EXHIBITS : Hands-On Sculpture for the ‘90s

Bill Hayner has some advice for anyone venturing into the “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get up” exhibit at Fullerton College: Don’t be nervous about touching (in fact, it’s pretty much a requirement), and if you feel like laughing, just do it, as loud as you want.

Hayner proudly points out that this isn’t one of those solemn, reflective experiences. The show of David Quick’s “kinetic sculptures,” which he co-curated with Kate Johnson, is interactive, the opposite of most gallery exhibits that ask you to keep a respectful distance and your yap shut.

“The involvement here is what makes this wonderful, at least that’s how I see it,” Hayner said. “So much of modern art leaves the public feeling distanced, but Dave tries to overcome that by having you become a part of it. Art can be fun, not intimidating, and that’s what his sculpture keeps saying.

“Art has been cynical and on the dark side for much of the 20th Century. This, instead, reaches out to people.”

For one thing, the Santa Monica artist’s complicated pieces actually talk to you, or at least make noise. There are buttons to push, cranks to turn and levers to snap, all a part of the process that gets the machinery turning.

Take, for instance, “Watch Out Vince!” one of the five sculptures displayed. Like most of his pieces, it’s a Rube Goldbergian take on the contemporary scene, in this case the strange side of American baseball. A large box is divided into two sections, on the top a miniature outfield featuring a lone outfielder, on the bottom all the thingamajigs that make it work.

Depress the red button and a tinny voice begins to call out a warning to the figure, then a rolling pin off to one side slowly starts toward him. Too bad, Vince gets squashed. Sports fans will get the joke: Quick is recreating the tarp accident that felled St. Louis Cardinal Vince Coleman during a playoff series with the Los Angeles Dodgers a few years ago.

In another baseball-oriented piece, “Kill a Seagull, Go to Jail!” Quick recalls when New York Yankee Dave Winfield was charged with killing a sea gull before a game in Toronto in 1983. Winfield struck the bird with a baseball, an incident that Quick shows in miniature by having us turn a crank.

As the crank goes, so does a small Winfield, sliding backward on a path until he reaches a baseball, which is then propelled toward the sea gull. Once hit, a Monopoly “Go to Jail!” card replaces the hapless bird.

It’s Quick’s humorous side that perhaps impresses Hayner most. “His work has an edge because of the jokiness. Humor can be used to make very serious statements, and I think he does that. There is commentary on the seriousness of the human condition and our environment.”

Applying that to the baseball works may be pushing it, but Quick does seem to be more issue-oriented with the environmental piece that prompted the exhibit’s title. Quick’s “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up” has nothing to do with that TV ad of the elderly lady in distress except that it uses the familiar catch-phrase.

This time, a crank starts a tattered globe spinning slowly on its axis. An accompanying poem explains that the god Atlas has “slipped on some grease and now there’s a hole in the ozone.”

The exhibit’s most elaborate sculpture is “Homage to Busby Berkeley,” which Quick created for a group show concurrent with the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984.

Quick, a big admirer of the director known for his effervescent, intricately choreographed musicals, has set up a video screen with a continuous loop of the best of Busby (the sound of tapping feet fills the small gallery). Nearby, 12 plastic cows, suspended by hooks through their snouts, hang from a central gizmo that, upon the push of a button, sends them into a little pirouetting dance to a soundtrack of “Lullabye of Broadway.”

The performance lasts almost four minutes and features small hands that reach up and, uh, fondle four of the cows standing in the center while a child’s toy tips over, emitting a “mooing sound.”

As one especially thrilled critic wrote: “It is a tongue-in-cheek ‘80s update of an earlier pre-Holocaust time when Hollywood movies flowed with a fun innocence perhaps lost forever.”

What: David Quick’s “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up” exhibit.

When: Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., through March 5.

Where: Fullerton College Art Gallery in the Home and Fine Arts Building, 321 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton.

Whereabouts: Take the Riverside (91) Freeway to Lemon Street and head north to Chapman and then head east. Enter the first parking lot to the north after the underpass.

Wherewithal: Admission is free.