Capturing the Social Animal

When you’re in a public place and someone does something bizarre or dangerous, it’s almost impossible not to turn to the closest person and put on a little eye-rolling show of shock or disapproval.

Alone, you might just continue on your way. But so long as there’s one other onlooker--even someone to whom you’d normally never give the time of day--you rely on them to verify your sanity and good judgment.

“Play Mode,” at the Art Gallery at UC Irvine, is an intriguing, if uneven, show curated by Anne Walsh, an artist and UCI lecturer, that aims to look at the ways we define ourselves through our “performances.” Works by seven artists are literally performances or supposedly related to the way we conduct our social and emotional lives as if directing our own scripts.

While some of these pieces are both compelling and relevant to the theme, others seem out of place in this show, unconvincing or (in one case) appallingly self-indulgent.

Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-born artist known for ritualistic performances and sculptures incorporating the imprint of her own body, is represented by an unusually playful series of photographs of a 1972 performance in Iowa, at the very beginning of her career.

She is shown distorting her face and parts of her trim naked body by squashing flesh under a sheet of glass. (The transparency of the glass plays on the notion of full disclosure, as if to say, “You get to see the real me only as I present it to you.”) In other images, her stiff, lathered hair is looped over her face to make an ersatz beard and mustache, or fashioned into goofy eyeglasses.

Beneath the insouciance of these gestures lies a sense of isolation and estrangement. Perhaps fueled as much by her fish-out-of-water years in the American Midwest as by contemporary feminist concerns, Mendieta’s performance is as much about disguise as it is about self-scrutiny.

Stan Douglas’ “Monodramas” are brief videos (with amusingly detailed accompanying scripts) presenting incidents that seem to be a cross between real-life events and moments from TV dramas.

The Canadian artist’s editing and use of atmospheric music lend a portentous air of menace to such banal scenes as a near-accident on the road, a glimpse of a stranger through an apartment window and an unexpected--but uneventful--encounter outside a warehouse. These vignettes underline the weird way we’ve learned to see our everyday actions in relation to the hundreds of plots we’ve absorbed from the big and small screen.

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Tiny, unlabeled paintings of a man in a gray suit from Belgian artist Francis Alys’ “Deja Vu” series are the most perfectly conceived pieces in the show. One of these figures walks in the woods with a bear puppet on one hand; another, seen only from the waist down, half-conceals an orange in his palm. He turns up again near an ornate park bench that another gray-suited man has just vacated, and yet again, striding down a street.

Viewers come across these images in a random way (they’re dispersed throughout the gallery), as if mimicking a real-life encounter with a stranger who keeps turning up wherever you go. Having first seen him with the puppet, you subsequently find yourself riveted by his most banal gesture simply because it might give you a clue to his motives and identity. The last image shows him with the puppet again, and you’re none the wiser.

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Bia Gayotto, a Brazilian artist living in Los Angeles, asked four artists to arrange four chairs in an empty room and photograph them. It’s almost impossible not to read these groupings in human terms. Interlocked, the chairs seem to be fighting; pushed together in pairs, they could be chatting. Upended in a row against the wall, they might be saucily baring their rear-ends. This is amusing work, but its relationship to the show’s theme is tenuous.

Amateur musical performances of the “Hey, mind if I play your piano?” variety are conceivably a form of “Play Mode.” Los Angeles artist Evan Holloway installed a player piano in the pitch dark interior of his curtained-off “Black Cabinet.” You’re supposed to sit there, pumping the pedals to activate Holloway’s dissonant score. But the music isn’t your own, and you are always aware of the public space of the gallery just beyond your claustrophobic private space.

Joseph Grigely, a deaf man living in New Jersey whose art derives from the notes people write to him, is poorly served in this show. Terse, sometimes obscenity-laced messages don’t give much insight into the idiosyncratic scripts that result from “conversing” with a pencil, and Grigely’s own store of anecdotes is embarrassingly banal.

The very idea of an artist making an 11 1/2-hour video solely of descriptions of herself by her friends smacks of overweening self-absorption. After all, it’s hardly news that no two people are likely to have the same impression of someone they know. After watching a few rambling minutes of this Bay Area artist’s epic, “Do You Love Me?,” one wants to respond, “only if you learn how to edit!”

* “Play Mode,” through Saturday at The Art Gallery, School of the Arts, UC Irvine (off Bridge Road). Hours: Noon-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Free. (949) 824-6610.