A Fun-House ‘Mirror’

At the Museum of Contemporary Art’s big, messy fun-house of an exhibition, “Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945,” the movie projector is king.

You find that out right at the start. An entry wall bearing the show’s title is crowned by a huge, mechanically elegant Bauer projector, mounted atop an imposing steel platform. Lord and master of all it surveys, the impressive machine quietly whirs, its giant reels majestically unfurling yards of film.

That film, projected onto a big silver screen hung high overhead and far across a cavernous gallery in MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary, turns out to be Andy Warhol’s notorious “Empire.” Eight hours long, the 1964 movie is contradictorily composed of a single, stationary view of the Empire State Building--stolid, erect, essentially unchanging. An ephemeral image of power, it’s the phantom twin of the mighty projector across the room.

The dramatic installation provides a grand theatrical flourish, announcing what promises to be a hugely crowd-pleasing exhibition. But the show is chaotic and difficult to follow. It is stuffed with art about moving pictures as well as moving pictures themselves. Screens and video monitors are scattered throughout the galleries, and a 40-seat screening room occupies the symbolic center of the building.

The exhibition creates a layered history of cinematic culture in the past half-century. But once you sort it out, it is not convincing. Consider the installation of “Empire,” which frames the curatorial perspective on art and film you’re about to see. Warhol, more than any other artist of our time, both understood and was entranced by the ubiquitous, magical and thoroughly modern power of mass images. Yet the stunning installation of the big movie projector undercuts the artist, changing the meaning of his art.

A blunt parallel is being drawn here by MOCA curator Kerry Brougher, who began work on this complex and ambitious show around nine years ago. The majestic movie projector, with its commanding physical presence, is made equal to the flickering patterns of light that create the spectral image of the Empire State Building--a grand and unmoving symbol of modern urban authority--far across the room.

A ruling metaphor gets established: Exposing the apparatuses lurking behind the power of film is what this show means to do.

In fact hardware is everywhere at the TC. Projectors, speakers, tape decks, monitors, scaffolding, screens, even a whole projection room--all the stuff that’s hidden away when you go to the movies is here revealed.

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So the critical position “Hall of Mirrors” has adopted is deconstruction, based on European art theory familiar to academic studies since the 1970s. Warhol’s brash and image-savvy work gets demolished in the process--which I suppose is itself not a bad metaphor for the larger relationship between art and movies in the 20th century.

The apparatuses lurking behind cinematic power--industrial, social, economic, psychological, spiritual--are like those behind any art. Yet when I think of movies I think of Candice Bergen, not Victor Burgin, whose schoolmasterish, 1984 photo-panels dryly locate Freudian subtext as a hidden apparatus animating the script of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Isn’t it somehow telling that, unlike the Burgin, you want to look at “Vertigo” more than once?

Here’s my Postmodern Auteur Theory about this show: Obviously pitched in part toward the moneybags in Hollywood who have historically resisted being wooed by local art museums, it enshrines the movies with a European intellectual stature. After all, it’s not titled “Art and Movies Since 1945,” which would epitomize Warhol’s lively stance of being an all-American fan; it’s “Art and Film,” with its thoroughly institutionalized aura of the cinematheque.

With very few exceptions, virtually all the 60 filmmakers in the sprawling survey and it’s accompanying film series are first-rate. Barely a clunker will be found among the specific movies selected for the show.

By stark contrast its 36 artists take you on a bumpy ride. Sometimes awful, the paintings, photographs and installations tend to range from terrific to moderately interesting. The latter, not the former, is the norm.

This lopsided distribution--great movies, erratic art--says something about priorities and achievements.

So does the particular selection of art. It mostly tells a history of postwar culture in a world that happens to have movies in it--which is not the same as art about movies.

Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-80) launched the career of one of the 1980s most important artists. Cindy Bernard’s big landscape photographs are subliminally compelling--a mystery solved when you learn that they record sites of famous movie episodes, like the flat roadway where Cary Grant was buzzed by an airplane in “North by Northwest.”

Bruce Conner’s heartbreakingly spooky assemblages are paired with his “A Movie” (1958), composed from found bits of film that he assembled into an exciting cinematic collage. Wonderful works by Douglas Blau, Joseph Cornell, Sharon Lockhart, Carolee Schneeman, Weegee and others are on view.

Though appropriate for the show, none is really an artist for whom film has been pivotal, without which their entire body of work would be unimaginable. I can think of only three major postwar artists who fit that bill--interestingly, all of them Americans.

Warhol is one. Edward Ruscha, represented by recent knockout paintings, is another. The third is Alexis Smith, who is shockingly absent from the show.

How come? Not for lack of space. A half-dozen of Mimmo Rotella’s mind-numbing constructions of torn movie-posters from the early 1960s fill one room. Another houses four corny assemblages from the 1970s, in which Fabio Mauri projects movies onto objects, such as a bucket of milk and a spinning fan.

Maybe Smith would have had a shot if she were an obscure Italian. But her collages build on her American predecessors’ Pop art stance, becoming particularly daring because--like movies themselves--they pointedly insist that mundane entertainment can be a vehicle for art. Given the show’s frame of reference, which is suspicious of entertainment and questions its motives (if not its own), that radical idea is out of sync.

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In addition to a history of art about movies, and of art about a world that simply includes movies, “Hall of Mirrors” has two more stories to tell. One is a history of Hollywood and foreign movies self-conscious about the movie genre (Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” etc.). The other is of abstract and avant-garde films, like Tony Conrad’s “Flicker” and Ken Jacobs’ “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son,” made without commercial considerations and with artistic ones.

The show says serious interaction between film and art blossomed only after 1945 because movies had by then matured and gone through a Golden Age. Perhaps. But remember that movies were also being usurped by an even newer visual realm: television.

History shows that the arrival of any new medium casts a self-reflective glow around the one being supplanted, lending it the aura of art. In MOCA’s high-toned Hollywood expose the movie projector may be king, but the king is dead. Long live the king!

* Temporary Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., (213) 626-6222, through July 28. Closed Mondays. For information on UCLA’s concurrent film series, call (310) 206-3456.