ART REVIEW : Holography Exhibit Is Stale, Unimaginative

Just when it seemed as though the self-styled Modern Museum of Art museum was beginning to offer shows of some merit, it has slipped back down the tubes. The directors have chosen a holography show by a veritable schlockmeister, an artist whom no well-regarded art museum would consider worthy of a one-man show. But well-regarded art museums have curators, and the Modern Museum is still proudly stumbling along without one.

They have found a British artist who calls himself just “Alexander”--not an encouraging sign--and they have seen fit to give him a retrospective. Alexander studied many years ago at the St. Martin School of Art in London, whose graduates include some of today’s leading British sculptors. But in terms of conceptual freshness or stylistic verve, he hasn’t a thing in common with them.

Initially a painter, he began making abstract sculpture during the 1960s. The catalogue text gushes that one of Alexander’s public sculptures was “the largest bronze sculpture of modern times.” Imagine that.

In 1980, while immersed in the writings of theosophist P.D. Ouspensky, Alexander became obsessed with the notion of making “four-dimensional” sculpture.

Finally he figured out how to do it: by assembling a group of slim poles--each one painted with a slightly different pattern of colored stripes. (The show contains a few table-top maquettes of these arrangements, some of which have been realized as outdoor sculptures.) Apparently, the eye is supposed to be able to read the color patterns as separate forms, a remarkably banal idea that one hopes didn’t cause Alexander too many sleepless nights.

Alexander eventually expended his repertoire to circles and barbed wire. The barbed wire pieces make ponderously cliched religio-political statements. In “War Into Peace 2,” the outlines of a cross appear to push aside the tangles of a white barbed wire sphere. (The original “War Into Peace,” sans cross, is striped red, white and blue, presumably in a burst of English patriotic fervor.)

Having created images of such symbolic inertness, you’d think Alexander might slink away into the night. But no, he went on to discover new ways of working with holography. A photographic method that uses laser light to produce three-dimensional images, holography has yet to attract a technical wizard able to transform it into anything approaching a work of art.

Needless to say, Alexander is not the one. His holograms serve up such sights as “Sense of Touch,” a motley collection of hands that appear to reach out into the viewer’s space, and--step right up, folks!--an evocation of an earthquake, with pouring debris.

Such items are weirdly reminiscent of the cheap-thrill palaces you see in tourist towns. The same dumb female stereotypes persist here, side by side with self-righteous anti-war sentiment. A phrase that could have been ripped from one of Britain’s many tabloids weaves around the body of a nude woman with a Barbie doll face (“. . . Been a Great Deal of Talk About Her . . . “). In “Evocation,” a crouching Asian woman in a black-sequinned top emerges from a pair of red lips.

Alexander’s piece de resistance , “The Horrors of War,” offers the sight of a skull with a barbed wire body, a “soldier” who appears to fire a rifle while a solemn voice intones a phrase reeking of schoolboy moralism (“ . . . There is no excuse to justify men and women killing each other. Think about this message and leave this zone immediately”).

To cap things off in proper style, the show includes a “database museum,” if you please, a computer screen that flips rapidly through each item in Alexander’s priceless oeuvre, offering garish color images and a list of salient details. My favorite: You can find out which of these masterworks are available framed.

“Alexander: A Retrospective Exhibition” remains through May 13 at the Modern Museum of Art, Griffin Towers, 5 Hutton Centre Drive, Santa Ana. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 754-4111.

KARI RENE HALL / Los Angeles Times