Delayed Gratification

Just . . . chill.

That’s the best advice for visitors to “Beyond the Physical,” a five-artist show at Cal State Fullerton’s Main Art Gallery. You need plenty of time to hang out with the work. This stuff is all about sustained looking.

The centerpiece is Carl Cheng’s “Friendship Acrobatic Troupe,” a humorously apropos title for a big tank of water in which a hydraulic system sends squadrons of ring-shaped bubbles rising to the top.

As you watch, the rings stack themselves in increasingly elaborate formations, resembling the stunts of acrobatic virtuosos. Yet sometimes they simply float upward in a single row, liable at any moment to break apart into tiny, pellet-like bubbles that wiggle flashily.

The bubbles are mesmerizing in a dreamy way, but they also invoke a weird form of competition. In acrobatic and trapeze acts, spectators may at any moment witness missteps that could be fatal. The bubble rings seem to vie with one another to make it to the top intact, but, unlike in a big-top show, most of their ranks don’t survive.

Water is one of Cheng’s preferred mediums. About a decade ago, the Santa Monica-based artist made a piece called “Alternative TV,” which consisted of an aquarium with a goldfish swimming in a Zen garden. Simple, yes, but quietly inspired.

Light is Thomas Emde’s tool. The German artist’s quartet of “Horizontalportraits” barely exists without the successive actions of darkness, daylight, fluorescent and black light. Four different-colored panels hang in a room. What viewers perceive depends on which part of the seven-minute cycle they’ve stumbled upon. (Seven minutes is a helluva long time to keep watching and waiting, though, and the rewards don’t really seem worth the patience expended; an alternative tactic is to pop in from time to time to see what has changed.)

During the cycle, the “portrait” (the top of a head wearing goggles? a cartoon monster?) remains shadowy at best, but the colors of the panels keep mutating. It’s the inverse of cartoon imagery, because the image remains the same while the atmosphere changes. The experience remains on a purely sensory level; it’s a light show for the technologically sophisticated ‘90s.

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Ross Rudel uses light (and sound) in a very different way in his elusive untitled piece, hidden behind a modest sliding door. Inside, Rudel has installed projecting box fans high on the center of each the walls and hung a bare lightbulb from the center of the ceiling.

This is a radical departure from the Los Angeles artist’s earlier sculptural work: beautifully crafted forms that subtly refer to parts of the body.

Here, there’s nothing to see but the spare geometry of the fans and the contrast between the soft shadows of the corners and the harsh glow of the gently swaying light. There’s nothing to hear but the two-level sound (a low drone and a lighter whir) of the fans.

A white-noise meditative zone? No, the awful symmetry of this piece makes it more of a holding tank, an interrogation room where viewers are obliged to answer and ask the questions all by themselves.

Marilla Palmer, a New York artist who works with painted layers of moire silk and other materials that don’t stay in focus and seem to change color, takes a deliberately disjunctive approach to perceptual awareness.

Some of her color harmonies are indeed seductive: the silvery gray, the soft green that soaks into the silk like a fragment of a Helen Frankenthaler painting.

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But Palmer’s passages of clumsy sewing--a handicraft element recalling the ‘70s wave of feminist-inspired art--maximize the gap between reality and illusion. In “Equilibrium,” crude stitches form intersecting box shapes reminiscent of an eye-focusing test. In “Hills and Valleys,” rows of green stitches mark competing “landscape” contours.

The coy, little-girl aesthetic of “Embellished Memories,” with its tiny star- and flower-shaped beads, looks out of place in this company. Still, as a whole, Palmer’s work suggests that aesthetic perception is a constant tug of war between the seduction of art and the viewer’s awareness of the tools the artist uses.

Ginny Bishton, an Angeleno and the youngest artist in the show, has received a lot of attention recently for her dual obsessive activities: drawing and making photo-collages.

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The untitled drawings on view are of wormy lengths of densely superimposed color, dispersed on the paper in blocky parallel clumps or as errant strands, as if controlled by a giant magnet. Closely scrutinized, these furry crawlers appear to have their own dynamic of mass and force--because we are so conditioned to viewing abstract images organically.

The collage is a more puzzling affair. Rows of photographs, each showing a crumpled piece of patterned clothing tossed on the floor, form a towering column on the wall.

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Bishton’s work in this vein has been lauded for referring to various art strategies of the past few decades: working in series; stressing the activity of making art rather than the finished product; “women’s work” elevated to a fine art realm.

The viewer’s tendency is to try to find a pattern in the patterns--duplications that would make a bunch of ordinary snapshots more compelling. But the distance imposed by the photographic process and the unidentifiable nature of the garments (even the patterns are hard to read) discourage involvement. The impact is more chilly than chilled.

* “Beyond the Physical” continues through May 13 at the Main Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd. Monday-Thursday, noon-4 p.m.; Sunday, 2-5 p.m. $3. (714) 278-2037 or (714) 278-3262.