Oversized Comments on Society, Success

Suppose Rip van Winkle had been an L.A. beat generation bohemian. Imagine him waking up in the current exhibitions at the little Santa Monica Museum of Art.

He wouldn’t be surprised at the gallery-filling installations employed by either Michael McCurry or Callum Morton. After all, Ed Kienholz invented that format in the early ‘60s. Rip would, I think, be nonplused if not downright disgusted at a world that, on present evidence, has transformed artists into a buncha yuppies.

McCurry, born in South Korea, is around 40, went to the California Institute of the Arts and, based on his exhibitions record, probably still counts as an emerging artist. His piece is titled “Golf.” That alone would make Rip spit tobacco. Rip shot pool, played the ponies and surfed--all sports edged with a certain honorable disreputability. The centerpiece of “Golf” is a documentary-style 23-minute film, “3 Artists Play 1 Hole of Golf.” It cuts back and forth between the trio on the green and shots in their studios, where they ruminate on what, if any, relationship they find between golfing and making art.

At first the consensus leans to a perception that golf is pure recreation, quite separate from the arduous, risky adventure of artistic creation. As the scenario develops, however, the artists find more and more commonality between the activities. In both, participants hope to outdo one another through a combination of control and luck exerci McCurry strews clues that this is all satire with surrounding pieces such as a strip of AstroTurf where golf balls spell out the pun “Fun Omenology”. He labels his film as the work of “Happy Nihilist Productions.” Nothing, however, is more telling than the casting of his artist actors, Sam Durant and brothers Kent and Kevin Young. They could be twins, and Durant might be another sibling. Big guys, they all have dark, short-cropped hair and fashionable stubble. They share a demeanor combining universal social acceptability with just enough macho to attract the girls without scaring them. In short, they don’t mind appearing generically identical to millions of young white dudes with a shot at the brass ring.

Morton, a Canadian-born artist in his mid-30s, is based in Melbourne, Australia. His piece, “International Style,” is a white rectilinear structure roughly 4-by-12 feet. Alluding to Minimalist sculpture, it nonetheless presents itself as a schematized Bauhaus architectural model.

Actually based on Mies van der Rohe’s 1950 Farnsworth House in Illinois, around here it evokes L.A.’s Case Study Houses. Morton clearly ruminates on a certain homogeneity in present culture.

Translucent glass prevents us seeing inside the model, but flashing lights in changing colors and a chatty-crowd soundtrack evoke a social occasion. Suddenly several shots ring out and cries of distress are heard.

Rip would probably disdain the whole thing as a flimsy, decadent one-liner about a flimsy, decadent neo-conformist culture. Notwithstanding, it’s just as easy to admire Morton’s piece as a deft use of minimal means to call forth sensations that are downright cinematic in their ambient fullness. Similarly, McCurry manages to economically impart the feel of an art world grown domesticated and pastoral.

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For Rip, the shortfall of this work would surely be its lack of passion. The adoption of the large-scale multimedia installation format was supposed to be art’s blockbuster answer to the Big Media. Only effective in isolated instances, in recent years it’s been co-opted by architecture.

Operatic angst, however, isn’t art’s only effective vector. The comedy of manners demonstrated here has it’s own sting and poignancy. What’s really interesting about this show is the way it resonates with a trend to intimate Rococo subtlety inside a big Baroque envelope. One is reminded of a rising trend to humanistic films like “Shakespeare in Love” and an artist like Charles Ray.

It may be that whatever is bothersome about the various arts of Morton and McCurry is a simple need to adjust its size down to the scale of its expressive intent.

BE THERE

Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, Building G-1, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, through Aug. 21, (310) 586-6488. Closed Sundays and Mondays.