ART REVIEWS

Culture Crash: Like the heady aromas of curry and eucalyptus wafting through the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s darkened and cavernous East Gallery, “Residue” is highly evocative, but ultimately rather heavy-handed.

A collaborative installation by visual artist Steve DeGroodt and composer Carl Byron, “Residue” explores difficulties and discontinuities experienced by indigenous cultures trying to survive colonial ambition, technological domination and economic oppression.

Natural and man-made artifacts native to the islands of Fiji and Papua New Guinea provide the material for the assemblages, wall drawings, sculptures, video and sound pieces presented here, all of which attempt to get at the contradictions characterizing present-day life in the Western Pacific.

The trouble is that those contradictions are too sharply drawn, the installation devolving too quickly into a series of simplistic oppositions between the oppressor’s imperialist vulgarity and the native’s noble savagery. So that the adz, a digging stick and traditional tool of survival, is juxtaposed with a cornucopia of Kraft products; a luxuriant pile of leafy branches with a cheesy, Western-inspired advertisement for New Guinea Motors, complete with Playboy-style cartoon; video imagery of the annual “Sing-Sing” ceremony, held in the eastern highlands region of Papua New Guinea (pageantry and bright colors) with New Guinean advertisements for American products (avarice and worn-out visuals).

Such knee-jerk romanticizing of the Other does little to address real problems in real people’s lives, nor to inform an audience most probably already aware of the cultural, economic and social dislocations brought on by the incursion of first world ideologies into Third World locales. DeGroodt and Byron have touched upon issues that are quite evidently crucial. But such issues cannot be addressed effectively through reductive polarities--the mix of desire, fear, exploitation and complicity that characterizes a planet held shakily together by consumerism and satellite dishes is simply too messy for that.

Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-0433, through April 19. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.