ART REVIEW : The Lively Arts Get Livelier

Are you tired of art that hangs quietly on walls? Bored with sculpture that sits still? If so, Santa Barbara has the show for you: “PULSE 2,” a community-wide, summer-through-fall series of exhibitions and performances by “people using light, sound and energy.”

The series got off to a shining, crackling, energetic start over the weekend with the opening of three exhibitions at UC Santa Barbara galleries and the installation of various outdoor works on campus. Later in the summer and early in the fall, museums and galleries in downtown Santa Barbara will get into the act, but there is plenty of action in this first batch of shows to merit a trip. Take your friends, wear your walking shoes and don’t forget the kids.

The liveliest group of works is at the College of Creative Studies, which is a good starting point for a tour of the sprawling show. Here you find an intriguing array of artworks that make music, move and talk to you. One room contains a trio of Jonathan Borofsky’s gray, life-size figures with projectors embedded in their heads. Bright circles of light, one of them containing a drawing that loosely resembles a head, shine on walls--rather like beams from the sculptures’ brains. Two of the figures appear to be dancing to silent music, while the third stares at a circle of light, as if contemplating a brilliant idea.

In a device called “Singer Songs,” Bill and Mary Buchen have equipped a treadle sewing-machine table with a headset that plays recordings of children singing and noises that sound like trains, but might be sewing machines. Turning the sewing machine’s metal wheel and pushing the treadle, “sewers” have the fantasy of turning out sound creations. The musically inclined also can play Howard Jones’ high-tech instrument, “Sonic Six,” by running their hands across six tiny holes that span a 16-foot-long aluminum panel, or by spinning a metal wheel that sets off chimes in Bernard and Francois Baschet’s “Musical Sculpture.”

This isn’t an entirely user-friendly exhibition, however. Jack Dollhausen’s abstract “painting” warns viewers “you walked too close” when they come within a few inches of a mass of electronic circuitry on the framed canvas. Alan Rath’s sculpture, “Voyeur II,” lends an ominous air of surveillance in digital images of two roving eyes on a pair of video monitors perched atop long metal legs. Rath’s creepy “Desktop Breather,” installed nearby, is an electronic speaker that sits on a pedestal but heaves like a human lung.

As you leave the College of Creative Studies gallery, walk across a parking lot and into the University Center, where a magical show of colored light holds forth in darkened rooms of the UCen Gallery. Most of the pieces here deal with light that moves or changes color over time. Art Spellings’ “Free Spirit” presents an array of geometric shapes within a frame, as if it were a traditional painting, but the brilliant colored components seem to float freely in dark space. Meanwhile, light darts through long tubes in Milton Komisar’s 6-foot-tall angular sculpture, “The Philosopher’s Geometry.” Clyde Lynds’ “Spectral Wind” presents a galaxy-like spectacle of pinpoints of light that change color slowly and create varied spatial effects.

Continuing on to the University Art Museum, you find another predominantly dark show, but this one provides some historical underpinnings for art made with light, sound and energy. Marcel Duchamp’s “Rotorelief,” which he started in 1935, is a mesmerizing piece based on off-center spinning circles. Jean Tinguely’s witty contraption, “Toyko Gal” (1967)--made of radio parts, a flywheel, a motor and feathers--is a hilarious parody of a fan dancer.

Taking a far more pristine approach, Robert Irwin’s acrylic disc (1969) wrests ephemeral, breathtaking beauty from light, shadow and simple form. Dan Flavin’s familiar fluorescent works transform space with white and colored light. Bruce Nauman’s neon piece, “Malice,” on the other hand, fills a hallway with nasty suspicions.

Along with works by these celebrated figures are surprises by lesser-known artists, such as Liz Phillips whose “Soundtables I and II (Wet and Dry Landscapes)” depend upon visitors’ participation. A little practice shows that moving your hands over two table-top “landscapes” creates symphonies of Space Age sound. You also discover that the rocky scene yields different sounds than the placid “lake” and that the two tables can be effectively “played” by a team. It isn’t hard to imagine true aficionados getting hooked and staying here until closing time.

If you leave these artworks--and many more--behind and wander around the campus, you find sound, light and kinetic art lurking in courtyards and on walls. The Buchens’ “Wind Gamelan,” an enchanting group of seven towering music makers inspired by wind machines, is a great excuse to walk out on a field by a lagoon and the beach. A map dispensed at the galleries indicates locations of most artworks, and attendants will point out others.

At this point, “PULSE 2” is more a spectacle and a hands-on delight than a scholarly exhibition, though a promised catalogue--due in late August--will probably provide some historical context and aesthetic analysis. Even without the catalogue, it’s easy to see at least three genealogical lines here.

One--embodied by Tinguely and his heirs--is a funky, inventive, Rube Goldberg-like streak that appeals to tinkerers and humorists. The second--practiced by Irwin, Flavin, Jones and others--uses technology as an extension of formal abstraction and an exploration of perceptual experience. The third delves into social and psychological implications of a technological society, in the works of such artists as Borofsky, Nauman and Rath.

If these first exhibitions don’t exactly promote analysis, they do demonstrate the range of a technological genre that’s often thought to be preoccupied with gadgetry. Primary funding for the exhibitions and catalogue came from the David Bermant Foundation: Color, Light, Motion with additional support from the University Museum Council.

UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies, to Oct. 5; UCen Gallery and University Art Museum to Oct. 21. Hours: Tue.-Sat., 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sun., 1-5 p.m. Information: (805) 961-2951.