Poverty--Up-Close and Personal : Art: Chris Hardman’s interactive work on homelessness in America has drawn fire from conservatives.

You lie on a slab, arms crossed, and slide into the crammed blackness of a morgue drawer. Someone says to rest in peace.

So begins your scary sojourn into the world of America’s poor and homeless, as re-created by Sausalito artist Chris Hardman in an exhibit now on display at the Smithsonian Museum’s Experimental Gallery. “Etiquette of the Undercaste,” here through the middle of next month, is a graphic, at times chilling, portrayal of poverty and homelessness.

It is an artistic experiment not without political risk.

It appears against the backdrop of increasingly hostile criticism in Congress--and on the presidential campaign trail--of what is considered art when it comes to federal funding. Museum officials stress that no federal money was spent to bring the exhibit to the Smithsonian.

But a critical editorial in the conservative Washington Times noted that the artwork was initially created with partial funding from the beleaguered National Endowment for the Arts. It panned the exhibit as pandering to the politically fashionable, who “like a little misery in their lives before heading home to the fireplace and the Perrier.”

Experimental Gallery Director Kimberly Camp concedes the exhibit might be considered “risky” in today’s political climate.

“There’s a sense out there that somehow it’s time to be safe, that it’s time to pull back,” Camp said in an interview.

Camp said the exhibit helps people to experience poverty on a deeply personal level, but at the same time contended that it was selected because of its innovations in art and not its politics. The work “pushes the envelope” in its avant-garde blend of theater and art, forcing the traditionally passive museum viewer to become an actor in the artist’s world, Camp said.

Still, the premise around which the exhibit is built is an unabashedly political one: that poverty, prison and homelessness are primarily a function of birth and that the American dream of upward mobility is a sham.

The exhibit tour starts with a trip to heaven, where, after getting up from the morgue slab, you wait with other cooing babies to be reborn. “Which crib will you be born into?” a voice asks. Another, girlish voice innocently says, “You hope. You just have a silly kind of hope . . . “

But after a spin of a roulette wheel you slide down into a tenement and look up at your mom, who’s high on crack. “Oooow, baby, come ‘ere, baby . . .,” she croons.

The admission-free exhibit is a dark, 7,000-square-foot maze that gives rise to a feeling of being cramped and closed in. Indistinct figures occasionally appear in the dark. Each visitor takes the 30-minute tour alone and is further disoriented and isolated through the use of a Walkman.

The artist has used real-life interviews from the streets of Northern California to create a soundtrack that is by turns a jarring cacophony and an almost hypnotic layering of voices. The speakers are hookers, thugs, a con man, a sweet but babbling social worker, a prison guard.

“What you learn, you’re going to remember or you’re going to have a very bad time. . . . It’s going to be pure hell,” says an alien figure in a spacesuit, identified as “the man.”

At another point, the visitor lies back on a motel bed and is subjected to louder and louder panting, the heavy breathing of a trick being turned.

People are usually represented by wooden, paper-doll-like figures. The technique has been criticized in some reviews as too stylized to seem real.

For Dwight Fowler, 41, who became homeless several years ago and now lives in a shelter, the faceless stick figures were real enough. Fowler is part of a troupe of homeless actors, Voices From the Streets, who have performed at area museums, including the Smithsonian’s Experimental Gallery.

“You’re single-sighted looking straight ahead, trying to find a way to survive,” he said. “You don’t see anybody. It’s, ‘I’m hungry. I’m cold. I’m tired. Hey, Lady, can you give me a dollar?’

” . . . You’re not a part of society. You’re not a person--you’re not a people anymore.”

Fowler said he was raised by his single mother and grandmother and was the first in his family to graduate from college. He said he lost a government job as an oceanographer after both women died and he suffered a breakdown.

Fowler believes that the recession, which is hitting white-collar workers especially hard, creates a receptive climate for the exhibit.

“Do I look homeless?” asked Fowler, who is articulate and professorial in glasses and penny loafers. “Homeless is not a look. It’s a state of being. Everybody’s a payday or two away from being there.”

Of course Fowler, who’s become an activist and volunteers at the museum, might be expected to say that. Outside on the steps of the museum, another homeless man panhandled as he shivered in a blustery March wind.

Lord Thompson, who said he lost his job as a cook and now sleeps on a grate outside a federal courthouse, seemed at first scornful of the exhibit but then made it clear he had seen it.

Said Thompson: “It touches base on some of the situations . . . that feeling of being invisible, an unperson.”