Art Review : ‘Limbo’: Saar’s Signature on the Shadows of Reality : The L.A. artist shows that folk beliefs exist on a par with institutional religions and great philosophies.

Betye Saar is now in her late 60s. For nearly four decades she has occupied a unique niche in L.A. art using precious junk to talk about her life, which happens to be the life of an African American woman. Using stereotypes like Aunt Jemimah and Uncle Tom, she has told us that prejudice turns everyone into corroded caricatures. Them and us. Us and them.

She has never, however, been an ideologue. This does not signal lack of courage, but rather a more intuitive and poetic focus on the human condition. It has to do, I think, with a desire to show that folk beliefs like those in voodoo, divination and astrology ultimately exist on par with those of great institutional religions and philosophies. She builds a zinger into the proposition by showing these “superstitions” to possess greater pith in the evocation of life’s enigmatic magic. This has never been clearer than in her new installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Called “Limbo: A Transitional State or Place,” it is like a vivid variation on the most famous western philosophical metaphor, Plato’s Cave. In it the great man compared this world to a cave where we see only shadows of luminous reality.

Saar’s pieces read separately, but their cumulative effect is more telling. The show opens with a blue neon sign spelling “Limbo.” The view of the main room is veiled by a hanging cloth bearing silhouettes of three figures. In the semi-darkness beyond are tableaux. A canoe is suspended mid-room over a river of wooden sticks. (If this is a pun on Dante’s crossing of the river Styx, the artist is to be forgiven.) Two child’s chairs rest in the little boat, between them are a brace of burning white candles. The ensemble plainly introduces notions of a journey requiring innocence and faith. Saar’s attitude of slightly humorous detachment is more subtle and reassuring. This isn’t as scary as it looks, kids.

Deftly, the artist makes the stages of the journey easy to track. A tube of white gauze hanging in one corner contains another child’s chair, also white. A metal heart is attached to the back. More candles rest on the seat, but now they are electric imitations. A dais of white plastic flowers supports the whole. Here innocence is lost to the artificial purity of mystical marriage to religion. Has everything turned fake?

Not quite. The chair points in the direction of a diaphanous black gown. Suspended from the ceiling on a wire coat-hanger, it turns slowly above a pair of footprints painted on the floor. Provocative and sexy in suggestion it’s real in a way the white sepulcher is not. Lit from the same corner where the chair stands, it casts a singular shadow. This shade seems surprisingly more real than the gown itself. It represents, I think, the dawning of that carnal drive that is so strong it makes us willing to accept life’s fictions.

Consummation is embodied in the next way station. Saar casts it using the techniques of California Light and Space art to create a medieval memento mori. A bed of bare metal springs is suspended at an angle from the ceiling. From it dangle various voodoo amulets representing all the incantations addressed to romance to keep alive the hope it will function as a substitute for transcendence.

Once again, what we cannot see in the reality of these tawdry springs, we see in a shadow. Cast large on the wall, it reveals a pair of human skeletons on the bed. All available hopes of transcendence are now exhausted, illusion turns back to reality and both are but shadows.

Saar has invested Plato’s Cave with nuances of poignancy, but she tries to go further. The final tableau abandons shadow for substance. It’s all coppery autumn browns, a waterfall of dead leaves surrounds an iconic abstract sculpture. Hands lifted in supplication reach toward it hoping again for something. What? Wisdom? A private spirituality that is somehow also universal?

The walls go blank save a quote about tears from poet Michael Leiris and the timeless plea, “Remember my name!”

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica; through July 3. Closed Monday and Tuesday, (310) 399-0433.