ART REVIEW : ‘Dignity’ an Overambitious Installation

The title of Liz Young’s installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “The Dignity of Survival: Desire and Destiny,” provides a good indication of the nature of her project. Young is interested in grand and tragic themes.

Unfortunately, the work does not support the weight of her ambitions. It is bloated, overstuffed with both references and Angst.

Young is a skilled artisan, adept at everything from welding metals to weaving strands of human hair and fashioning shackles out of animal bones. The objects she has crafted include a garment of stitched rawhide with a conspicuously pregnant belly and a crocheted rubber phallus; a chair with leather arm straps, which resembles an antique torture device, and a coffin-like structure whose roof is made of thousands of hammered pennies.

Singly, these are both seductive and horrific things, the stuff of medieval morality plays and sadomasochistic ritual. Yet, as elements of an architectural environment placed inside a cage-like armature, which is itself located within a darkened room, the whole is over-narrated, over-determined and overwrought.

An audio-track featuring the sounds of labored breathing and beating hearts underscores the fact that Young leaves the viewer no breathing room whatsoever, no space for empathy, identification, pity or fear. All emotions are manufactured in advance, as if the artist can’t quite trust the viewer to heed the message on his or her own.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000 , through Jan. 30. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.