to be on the right wavelength to understand what’s going on in this work. But too much of it leans too hard on elaborate intellectual constructs, too little presents a face you can scrutinize with some visceral pleasure before yielding to the suffocating embrace of What It All Means.