ART REVIEW : A Focus on the Goods That Define Our Lives

As sheer spectacle, the sculptures of David Mach rarely disappoint. In the last decade, the Scottish-born Mach has fashioned a full-scale Rolls-Royce from thousands of books and rebuilt the Parthenon out of used car tires. Another of his trademark, maximalist gestures is to appear to send a motley assortment of consumer goods rushing through a room on a billowing, bulging wave of newspapers or magazines.

“Fully Furnished,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, is the most recent of such installations. Constructed during a January residency at the museum, the sculpture consists of roughly 15 tons of surplus local newspapers, meticulously layered into what appears to be a fluid current momentarily stilled in the corner of a large, bare gallery. Tossed about in this swollen sea of paper are a grand piano, television set, tanning bed, sofa, surfboard, a statue of a horse and a kitschy painting of a nude woman. The raging torrent spews out of a faux baroque fireplace cracking under the strain.

Lingering by Mach’s hearth does little to warm the heart. Gradually it becomes clear that this waste-stream doubles as society’s bloodstream. Excess in, excess out. From high culture (the piano) to low (the pin-up girl), late 20th-Century capitalist culture is a revolving door of material objects. Like Tony Cragg’s playfully poignant sculptures made from plastic trash, and Bill Woodrow’s metal objects de-junked, Mach focuses on the glut of goods that defines our lives. All three British artists temper despair over pollution, waste and greed with a sly sense of humor.

Mach differs in his use of objects that are not yet exhausted--they are still clean, they can still claim some commercial allure. That, ultimately, is what makes “Fully Furnished” so fascinating and perversely beautiful. It attracts and repels simultaneously. The flip-side of the grand is the grotesque, and Mach manages to compress both extremes--the dream and the nightmare--into one spectacular sight.

Without this push-pull dynamic, Mach’s other two sculptures are too easily reduced to sensational one-liners. In the wall-mounted “Untitled (Gargoyle)” of 1991, a two-headed, fiberglass hermaphrodite gargoyle perches atop a television set, ready to hurl an immense brass chandelier at the viewer. “Mama’s in the Pool” (1994) consists of about 1,000 clear glass bottles aligned in staggered rows. Certain bottles filled with dark liquid cumulatively read as the silhouette of a woman with arms and legs spread. Sexual vulnerability mingles with a vague violence in this haunting but unresolved work.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 1001 Kettner Blvd., downtown San Diego, through April 7. Information: (619) 234-1001.