ART : The Museum as Stage : As ‘Helter Skelter’ demonstrates, exhibitions have become theater, with former performance artists involving viewers in the drama

Performance art is not a genre included in “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” the energetic exhibition that has been packing in the crowds at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Little Tokyo satellite for the last three months. Painting, sculpture, drawing, installation art--yes. But, not performance.

At least, not directly. One of the curious aspects of the frequently raucous exhibition, which closes today at the Temporary Contemporary, is how several of the strongest works on view are by artists for whom performance art has been a significant feature of past work. The ghost of the genre haunts the museum’s galleries.

In the 1960s, performance had emerged as part of a larger effort to get art out of the rarefied precincts of the museum and away from the commercial imperatives of the marketplace. In the 1980s, as the museum and the marketplace together roared toward an unprecedented position in the popular artistic consciousness, certain performance strategies and imperatives were absorbed into sculpture and, especially, into installation art.

Chris Burden gave up performance art more than a decade ago, but he pioneered an important form of the genre in the early 1970s. In events where violence and physical danger loomed, he suppressed the strictly perceptual phenomena more common to visual art; instead, the audience was offered extreme confrontations with moral dilemmas.

Should the artist be stopped from having himself shot, in the name of art, by a rifle-toting accomplice? Should his body be dragged away from the precarious pairing of electrical wires and water bucket, which could electrocute him in a flash? A spectator was always made to wonder whether or not he should intervene in Burden’s carefully chosen performance activity.

During the last dozen years, Burden has successfully transferred this confrontational stance from performance art to sculpture. His 5-ton “Medusa’s Head,” ominously suspended by a muscular chain from a steel I-beam in MOCA’s rafters, is a planet ravaged by toy trains that relentlessly mine its rocky innards. As the sculptural form is opened up, extinction threatens. Deepening and complicating the awful conflict inherent in any moral predicament, “Medusa’s Head” merges a childlike playfulness and stark brutality.

Sculptor Charles Ray groped toward his mature work in the 1970s and early ‘80s by incorporating his own body into otherwise highly formal sculptures. They would be displayed as if a brief tableau. The gallery door would open to admit viewers, and the artist himself would be on view visibly encased in a wall-hung box or huddled naked beneath a cold steel plate, as if entombed inside a Donald Judd sculpture or buried beneath a Carl Andre floor-piece. After several minutes, visitors would be ushered out and the gallery door would close.

Distinct echoes of this explicit, person-to-person encounter are found today in Ray’s cleverly manipulated department store mannequins. One otherwise generic example in “Helter Skelter” is fashioned into a faithful portrait of the artist. Another is unclothed and equipped with highly realistic genitals. A third is perfectly ordinary--except for the rather disconcerting fact that she is 8 feet tall.

A fashionable, high-style Athena, Ray’s female mannequin dwarfs the unsuspecting viewer who encounters the commandingly poised figure. Suddenly she bursts forth in the mind as Everymom--a culturally idealized image of graceful female perfection, yet also distant, unknowable and coolly intimidating.

Visceral, evocative and broadly influential performance works have been presented by Paul McCarthy in the United States and Europe since the late 1960s. Sometimes the performances are executed in private and videotaped, for viewing later by an audience. In a startlingly effective exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in December, a video performance called “Bossy Burger” was displayed together with the room-size set in which it had been enacted.

The presence of the set created a bizarre “behind-the-scenes” experience for a television show that will never see the light of broadcast. As a result, the “private” videotape seemed painfully intimate, the act of watching it an awful intrusion into the psyche of a stranger.

At MOCA, McCarthy’s “Garden” is also reminiscent of a stage set in which any stark divisions between public and private have been thoroughly scrambled. Built atop a big, raised platform and employing a carpet of artificial grass, papier-mache boulders and fake trees, the component parts of the installation were indeed salvaged from a television soundstage. Within the faux -forest primeval, acutely observed mechanical men simulate sex with the ground and a tree, the repetitive ca-chunk of their whirring machinery providing a chilly soundtrack for the voyeuristic scene.

Nature is a cultural fabrication in McCarthy’s extraordinary “Garden.” The manufacture includes the fully human nature displayed by spectators, who inevitably crane their necks to get a better look at the pathetic sexual activity hidden in the bushes.

Ordinary inventions of people-like-us are likewise central to Mike Kelley’s work, and performance art was the initial engine that drove the exploration. Kelley would develop a thematic body of drawings, sculptures and installation pieces, which would be shown as independent works of art. Significantly, these discrete objects also functioned as working notes for the artist, notes toward culmination in a performance piece.

Kelley’s installation in “Helter Skelter” is a “Proposal for the Decoration of an Island of Conference Rooms (with Copy Room) for an Advertising Agency Designed by Frank Gehry.” This remarkable ensemble conceives of an office as already a kind of stage set, where the drama of distinctly modern life is daily played out.

A suite of typical, all-white rooms has been decorated with images created not by the artist, but by anonymous office workers. From a variety of sources, Kelley gathered up the sorts of rank doodles and sarcastic cartoons--often sexual, scatological and adolescent in their humor--that decorate the typical contemporary work station. These he enlarged to mural size and silk-screened with black paint onto the surrounding walls of the conference rooms.

Originally commissioned by a large advertising agency, Kelley’s incisive installation merges his activity as an artist with the artistic expressiveness of office workers. Rather than imperiously adding a sculpture to the lobby, the artist here presents “corporate culture” as a developed entity, complete with its own familiar visual codes, social rituals and repressed anxieties. These are given telling (if unacknowledged and unexalted) form through the “urban folk art” of office cartoons.

A crucial feature of Kelley’s installation is its reconstruction of an office copy room, outfitted with a copy machine, metal shelving, work table and coffee maker, and marked by a closely observed aura of casual disarray--right down to the coffee-cup rings that mar the table. Restricted to “Employees Only” and the one room in the office suite that is locked to museum visitors--you peer in through the windows to peruse it--the copy room is revealed for what it really is: the artist’s studio for corporate culture.

Like their prior endeavors in performance art, the “Helter Skelter” sculptures and installations of Burden, Ray, McCarthy and Kelley audaciously perform. They’re highly theatrical because, with candor and straightforwardness, they acknowledge and address a spectator standing before them.

Ours is an era when big, expensive exhibitions have become an imposing form of political theater, replete with a variety of often hidden agendas. Performance-related sculpture and installation art have come to the foreground because they have a particular role to play in this rambunctious scenario.

More than any other genre, including the time-based mediums of video and film, convincing performance art has been characterized by a sharp difference from other forms of entertainment: Rather than complaisantly amuse, it means to transform the audience from passive viewer into active spectator. For an audience more commonly primed for inertia, artists with a history in performance art have a special capacity to create a bracingly self-conscious condition of spectatorship. In an elaborate show like “Helter Skelter,” several do.