ART REVIEW : New Artists on the Block : The works in an Afro-American Museum show are generally banal, but two installations are exceptional.

Among the diverse genres of contemporary artistic practice, installation art has been running at high gear for several years. No let-up is in sight.

Barbara Bloom, David Bunn, Daniel Buren, Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Charles Ray, Jeffrey Vallance, Meg Webster--the list is long. Since the 1970s, artists of different generations, widely divergent sensibilities and a broad range of accomplishment have worked in the installation genre. Paintings and sculptures of course continue to be made, but installations are still very much the order of the day.

A partial explanation of why this should be so can be seen in the biennial exhibition of 12 emerging artists at the California Afro-American Museum. In contrast to a generally staid, conventional and mediocre group of paintings, photographs and prints, easily the most convincing works are its two installations, both from 1990: Mildred Howard’s winsomely poignant “Memory Garden: Phase II;” and, especially, Alfonzo Moret’s incisive and sharply critical “House of Veils.”

“House of Veils” is a compact theatrical stage set. A small, tin-roofed shack stands behind a gate-less picket fence, and before a woodsy painted backdrop. Built on blocks painted to look like watermelons, the cabin is a shallow facade covered with chicken wire, roofing paper, burlap and assorted trash (a paper cup, a fried chicken box, a cigarette package). Three steps, marked in Victorian script with the words “Faith,” “Hope” and “Prosperity,” lead to the closed front door.

Embedded in this door is a television monitor, upended to emphasize the verticality of the entryway and flanked by two horizontally placed monitors. Together, this arrangement makes a strong cruciform shape on the cabin’s facade.

Suddenly, the simple wreath of twigs hung at the top of this nominal “cross” suggests a crown of thorns. As it does, Moret’s “House of Veils” begins to peel back its layers. The church as an anchor of stability and cultural perseverance is most obvious, but the structure implies a more specific reading. This closed-off, ramshackle “House” recalls “Uncle Tom’s Cabin (or, Life Among the Lowly),” the 1852 novel about an elderly black slave by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both the daughter and the wife of clergymen, Stowe always insisted the book was not written by her, but by God.

The two horizontal television monitors show identical tapes assembled from popular media sources--clips from the evening news, television entertainment programs, movies--that describe various aspects of black life. Superimposed over these clips are the printed words of black poets (including Moret’s own). The selected media images, whose creation and dissemination have been controlled by white culture, rub against the chosen poetic images, created by black men and women. The resulting friction sets off sparks, both incendiary and illuminating.

Directly beneath the crown of thorns, the central television monitor displays a looped sequence of faces of individual black men and women, each concealed by a mask of Aunt Jemima or of a minstrel singer. One after another, their silent voices speak with printed sign-language: “I-can-free-myself-again.”

Modern media pictures reverberate with the historical tensions of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” For here was an ardently abolitionist story about black life under slavery, written from the perspective of a white author and thus inevitably circumscribed by its display of black subservience to white authority. Moret’s powerfully complex installation invokes history and cultural memory in order to vivify its appeal to a present predicament.

Mildred Howard’s “Memory Garden” plainly makes a similar invocation, but to far different, and less urgent, effect. The “Memory Garden” is in fact a very large sandbox--adult size, so to speak--through which a path meanders to a bench. A score of wintry, leafless birch trees arch through the space, where row upon row of glass bottles are stuck neck-down in the sand. Label-like bits of writing are printed on certain bottles, as if fragmentary messages from afar had washed up on a sandy beach. They’re snippets taken from a text carefully painted in pale blue-gray letters on a far wall.

Howard has chosen a paragraph from the 1912 novel, “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man,” which was first published anonymously and subsequently revealed to have been written by James Weldon Johnson--lawyer, U.S. consul to Nicaragua and Venezuela and a founder of the NAACP.

“I have only a faint recollection of the place of my birth . . . “ begins the paragraph printed on the wall. You read the text through barren trees, surrounded by broken fragments that stand as markers in the sand. The reference to birth quietly expands from the personal to the cultural. An episode in the birth of modern black consciousness is commemorated.

Howard, like Moret, addresses issues of identity and origin in her installation. According to an accompanying catalogue essay by Lizetta LeFalle-Collins, curator of the museum and organizer of the biennial, so do the 10 remaining artists selected for the show. (Work by nine other visual artists is on view, including Ronald Corbin, Darrell Kenyatta Evers, Violet Fields, Todd Gray, Willie Robert Middlebrook Jr., Rufus Snoddy, Therman Statom, Elaine Townes and Frank J. Williams. The 10th is performance artist Keith Antar Mason.) But their paintings, prints, and photographs seem banal, especially when compared to the installations. Ironically, the very issue of identity is the reason.

One great lesson of modern culture is that nothing in, say, a painting inherently makes it anything more than a piece of smudged-up fabric. The identity of art is always provisional and in doubt, and must be remade at every outing. Compelling work regards this issue as integral. It knows the as-yet “un-smudged” fabric is not a tabula rasa , a blank slate awaiting the artistic uncovering or assertion of identity. Painting is in fact a loaded cultural field.

But in the biennial exhibition, established conventions of painting, photography and such are assumed as art’s givens. However skillfully those conventions are sometimes manipulated (most notably by Evers and Gray), motifs from the work of dozens of established artists can be checked off at every turn--artists as diverse as Clyfford Still, Sam Gilliam, the Starn Twins, Francis Bacon, Michael McMillen, Charles Arnoldi and many, many more. This is not a mere question of “originality” or “influence.” (Formally, the precedent of Edward Kienholz’s theatrical tableaux stands behind Alfonzo Moret’s “House of Veils.”) Establishing in the foreground a litany of artistic forebears and colleagues intrudes on art for which, in the words of the curator, identity is “an overriding issue.” What of the identity of art?

Art’s tenuous identity is a daunting puzzle--and a wellspring of its power to speak truth. Like performance art, installation art benefits from a sense that the provisional is built-in. One never has the impression that a painting or a sculpture will, when the show is over, vanish into nothingness, or be disassembled into its constituent parts. But that’s the way with an installation. It’s here, now, assembled for your engagement. Permanence is pending. There’s no presumption of automatic value--that it’s ipso facto “for the ages.” What’s privileged, instead, is you.

* California Afro-American Museum, 600 State Dr., (213) 744-7432, daily to Sunday.