ART REVIEW : Destination Unclear for 2 MOCA Exhibits

Everybody remembers that trip where the journey was more rewarding than the destination or that party where getting ready was more fun than the fete. One suspects this was the case with two large installations currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Both feel like fascinating projects, whose residue is somehow incomplete, like stage sets with no performance.

“Hirokazu Kosaka: In the Mood” is literally an installation based on prop pieces from Kosaka’s performance work “Amerika Maru.” Kosaka, a noted practitioner of the genre, was born in Japan in 1948, immigrated here at age 10, attended L.A.’s legendary Chouinard Art Institute and later became an ordained Buddhist priest.

Central to this piece is a huge pile of musty pre-World War II luggage. It rests like a monumental sigh in a beautifully proportioned gallery. Most of the bags were given to the artist by Issei--first-generation Japanese immigrants--who came here, like so many others, with their dreams in shabby suitcases. Along one wall is a row of wooden boxes with shoulder straps and vintage sewing machines attached to their tops. Such humble and industrious machines were often the first gift Issei husbands presented their wives. We recognize the Singer brand but most have vanished--Franklin, Waite, Rotary, Davis. . . . They recall the myriad of disappeared things once thought to be enduring.

There’s a model of an ocean liner’s hull that bears yet another sewing machine. It rests in a case atop spools of gaily colored ribbon. It may symbolize first, the serpentine celebrating a liner hoisting anchor, and then the sweatshop labor that immigrants were obliged to perform at the end of the journey.

Kosaka’s work tends to the autobiographical. There are vague hints of this in the installation, the bittersweet pain of departure for a promised land, the famous Glenn Miller tune from which the piece derives its title, but what remains obdurately absent is some link that will put it all together.

Performance photographs and a poetic booklet accompanying the installation provide more clues. Actors wear the box-and-sewing-machine contraptions on their backs like parodies of Samurai arrow quivers. The men are dressed incongruously in kimonos and fedoras. In one image they stand in ranks before a huge Japanese flag. The stage is festooned with ribbon. A Spanish dancer performs in the foreground.

It’s an enticing enigma, but it does not jell. The Amerika Maru is a boat that sailed without us. But if the presentation--organized by MOCA curator Julie Lazar--remains artistically elusive, it does make an important point about a new epoch where we live in a world culture rather than a national one.

Alighiero e Boetti’s installation addresses the same theme. Boetti, who died this year at 54, was a key figure in the Italian branch of the Arte Povera and conceptual movements. His installation is titled “Alternating 1 to 100 and vice versa.” The accompanying book--in English, Italian and French--is called “De Bouche a Oreille,” which seems to be slightly fractured French for “From Mouth to Ear.”

It documents a Boetti project with origins stretching back to the ‘70s. The present version involved students from 30 French art schools, 20 friends of the artist and 50 kilim rugs made by a team of Afghan weavers living as refugees in Pakistan. If nothing else, the piece is a reflection of multicultural realism.

Operating in a manner similar to Sol Lewitt, Boetti had friends and students make squared patterns by filling in blocks of a black and white grid. These were then woven into kilim by the Afghan craftsmen according to the artists’ instructions. On view, the drawings are displayed in sumptuous red boxes. Viewers may handle them with white cotton gloves that are provided. Rugs are presented with ceremonial solemnity in 28 examples spread out in a particularly handsome and capacious gallery. All of this grand-gesture bunting has the unfortunate result of making everything look rather slight and causing viewers to wonder what all the fuss is about.

According to both book and appearance, the project has all manner of interesting resonances. An essay by Adelina von Furstenberg suggests the project parallels a lost tale about a man seeking knowledge. A wise man says he will give the hero understanding if he will bring him a kilim. When he does so after many adventures, the wise man says the hero is now ready to receive understanding because he was willing to sacrifice his own desires to a larger goal.

Equally timeless are the rugs themselves. Patterns bring to mind everything from ancient hieroglyphics to Navajo weavings. To present-day eyes, however, they resemble nothing so much as enlarged computer-pixel patterns, the language that makes world culture possible.

The installation was organized and produced by the Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble and coordinated here by MOCA’s Alma Ruiz. Both installations are part of MOCA’s “Focus Series.”

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Kosaka to Sept. 25, Boetti to Sept. 4, closed Mondays, (213) 626-6222.