French Artists Provide Cursory Peek at Getty Archives

The pleasures of Anne and Patrick Poirier’s temporary installation at the Getty Research Institute are cerebral and slight. Modest, tasteful and mildly amusing, the French artists’ collaborative project, which is part of the ongoing Co^te Ouest promotion of contemporary French art at various venues on the West Coast, combines a selection of photographs and artifacts from the institute’s archives with lengthy wall labels, a silent video and a stagy re-creation of a fictitious archeologist’s study.

The hushed tones of a serious library (augmented by signs warning you to keep quiet) greet visitors to the hilltop building. At the gated and guarded entrance, another sign conveys the message “Scholars only,” and a third directs visitors without credentials to the small antechamber of a gallery in which the Poiriers’ work is installed.

Here, “The Shadow of Gradiva: A Last Excavation Campaign in the Collections of the Getty Center by Anne and Patrick Poirier” offers an extremely abridged, unnecessarily reverential and surprisingly naive version of what lies beyond the gate, in the institute’s otherwise inaccessible archives.

Objects and images, both ancient and modern, are juxtaposed in no immediately discernible order. In the first gallery, more than 50 black-and-white documentary photographs depict ruin-filled landscapes, classical sculptures that have sustained various degrees of damage, war-torn cities, dead soldiers, veiled women, French mannequins and a Surrealist exhibition in which live plants grow out of an unmade bed.

Also displayed are five small objects: the cast foot of a woman, a bronze statuette of a mythological siren, a pair of embracing winged creatures, a ring with a tiny carving of Perseus holding Medusa’s head, and a group of miniature ruins set in a life-size plaster skull.

None of these mysterious artifacts is accompanied by an explanatory label that provides specific information about when it was made or what it depicts. Instead, the Poiriers use the bits and pieces of history they have borrowed from the Getty as generic touchstones--vaguely magical talismans out of which they weave their own bookish narrative.

To clue viewers into the numerous literary references that drive their project, the artists have printed long-winded texts on the walls of each section of the installation. Here is where we learn that their story begins with Wilhelm Jensen’s 1903 novel, “Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy,” in which an archeologist named Norbert Hanold falls in love with the image of a woman he sees in a sculptural relief in a Roman museum of antiquities.

The Poiriers’ narrative continues in 1907, when Sigmund Freud published an analysis of Hanold, treating the character as if he were a real patient while warning readers about the dangers of confusing delusions with reality. It goes on to reveal that a student of Freud, Dr. William G. Niederland, undertook a posthumous psychological examination of the father of archeology, Heinrich Schliemann, simultaneously paying homage to Freud and criticizing him for analyzing a fictitious character instead of a real person.

The meandering story doesn’t end so much as branch out in many directions. Eventually it includes an anecdote about a door Marcel Duchamp built for Andre Breton’s gallery and a strange book in which a man with the head of a baboon cradles a bare-bottomed woman as acolytes look on.

In typically French fashion, the installation lavishes far more attention on the written component than on the visual elements. Consequently, the material details of the artifacts become increasingly less interesting the more deeply you become lost in the wall texts.

Even less compelling are the Poiriers’ dryly illustrative video, “Delirium and Dreams,” projected on a wall of the first gallery, and a wall painting made up of terms taken from the wall texts and linked together in the pattern of a constellation. In the second gallery, an earnest rendition of Hanold’s office (modeled on Freud’s) is accompanied by an audiotape version of Jensen’s novel playing softly on hidden speakers.

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The difference between Sunday painters and painters who work all week is that the former are hobbyists who dabble in a medium, deriving considerable pleasures from it but never fully committing to its rigors. Likewise, Sunday scholars’ level of dedication and accomplishment is nowhere near that of professionals.

Yet Sunday scholars get a kind of respect never afforded Sunday painters. Frequently called Conceptual artists, Sunday scholars like the Poiriers are treated with the reverence usually reserved for intellectuals. At the Getty, this is the point at which a French fascination with texts overlaps with an American obsession with the appearance of intellectualism.

* Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, (310) 440-7335. Through Jan. 30. Closed Mondays. Parking, $5; reservations required.