‘WORLD TOUR’: A Look at Race, Power : ART REVIEWS : ‘World Tour’: A Look at Race, Politics and Power : Renee Green’s complex exhibit is less about charged moments in history than about history itself, about systems of representation and modes of display.

Renee Green’s “World Tour,” currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is unabashedly political and complex. It demands unusual amounts of time, receptivity and thought. Many viewers resent such demands, shrink from such responsibilities. The standard line is: Art has no business informing us about anything, much less railing about racial inequities, social injustice and cross-cultural mixed signals.

Yet when does art not rail? How different are Frank Stella’s “black” paintings, which demonstrate to what extent images can be purged and still remain images, from Green’s meditation on “blackness,” a visual and linguistic signifier used to justify centuries of abuse? Both are didactic, but what Green offers in the same breath is a trenchant critique of didacticism.

On one side, “World Tour” is a pointed analysis of race and the politics of the African diaspora; on the other, it is a deconstruction of the institutional bases of power, wherein objects, groups and individuals are codified, managed and selectively oppressed according to predetermined notions about their “essences.”

The exhibition consists of four separate installations, all of which were originally designed for other sites. “Mise en Scene” deals with the 18th-Century slave trade in France; “Bequest” examines literary stereotypes of “blackness” and “whiteness”; “Idyll Pursuits” addresses the 19th-Century artist’s obsession with exotic landscapes; and “Import/Export Funk Office” looks at the way hip-hop music has been absorbed into the German culture.

Green has modified each of the installations for the current exhibition, allowing for a certain degree of self-reflexivity. She includes, for example, comments generated by previous showings of the work, encouraging L.A. viewers to note their own experiences. There is, indeed, much here to experience. There are objects to see--elaborate clapboard structures and framed photographs of American colonial art; sounds to hear--French harpsichord music and New York hip-hop blasting from tape players; and texts to read--interviews with government officials in Clisson about the French slave trade and shelves filled with books from the “black power” era.

Working in multiple registers, Green privileges meanings that are fluid over those that are fixed. Yet with certain subjects, it is difficult to allow for ambiguity. Slavery, for example, claims victims and oppressors. In “Mise en Scene,” Green resists pointing the finger to do the more difficult work of exploring how such ignominy has been and continues to be framed. What does it mean that African slaves arrived in France aboard ships named Croissant and Pere du Famille? What does it mean that a master-slave encounter becomes a motif on a piece of 18th-Century linen? How and as what does such a loaded object function within the palliative context of a decorative arts museum, itself staged by Green inside a museum of contemporary art?

“World Tour” is less about charged moments in history than about history itself, about systems of representation and modes of display. Green uses the occasion of the West’s colonial exploits to examine the ways in which both language and objects have themselves been colonized in order to enact ideological positions. This begs the question of the artist’s own position. Green certainly doesn’t shy from implicating herself in her work, but she refuses to specify whether she is the anthropologist or the data. Her work is critical insofar as it muddies up, among other things, such insidious lines of demarcation.

Museum of Contemporary A rt, 250 S. Grand St., (213) 621-2766. Through May 16. Closed Monday.

Going Shopping: Shopping is an intensely sensual experience. For some, it’s the sharp snap of the credit card as it hits the counter--a staccato note that signals reckless abandon and induces the best kind of guilt-riddled excitement. For others, it’s the intermingled smells of expensive perfumes at the cosmetics corner. For Larry Mantello, the rush is nothing quite so subtle.

“Pleasure Treasure,” Mantello’s plastic, fantastic installation at Food House, figures shopping as a synesthetic explosion of Wagnerian proportions--only far less exalted. We’re talking kitschy, campy, junky, fake-funky, tasteless, mindless paraphernalia packed from floor to heart-shaped/helium balloon-studded ceiling. The vaguely nauseating scent of stale room fresheners wafts through the air, and all this to the syncopated strains of the Trampps’ “Disco Inferno.”

“Pleasure Treasure” celebrates the perverse allure of the gift shop, brimming with ersatz exotica and on-the-cheap erotica: lewd greeting cards featuring lipsticked harridans, their boozy husbands, and their husbands’ bodacious, tennis bunny babes; Penthouse key chain click viewers; plastic hand mirrors in alarming shades of chartreuse and fuchsia; rotating, electrified Chinese lanterns; Uncle Sam hats; foil-wrapped packets of freeze-dried ice cream; joke buttons (“I’m With Stupid”); fuzzy, clip-on creatures; and clusters of miniature, plastic fruit.

Mantello takes these novelty items and heaps them together harum-scarum, dangles them from “chip clips,” displays them on hanging racks, strings them on chains of glass beads, lines them up on wooden shelves and suspends them from the ceiling. Sometimes he reconfigures them as “art” collages made of temporary tattoos and Cubist-style constructions made of neatly sliced greeting cards.

Art is supposed to represent an escape from consumerism. Yet here, art is merely a fancy name for the same old stuff. If culture is suspect, what about nature? Mantello covers that base, too. Wrapped around the walls are mass-produced photomurals depicting a tropical beach, a mountain stream, a field of daisies. This is nature--but it’s rendered banal by culture. This is fantasy--but it’s circumscribed by cheap packaging and a pronounced lack of imagination.

It seems as if there is no escape. But so what? Like Jeff Koons, Mantello gives himself over to the myriad seductions of simulation, and, as with Koons, you will be seduced by the artist’s greedy energy and delight in excess. Take a deep breath. It won’t take long before the walls start to close in on you to the beat of “Boogie Wonderland” and the flashing lights of the mirrored disco ball. But don’t worry; it feels fine. Mantello makes claustrophobia contagious.

Larry Mantello, “Pleasure Treasure,” at Food House, 2220 Colorado Ave., Building 4, Room 402, Santa Monica, (310) 315-9633. Through April 24, closed Sunday and Monday.

Whispers of Rupture: If paintings were bodies, Adam Ross’ would be covered in bruises--impossibly beautiful agglomerations of purple, pink, yellow, red and blue, swirling, pulsing and then congealing beneath their unbroken skins.

Bruises are discolorations resulting from the rupture of small blood vessels and the escape of blood into the surrounding tissue. Ross’ paintings at Sue Spaid are hyper-colorations that whisper of rupture, dream of escape, but will--thankfully--never heal.

You complain: How sadistic an analogy! Yet Ross’ process inspires it. His surfaces appear utterly flat, untouched, pure. Yet they accrue from layers and layers of alkyd and oil, each sanded with vicious zeal, the pigments holding onto their wooden supports only in tiny specks, as capillary-like lines, mottled patches, concentric rings and faint shadows.

You complain: What hyperbolic language! Yet the images that result from this painstaking process swing from one extreme to another, conjuring spaces that are unimaginably large--supernovae exploding in space, universes unfolding in time; or so small they are almost unfathomable--mitosis, meiosis, cytoplasmic fission.

Less spectacular are the smaller works on iron--taken from real irons, no less. Though the shapes are suitably (if ironically) heraldic, the application of paint is unrefined, with pigment dripping over the edges and areas of demarcation less precisely noted. These works are casual; Ross’ best paintings are obsessive.

Adam Ross, “That Which Appears Is Good, That Which Is Good Appears,” at Sue Spaid, 7454 1/2 Beverly Blvd., (213) 435-6153. Through April 25. Closed Monday and Tuesday.