Stepping Into ‘Performance Anxiety’

“We must arrange our Art, we must arrange everything, I believe, so that people realize that they themselves are doing it, and not that something is being done to them.” So declares John Cage in the catalog for “Performance Anxiety,” an exhibition of installations by nine artists now at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Each work in this quirky show has viewers doing something--walking barefoot over a stone path, negotiating a room of revolving doors, putting on costumes, glimpsing themselves on video--that presumably puts them at the center of the experience, rather than just on the sidelines.

The level of required or encouraged activity varies, but participation in most of the installations boils down to the conventional acts of looking and listening. If viewers feel “performance anxiety” here, the feeling is most likely nagging disappointment that the art isn’t as engaging physically or psychologically as it purports to be.

Jim Shaw’s “Audio Tour,” for instance, consists simply of a cassette tape, which one can listen to in a seating area or while walking around the show, though the “tour” bears no relation to the surrounding art. The tape, like much of Shaw’s visual work, relates a mildly amusing interior journey, through a numbered account of dream fragments fusing humor, fantasy, projection and confession.

Rirkrit Tiravanija has re-created a plexiglass-walled recording studio in the museum available free to musicians by reservation. Without performers, however, the studio resembles nothing more than a stage set furnished with inert props.

All the works in the show--organized by Amada Cruz for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago--attempt to dissolve boundaries between art and audience, to make the experience of art less a spectator sport and more a joint performance. But at its best, hasn’t art always been a give-and-take, an engagement of both mind and senses, a confrontation between the private and the public, the viewer’s interior world and the artwork’s exterior context?

In attempting to call overt attention to the audience’s performative role, too many of the artists have assigned only gratuitous functions. Sitting on one of Angela Bulloch’s beanbag chairs triggers the release of a snippet of techno-pop music.

Walking through Julia Scher’s pseudo-security station affords a glimpse of your own image on the surveillance screen. And filling a paper cup at Charles Long’s goofy water cooler buys time listening to the pop beat of Stereolab. Yes, viewers do physically “complete” these works, but that doesn’t necessarily lend them significance.

Renee Green’s “Partially Buried” is the most intellectually complex work in the show, though the physical demands it places on the viewer are inconsequential.

In one gallery, Green has hung photographs of the student demonstrations at Kent State University in 1970 and of her own recent revisit to the campus and a Robert Smithson artwork created there before the demonstrations. She has furnished an adjacent room with tables, chairs, rugs, macrame wall hangings, a turntable and record albums, all dating from the early ‘70s.

Viewers resting on floor pillows can watch three simultaneous videos, mixing personal memoir, aesthetic inquiry and historical reflection. Though it’s arduous to follow any particular narrative line for long, what emerges is a collage that exemplifies Green’s view of historical truth as polyphonic, contested and, by definition, always “partially buried.”

Paul McCarthy is at his scatological best/worst in “Santa’s Theater,” instructing viewers to don reindeer, elf and Santa costumes before watching, on video, like-costumed characters performing perverse sexual antics. Wearing the same costumes as the performers forces an association with them, which is quickly dismaying, incriminating and, ultimately, intolerable.

Installations by Cai Guo Qiang and Willie Cole are the most satisfying when it comes to integrating mind and body, principle and action, concept and reality.

Cai invites visitors to walk barefoot along a path of stones of diminishing size. The pressure of the stones stimulates different areas of the foot, which correspond to the body’s vital organs, according to the principle of reflexology, which Cai diagrams in beautiful ink and gunpowder paintings hanging alongside the path.

Cole, in a work named after the Yoruba god of choices, Elegba, has viewers navigate a labyrinthine corridor of old revolving doors, each painted with a word or phrase, like Anonymity, Terrorize, Bioengineering, Eat Junk Food, Death and San Francisco.

Pushing one’s way through the space becomes analogous to working through the decisions, mundane or profound, that constitute a life. Though a bit heavy-handed, it’s an empowering reminder of Cage’s words--that in art as in life, we’re doing it, not having it done to us.

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* “Performance Anxiety” continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla. through Nov. 30. (619) 454-3541.