When You’re in a ‘COMA,’ Satire Is Never Too Far Away

“Art humorist” Susan Shwartz Braig has brought her affectionately satirical video-installation “COMA” home, so to speak, for an exhibit that opens today at the Fullerton Museum Center.

In offering a mock tour of the nonexistent “County of Orange Museum of Art,” COMA takes aim at what Braig finds crass attempts to market art to the general public. The project was created by Braig while she was in graduate school at Cal State Fullerton.

“My experiences during those years were my inspiration” for COMA, said Braig, an Ohio native who lived in Orange County for six years before moving to Los Angeles in 1986. “I saw much potential for the development of an Orange County art community but also was frustrated by the same lack of arts awareness typical of most American communities.”

In the 20-minute COMA video, which was shown last fall at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Braig parodies art museum tours (and videos) used to stimulate such arts awareness.

COMA--with a motto of “When you’re in a COMA, art is never far away”--encompasses galleries devoted to 20th-Century Abstraction, Heart Art and Pop Art, as well as the Orange County Model Home and the Carved Animal Petting Zoo.

Lampooning efforts to make museums more patron-friendly, Braig also came up with a “Sunken Treasures” exhibit in which guests swim through a tank with statues, including Venus de Milo and Michelangelo’s David.

The pseudo-tour climaxes at a “Sistine Chapel Re-Creation” exhibit that offers surrealistic Salvador Dali paintings on the ceiling in place of the original frescoes because, as tour guide and COMA director Braig says in the video, “Unfortunately, the real Michelangelo is dead.”

The video will be shown continuously at the Fullerton Museum Center. A 16-by-8-foot table-top miniature model of the museum that Braig built for the video also will be on display during the exhibit’s run, through Sept. 25.

Braig describes her ersatz museum as “a sort of wacky doll house full of junk shop objects and consumer products. The museum’s ‘collection’ resulted from months of sifting thorough Orange County thrift shops and retail stores.”

COMA continues through Sept. 25 at the Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona Ave., Fullerton. Museum hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. and Thursday and Friday evenings until 9 p.m. Admission: adults, $2; students and seniors over 60, $1. Admission is free Thursdays between 6 and 9 p.m. Information: (714) 738-6545.