ART REVIEW : 2 More Cases of the Message Getting Lost in the Delivery

An urgent message delivered without urgency is doomed.

That’s the lesson of American electoral politics in the electronic age, and it’s a lesson that’s also rife with relevance to the arts. Without compelling form, even the most essential and substantive work fades into the periphery. What should scream sits mute; what might fly plods clumsily instead.

More insistently, perhaps, than any other venue in town, Installation Gallery has focused on art that addresses the central issues of contemporary society: power, authority and the relations between sexes, races and classes.

But, with few exceptions, these probing, intelligent inquiries have been stifled by the artists’ disregard for visually engaging form. Since it moved into its cavernous space last year, Installation has too frequently been filled with urgent messages delivered with no urgency.

Two of the three installations now on view at the gallery (930 E St., through Dec. 22 fall prey to this syndrome. Nancy Floyd’s “Just Married” pursues a theme of great personal and public concern, but with such uninspired, dispassionate means that the work evokes little more than a nod of acknowledgement.

Floyd examines the institution of marriage in terms of private dreams and social expectations. Photographs documenting her own wedding line the walls of the installation, along with occasional text panels. The text shifts back and forth from an outsider’s narrative account of the union to the artist’s own musings on the ritual, punctuated by excerpts from related studies.

Two video monitors in the center of the installation play a diary of the artist’s anxieties about her impending marriage and a fragmented look at the subject from the perspective of the news media. Visitors view the videos from white benches arranged as if for an actual wedding.

Although the installation touches on crucial issues facing individuals and couples today, none of the strands of thought presented is explored deeply, nor are they tightly or creatively interwoven. The cumulative result: a bland account of already-familiar themes.

Kaucilya Brooke’s “Not Lying Down” is slightly more arresting visually, but its stiff and cerebral tone yields the same numbing effect. Through an array of photo enlargements, tinted, cut out and splayed across several walls, Brooke traces the course of a private dialogue between a lesbian couple, a meeting of an activist peace group and a theatrical performance.

In each of the narratives, and in additional newspaper photographs of political protesters, individuals are striving to define their own positions in resistance to the prevailing, monolithic powers of government and convention. The couple is blocked by the fear of losing intimacy, the group meeting gets hung up on the technicalities of the consensus-forming process and the protesters are mostly shown being dragged away by the police.

Brooke densely packs her work with analogies between structures of power in private and political spheres, and her portrayals of individuals struggling to chart their own course evoke sympathy and support. But, like Floyd’s installation, Brooke’s hovers somewhere between art and treatise, and is only partly effective as either.

“Archive of Memory,” an installation by Sara-Jo Berman, Charles Craun and Graciela Ovejero, is worlds away from the dry didactics of its neighbors. Rich with emotion and evocative imagery, the installation befits its name as a dream-like repository of memories. Six video monitors and three large screens host a continuous sequence of ephemeral moments, a fleeting tapestry of images, from light filtering through trees to the soft rush of a wave on a woman’s ankles.

The space, entirely isolated from the rest of the gallery, seems equally remote from the constraints of time and worldly obligation. Though intended as a set for Berman’s performance of the same name, the installation also works sculpturally on its own, as a clearing for the meditation of shadows and reflections. A slow sensuality pervades the environment, through the instrumental sound track and a whispered monologue that filters through the air but never disrupts the mood of quiet introspection.

Visually engaging form is in long supply in the Mesa College Art Gallery’s exhibition “Values Made Visual,” a selection of African masks and sculptural works from the local collection of Robert and Patricia Berg. The 52 objects on display (7250 Mesa College Drive, through next Friday) invite the eye on an exhilarating journey across patterned surfaces, around subtly modeled shapes. This formal richness has long been admired and imitated by Western audiences, but with little regard for the societal values embedded or encoded within it.

Mesa’s show helps correct this persistent neglect of context by highlighting the spiritual and practical power bestowed upon the objects by their makers and users. Wall labels ascribe meaning to each piece by listing the values it embodies, such as respect for ancestors, authority, secrecy and beauty.

The fine catalogue and video accompanying the show form a solid, insightful foundation for viewing the work, by taking the objects out of the static gallery context and restoring to them a sense of their natural, dynamic functions among the peoples of West Africa.

African art scholar and Mesa Professor Barbara Blackmun curated the exhibition and wrote the catalogue with the assistance of the school’s honors class in African art. The show marks the debut of gallery director Kathleen Stoughton, who has physically upgraded the space and set it on a highly professional course.

The attractive installation has only a single flaw: The full, sculptural qualities of the objects can’t be appreciated when viewed from only one angle, which is all that is allowed by the placement of the objects’ pedestals against the gallery walls.