ART REVIEW : A Provocative Frame of Reference : The Municipal Art Gallery’s ‘Enclosure’ exhibition showcases a variety of display-case sculpture.

Certain devices, at certain times, become so frequently used by artists, even of widely divergent stripes, that you wish a moratorium could be invoked to cease the numbing proliferation.

The use of a big, wide, heavy or otherwise emphatic frame is one such familiar motif, which characterized the return to prominence of painting in the 1980s. The bulky frame stood in sharp contrast to the frameless canvases so common to postwar art.

Another device slightly more recent in its ubiquity is the display case, cabinet or vitrine, which artists began to employ as a kind of three-dimensional version of the assertive pictorial frame, this time for sculptural objects. In the last several years, the display case has been everywhere in gallery and museum shows.

“Enclosure” is an exhibition at the Municipal Art Gallery that, under the direction of Edward Leffingwell, gathers together principally display-case art. Christopher Williams’ gargantuan books of photographs of birds, taken at the London Zoo, are trapped in weighty vitrines that prevent their pages from being turned. Liz Larner’s “Tropicana” is a specimen jar filled with odd detritus: swimming pool water, mercury, guitar strings. Mike Kelley’s “Kappa Scalp” is a vaguely Moe Howard-like wig, which the artist wore in performance in a well-known videotape by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, here sealed beneath a glass bell jar on a wig stand made from a wine glass. Sarah Seager’s “Band Apart” plays on a domestic theme, in which the display case is a stripped-down china cabinet.

These, like most of the rest, date from about the last five years. Almost every work will be familiar to those who regularly make the gallery rounds. “Enclosure” has been sifted from the recent mainstream. The sorting and classifying activity that is a hallmark of the group show (and of the museum idea) reverberates against the display-case strategy employed by the artists. As specimens for examination, the sculptures are inflected with a sense of having been plucked from their natural habitat, outside the museum’s walls, and assembled for your perusal.

Laid out in a fairly sparse, visually elegant, somehow antiseptic installation that heightens an already anthropological aura, the show is too small to fully articulate its premise. Still, it manages to suggest that the resonance of the display case or vitrine in recent art has to do with its inherent ability to accomplish several things at once: It invokes the presence of a spectator standing before the work of art; it articulates the way in which bureaucratic culture classifies and catalogues; it identifies the modern impulse to collect, preserve and care for; it points to a dislocation from the daily flow of mundane events beyond the official world of art.

Sherrie Levine’s display cases hold checkered paintings that, lying horizontally on a shelf, get transformed into objects existing somewhere between sculptures and actual chessboards. (Each is untitled, but identified as being “after (Marcel) Duchamp,” an artist dedicated to the rigorous mental strategies of the game of chess as cultural metaphor.) Like the display-case syndrome for sculpture, the dramatic frames that began to appear on paintings in the last decade let the spectator know that the artist knew that painting and sculpture are culturally shaped languages, not supposed equivalents to nature. Culture’s rules are arbitrary, their structure revealing. Levine’s conflation of painting, sculpture and worldly object forms a complex scheme.

About a third of the 27 works in “Enclosure” are meant to suggest various historical roots for the display motif. Unsurprisingly, the ghost of Duchamp makes an appearance in the form of the famous “box in a valise,” the 1963 multiple in which small reproductions of his work from early in the century were carefully packed in a traveling salesman’s sample case. Very surprisingly, the late German artist Joseph Beuys makes no appearance at all--a rather serious omission, given that Beuys’ prominent use of the display case is surely the spur for the current ubiquity of the motif.

And most refreshingly, a 1973 Wallace Berman sculpture of a rock, painted with Hebrew glyphs and chained to a pedestal, turns up where it isn’t expected. The context provided by the show manages to shake up the standard interpretation of his art as being inner-directed and eccentric.

Berman used heavy links to chain his bit of painted sculptural stone to its platform. Earlier, in the 1960s, sculpture had climbed down off its pedestal in order to escape the constricted art context and confront the spectator one on one. Later, in the 1980s, sculpture absorbed the display case as its new pedestal, thus identifying the art context as inescapable yet potentially revealing. “Enclosure” identifies Berman’s work as an important connection between the two strategies.

Berman’s inclusion is the provocative highlight of the show. The ubiquity of specimen display cases in contemporary art has by now reached a saturation point. Unintended mannerism threatens. Slightly rearranging Berman’s already dusty place in the classification of recent history, “Enclosure” keeps you from groaning in the face of yet another display of display cases.

* Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 485-4581, to April 14.