ART : Two MOCA Shows of Breezy Entertainment

The Museum of Contemporary Art is beginning to shape itself into the lively arena we’d all hoped for during the yearlong siege of its opening exhibition. Now, between its elegant Post-Modernist temple on Bunker Hill and its exhilarating Temporary Contemporary warehouse in Little Tokyo, the place has a baker’s half-dozen of varied shows and installations. The ensemble has a cosmopolitan air that puts one in mind of international compendiums like Germany’s Documenta--particularly because there are foreign visitors introduced here in the form of British conceptual photographer Boyd Webb and a similar Swiss duo, Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

Los Angeles art goods make up more than half the program with offerings devoted to the architecture of Frank Gehry, drawings by Bruce Nauman and a look at new acquisitions of works by Southern California artists called “Striking Distance.” By now it is no surprise that art made in these parts looks like big-city art, but it doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings to be reminded.

Or does it? A couple of large, if remote shadows lurk behind the fun like the specter of a shaky global economy behind a jolly dinner party in a yuppie bistro. When you think about the time, effort, ingenuity and wherewithal it is going to take to keep MOCA’s cavernous spaces filled, it is easy to imagine the curators bolting up at midnight to horror vacui dreams.

A less practical but more real consideration is the lumpy profile drawn by the ensemble of this art. It leans to the spectacular in size, materials and ambition. It lists into the winds of the sensational and comes about in breezy entertainment.

These are Baroque times in art and there is no resisting that drift, but MOCA needs to correct its course constantly in the direction of intellectual gravity and aesthetic independence. Not that it doesn’t try. Everyone is looking forward to the June visit of the works of Germany’s Anselm Kiefer. Here is an artist of high seriousness and cultural profundity who is causing people to whisper--for the first time in decades--of a master with the power and significance of a Jackson Pollock, an artist who reflects the kind of density found in the best works of MOCA’s permanent collection, the Rothkos and the Klines.

But--surely against his will--Kiefer has become a kind of international mainstream superstar. The idea of showing him is more a matter of social obligation than of curatorial originality. Showing artists of his stamp marks MOCA as a responsible and knowledgeable ship of the line in the transatlantic armada. But anybody who has been a passenger as the fleet makes its way from the Venice Biennial to Paris’ Beaubourg--with side trips to a Christo bridge-wrapping and a Heizer earthwork--before it chugs on to London’s Saatchi Museum and Germany’s enthusiastic repositories of Avant-Academic art begins to find a certain predictability in it all. Maybe MOCA--and all of them--need one smart guerrilla curator who hates the whole system and is permitted to periodically plant a poetic car bomb in the basement. If MOCA had been able to show an understated master like Lucian Freud at the same time as Kiefer, it would have added up to two things we sorely need from our museums--penetrating ideas and productive surprises.

It is no surprise that the exhibitions of Boyd Webb’s photographs and the photos and objects of Fischli and Weiss (to June 19) are accompanied by video presentations. It has long since become standard practice for exhibitions to have a video component--either an educational tape about the artist by somebody else or an example by the artist fooling around with the video camera. It used to be unnecessary to watch these, as they were frankly redundant.

In the present exhibitions, videos outstrip photos and objects that are no slouches themselves. It is nice to see artists mastering the medium. It is disturbing if one of your reasons for going to art exhibitions is to get away from the home tube to stare at more participatory art. If videos continue as entertaining and artistically central as these, the art audience will be reduced to brain-dead zombies whose vital signs are kept going on an intravisual life support.

Fischli and Weiss have worked together in Zurich for about 10 years as a pair of visual slapstick comedians. Sometimes they are oblique, as in a gallery full of common objects like kitchen drawers, vases and house plants copied life-size in black rubber. It is hard to account for why they are so humorous. There is just something risible about a dignified vase that gives when you poke it.

A series of sausage photos casts inherently humorous and very German wursts as ladies in a fashion show or as automobiles crashing in a cardboard-box town on fire. The “Equilibrium Series” does balancing acts of familiar objects, like a pair of kitchen chairs that rest on each other’s front legs while one does a headstand on a pottery pitcher and the other leans on a pole. Titles like “Outlaws” add a dimension of subtle understanding to work that presents itself as innocent and even a bit dumb.

There is nothing dumb about their video-translated 30-minute film “Der Lauf der Dinge” (The Way Things Go). In gross outline, it is a cinematic version of an old Rube Goldberg cartoon. A ball (a) rolls off a shelf and falls into a tin can (b) which tilts on a seesaw (c), lifting a candle which ignites a fuse releasing air to blow up a balloon (d) which explodes. . . .

You get the idea.

Sounds like it’s been done. Sounds like a bore. Wrong. This is not a cartoon but the action of real objects on film that was apparently shot in one take, thereby creating real-time suspense about whether or not things are going to work. Sometimes the action slows. You think they’ve hit a snag, but it’s just a bottle filling up with gas so it can tip over and start a fire.

The artists flirt with violations of the laws of physics. A rolling car tire hits an uphill ladder, bumps another which bumps another. Uh-oh. They’re losing momentum. The last one is barely nudged, but that was all they needed to set off the next example of unflagging goofy invention. A pair of lady’s shoes seems to waddle downstairs on a bike pedal.

As things get funnier and invention more inspired, effects become more violent. There are small creeping fires and more and more inexplicable effects like foams that burn. You can’t avoid the feeling that this is a mechanized Mack Sennett chase about chain reaction, domino theories, the arms race, the escalation of violence and refinement of the technological means to perpetuate it. The world ends not with a whimper, but a strangled giggle.

British photo-conceptualist Boyd Webb also appears to deal with some Post-Atomic world. The 41-year-old artist, who was born in New Zealand and works in London, makes oversize color prints depicting a world where survivors float naked in the galaxies or wander near the sea. In “Trophy,” a weightless man floats beneath a space vessel from which dangles a kind of basketball hoop. He tosses little globes of the earth towards the hoop, but he can never make a basket because the hoop is blocked by a hairy ball. In “Nourish,” a castaway lies on the ocean bottom underneath a big boat where he is dragged along by a suckling breast that juts from its bottom.

Then you notice that Webb’s seas are made of ordinary carpet. Boats are tarps and backgrounds painted skies that make no effort to disguise their artificiality. There’s an effect of kitsch surrealism, but the work is too smart for that to be an accident. There’s a purposeful homey ineptness about it all that makes it feel like it is really about frustration, the helplessness of trying to make art while hemmed in by the demands of daily life, the embarrassment of realizing you blow up your little annoyances to epic proportions because in the end, you’ve got an ego even if you are a jerk.

For a while there was an English troubadour-rocker who was hot in the pop music business. He sang about street-corner musicians and their humble struggle for survival. After a few hits he disappeared, and I always suspected that his sensibility was scotched by a curdled combination of self-pity and rampant narcissism. Boyd Webb’s art makes you think about that guy, trying to charm you with his winsomeness while putting you off with exhibitionism.

Webb shows a commissioned piece that is a real tent that looks like a Ku Klux Klan hood. It’s got two peepholes, with a mirror hanging inside. You can’t see yourself in the mirror from either hole, as if that frustration was the worst thing in the world.

Boyd’s videotape, like Fischli’s and Weiss’ movie, is the clearest articulation of his sensibility. It elaborates on several photos and gives the ideas a fullness they lack. In one, a guy peacefully slurps a cup of yogurt on a dock. A periscope comes up and circles him. He finishes his yogurt and puts the empty cup over the periscope which sinks in confusion. In another, a girl (with a great knack for pantomime) swims underwater (the surface is a length of fabric). She gradually melts a block of butter using a hair dryer.

There’s something repellent about Webb’s expressions of ambiguous paranoia that both wants recognition and rejects it. There is some kind of unwonted ambition lurking behind the art’s preoccupation with fears of impotence.

To the work’s artistic credit, it does not become quite so pathological that we miss the message that this loss of self, this confusion of goals and muddle of identity does truly mirror a type of modern mutants wandering the planet in large lonely numbers.