Plunging Into Three New Installations : The Temporary Contemporary’s new exhibits--Are they sculpture, video or theater games?

Suppose somebody invites you to a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. You get your expectations all dressed up for one of those rewarding wordless conversations we have with art objects. You’ll contemplate rusty steel, swaths of color or impersonations of reality and, if you’re lucky, feel a little sharper than usual, more perceptive, wiser. You’ve lived through the artist’s eyes for a few minutes and added your own 2-cents worth of smarts to his. It feels good and if the work really has resonance you know the experience will get better later as other things crystallize on the memory. You’ll see a big slab of steel on a building site and think, “Hmmm, looks like a Richard Serra, powerful and dramatic.”

Instead you arrive at MOCA--or in this case its Temporary Contemporary wing in Little Tokyo--and the “show” turns out to be an opera, an avant-garde ballet or concert. Nothing wrong with that except such events belong to other categories of aesthetic experience, causing you to have to re-jigger your sensors to properly receive the new information.

Actually, the three new exhibitions at TC are an even harder case than that because they bracket aspects of pictorial art, sculpture, theater, video and philosophical games. The artists involved are Anne Hamilton from Santa Barbara, San Francisco’s John Woodall and the British sculptor Richard Deacon. None are well known hereabouts and are sprung on the locals in large complex works that arrive sans catalogues so the uninitiated browser has no help in sorting it all out.

The genres of work represented are familiar from international art extravaganza’s like Germany’s Documenta where artists seem to labor to outdo one another by the sheer size and complexity of their multidisciplinary “installations.” A few artists like the late Marcel Broodthaers had a real knack for grandiose scale but as often as not, these ambitious chimeras try to do too many things at once and so fall short in all conventional categories while failing to blend into anything new.

However, the idea of inventing new categories of art is an intriguing and adventurous conceit that has been central to the avant-garde quest and has paid off in everything from collage to tableaux to the limpid spaces of the California Light artists. Nothing for the sympathetic visitor to do but open all circuits and plunge in.

Anne Hamilton’s piece is called “The Capacity for Absorption” and consists of three large, dim consecutive galleries that seem as deep as wells. Walls of the first are infected with hundreds of small copper shelves bearing glass tumblers full of water. Through heaven-knows-what trick of physics, each has a miniature whirlpool gurgling away inside.

A huge loop of what looks like giant rope hangs in the middle of the gallery. It could be fashioned of miles of Rapunzel’s hair wrapped around Paul Bunyan’s inner ear. In fact, there is a small video nested at one end playing a picture of water running over an ear. At the other hangs a microphone. When you speak into it, the water in the glasses stops swirling and the room is silent. The whole thing could be about our auditory sense and maybe some relationship to our feelings of balance and scale since the room tends to miniaturize the viewer and stuff him inside someone’s head.

Size woozes around in the next room. Walls and floor look like marble until we see the grain is made up of--what? Strands of hair? Delicate algae? Has one been transformed into Kafka’s beetle scurrying around on a barbershop floor?

A long narrow table dominates the center of the room. At one end stands a young man wearing a crudely cut overcoat whose long train is twisted into an umbilical cord that trails off to the next chamber. The fingers of both his hands are inserted in holes at the end of the table. You notice another set of holes next to the figure. Ah, an invitation to participate by sticking your fingers in the holes. The table is awash in a thin sheet of water. Right, mystical union in the primal liquids of the womb or something.

The poor guy looks stoical and miserable. Seems unkind not to say something to him.

“Hi. Do you talk to people?”

“I’m really not supposed to.”

“Tough just standing there like that. How long is your shift?”

“Hour and a half. We were up till 4 this morning installing the piece. The guy who’s supposed to do this didn’t show up. I’m just filling in. I’ll be glad when I can get back to the hotel. I really need some sleep.”

“Hang in there.”

Nice chat. But Hamilton has a psycho-dramatic problem there. If a viewer talks to the actor and he replies, it breaks the enigmatic mood of the piece. If he doesn’t reply, the viewer feels like a ninny. Imagine sharing the profound mysticism of the primal liquids with somebody who won’t even pass the time of day.

Maybe the actor should be given an appropriate line or two to acknowledge friendly viewers and preserve the tone of the piece.

“Welcome to the well of Loneliness.”

Nah, too heavy but something like that.

You follow his umbilical coattail into the next room. It is attached to an immense iron ball--a sea-buoy. Here the room is paved with slugs of old-fashioned metal type. On a low shelf stands a crude puppet constantly and rudely jerked by whirly-gig machine.

That’s it.

We’ve clearly been inside somebody’s mind sharing thoughts of elemental ritual, procreation and control. That little puppet may have been us being jerked around by the artist. There are flaws in the piece and like all such ultra-serious multimedia art, endless opportunities for satire open up in the cracks.

It missed catharsis but at least held our attention.

John Woodall’s show is subtitled “Tools of Performance.” There is a heap of material in it from 80 framed drawings to a huge commissioned wall drawing to sculptural objects and a video installation but the minute you look at the main piece you know something is seriously missing.

Titled “Gim-Crack,” it is a wooden platform punctured by trap doors and a couple of skeletal ramps draped with sandbags. A scarecrow figure stands swathed in a greatcoat.

What is this?

Whatever it is must involve a lot of symbolism because there are a pair of cymbals right there.

It looks for all the world like an avant-garde theater set. It is in the nature of human weakness, when confronted with a set, to salivate for actors in a play.

The visitor feels silly. Came to the party on the wrong day. Come back tonight for the play. Turns out there will be a play, but not until March after the exhibition closes with the other two on Feb. 26.

Excuse me, but in art jargon we don’t call it a play. We call it a performance. The set is not a set but an “installation,” costumes and props become sculpture. Designer sketches original works of art. Somehow we are supposed to deduce the play--sorry, the Performance--from the paraphernalia.

OK, let’s have a crack at it. Looks like a lot of influence from Joseph Beuys and Jon Borofsky. Fedoras and running figures. The video installation is a murky affair--possibly a suspect being interrogated, but voices are garbled to incomprehensibility.

Go through a haunted-house pivoting door and there is a miniature version of “Gim-Crack” surrounded with a din of weird music and horror-movie sound effects. It may be a tableau in the art world, but it looks like a set model to me.

In other galleries hang masks made in the style of Cabbage Patch grotesques, a clever crocodile with aluminum scales and porcupines that appear fashioned from dried grains. They are definitely props, could be crafts objects but are not art. You can’t transform theater memorabilia into art by changing the nomenclature.

Woodall’s sensibility sprawls from holistic to sadistic but you can’t tack it down to anything but a kind of traditional Bay Area Funk humanism.

In the end, the danger with performance-installation hybrids is that they offer the pitfall of an unbridled monomania which fails to recognize that self-imposed limitations channel and clarify art. Otherwise, the expression is that of someone who writes and illustrates his own autobiography, turns it into an opera, composes the music, plays all the parts and sweeps out the theater.

Such enterprises rarely come to fruition and when they do the result is only a strange fetus still umbilically leashed to the person of the artist. Maybe when Woodall comes in person to do his piece it will sort out, but that still leaves it theatrical art, not art-art.

Poor Richard Deacon would probably look quite different in other company. Yet significantly, he also was once a performance artist who evolved into a sculptor of commonplace materials like plywood, aluminum siding. One piece looks like a hunk of the Alaska pipeline.

He retains the performance artist’s mixed motives and tendency to overdramatize. The pieces are basically witty comments on the semiotic art-and-language game that would do as well or better at one-hundredth the scale.

“Body of Thought” looks like the skeleton of a peanut blown up to the size of a spacecraft. Its looping struts are made of aluminum boxes so the whole thing suggests a mental conveyor belt, suggesting complex chains of neurons and synapses reduced to Charlie Chaplin slapstick.

“Doubletalk” is a room-size structure of snaking wood partly covered by a red Leatherette sleeve. “2 My Face” is a big ramp shaped like the cardboard feet of a Mickey Mouse balloon and covered with checkered linoleum. Its main goal in life is a punker’s quest to have his appearance defy description.

If you could carry these sculptures around in your pocket and plop them down on a cocktail party table, the hip crowd would get a chuckle out of each and everyone.