Street Structures Make Public Do Double Take : Art: Dennis Adams discloses his social agenda in ‘urban decoys’ found around the world.

“Your message here” shout the backs of thousands of bus stop benches, hungry for something to sell. A few such signs interrupt the cacophonous capitalist song to whisper, “I am not an advertisement.” These are the works of Dennis Adams, a New York-based artist and maker of “urban decoys,” structures that look familiar but snag the mind from quotidian musings.

In Geneva in 1988, Adams transformed “men at work” signs into comments on the city’s underclass of immigrants. Each sign bore a portrait of a foreign worker with the name of his or her native city, an attempt to bring an invisible segment of society to light.

In New York, Germany, Canada and Israel, he has constructed architecturally bold bus shelters whose illuminated panels don’t hawk cigarettes and jeans, but instead confront the commuter with photographic fragments of his own cultural past: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg after their arrest; the lawyer for Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie; native Canadians defending their land rights.

“I’m interested in the idea of collective memory, what collectively we choose to remember, and what we choose to forget,” Adams said in a telephone interview from his studio. “I look for something that’s going out of focus in the public consciousness or is being distorted. Everything is being erased by this information overload. I’m trying to slow things down a bit, to get people to interact with something that’s unexpected.”

Adams, 41, will discuss his work of the last ten years, including how his “disillusionment with the art context” prompted him to plant work in the public arena, on Tuesday at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

Adams’ work of the 1970s, like much Conceptual art of the time, investigated the relationship between image and text--”how images come to define a text and how text defines an image, and the discrepancies that come up between the two.”

Always problematic, however, was that Conceptual art “promised a lot but delivered very little. It gave a lot of lip service to breaking out of the art world. There were a lot of ideas going on there, but everyone was really staying home, and I thought it was time to go outside and investigate public life.”

For his first outdoor work, Adams in 1978 mounted a series of photographs and texts in the windows of a mid-town Manhattan garage. The photographs pictured Patty Hearst.

“I like a subject that, generally, people recognize, because it has a kind of hook to it,” he said. “I’m looking for a kind of public iconography, and I have been from the beginning.”

Most of the images that Adams enlarges and mounts in light boxes are “found” images--pictures from the press, from picture agencies or from his own archive. Occasionally, he will make a photograph himself, if he can’t find one that suits his needs. For his second New York bus shelter, near Union Square, Adams photographed a homeless man and paired the image with the words, “Studios From,” a reference to the new luxury condominiums down the street.

Adams has been working less and less with words in recent years. “I’ve become more interested in using architecture as a text to define the image, as a way of recontextualizing images,” he said. The angled walls and stark geometry of his bus shelters found their inspiration in the work of the Russian Constructivists, early 20th-Century artists who aspired to a new art and a new social reality through the exploration of pure geometry, color and space. “They had a social agenda, and took art right to the street level,” Adams said.

That public domain, which he describes as “everybody’s territory, a place where privilege breaks down, where there’s no safety,” is a loud place in which Adams wants to have a soft voice.

“I don’t want to hit people over the head with something. I look for a point in my work when it nearly becomes invisible. I hope it operates in a very subtle way.”

Interrupting the status quo, subtly or not, has been the artist’s mission since he took to the streets. The possibility of becoming a part of the status quo has steered him away from permanent projects. His bus shelters and other public works have been installed for months, even years at a time, but they have always been removed before their absorption into the environment is complete. Working on temporary projects allows him to give free rein to his self-professed anti-authoritarian views.

How Adams would reconcile his interventionist methods and critical stance with a permanent installation remains to be seen, and it may be seen first here.

Adams is one of a team of artists and designers currently planning a “linear park” for downtown San Diego. Located along Harbor Drive, the project is being developed incrementally, and is scheduled for completion in five years. The first of Adams’ contributions entails a series of large photo panels in the plaza of the Convention Center trolley station. Adams has not yet disclosed the nature of his images, but, as always, he will be working “in that zone, where things are being repressed or distorted in the public consciousness.”

Adams’ lecture, at 7:30 p.m., is part of “Future Perfect-Present Tense,” a series presented by the La Jolla museum and the Visual Arts Department of UC San Diego.