Bold Exhibitions of Images at UCLA’s Hammer Museum

Two formally similar exhibitions at UCLA’s Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center complement one another nicely. Tania Mouraud’s black-and-white wall paintings in the building’s main stairwell and Kara Walker’s black-and-white paper cutouts in an unfinished back gallery use similar visual devices to cover such radically different ground that they seem to be a match made in heaven.

Both dispense with technical bravura as a meaningful gesture. Neither insists that art has to be handmade to be interesting. Both also address their mural-scale works to big social spaces, preferring bold public assertions to timid introspective musings. Even the colorblind are at no disadvantage in front of either installation, each of which eliminates chromatic variation as a way of conveying significance.

How the works differ is more complicated--and more interesting. Mouraud, a Conceptual artist born in Paris in 1942, begins by bowling over viewers. On two walls of the massive marble staircase, approximately 4-inch-wide stripes of shiny black enamel run from the floor to the ceiling. Between these glossy bars are visible similar widths of the mat-white walls, forming a repetitive pattern that invites your eyes to race up and down its sharply demarcated contours.

About two-thirds of the way up from the floor to the ceiling, irregularities occasionally interrupt the repetitive consistency of Mouraud’s vertical bands. Some black stripes stop. Others jog left or right, forming short, horizontal detours to join with stripes that had been parallel. Running along the floor and ceiling are similar inconsistencies--horizontal black bars linking various vertical ones in apparently random patterns.

Viewers with an eye for the logical systems on which decorative patterns are based will immediately try to determine the cycles or repetitions the artist has set up. As aggressive as her work is, it still recalls wallpaper, suggesting that some kind of pattern (or repeated unit) must be present.

Eventually, you realize that you’re looking at extremely elongated letters whose curves have been turned into right angles. The logic underlying Mouraud’s two-dimensional installation is not visual but linguistic. Her wall paintings make sense when you stop looking and start reading.

For the impatient--or those who get dizzy trying to determine where one letter ends and another begins--wall-labels printed with the same words (in easy-to-read dimensions) are provided. I won’t spoil the tiny bit of fun provided by Mouraud’s high-end reading lesson by spelling out its pair of messages here.

As works of art, her wall paintings assert that embodied experience is ultimately incoherent, a confounding disarray of sensations. Hidden within this chaos is language, a not-so-secret code that makes sense of the world’s incoherence.

This is a particularly shortsighted (and particularly French) notion of how language works. For a visual artist to insist that words form the bedrock of experience is to limit her work to a world of lifeless academicism, where texts hold the world at arm’s length so they might have the upper hand.

By contrast, Walker’s similarly bookish installation limits words to its title, a long-winded melodramatic statement that begins by emphasizing the inadequacy of language, “No mere words can adequately reflect the remorse this Negress feels . . . “ An African American artist born in Stockton, Calif., in 1969, she has installed a sequence of loosely related Victorian or antebellum silhouettes on a curved gray wall in a dimly lit storage room on the second floor.

Rather than assaulting viewers with overwhelming visual impact, her elliptical installation sneaks up on you. Its figures have a user-friendly, children’s picture-book quality that is immediately appealing. Only slowly do you realize that you’re looking at nearly life-size shadow puppets acting out a fever dream filled with too much horrifying violence and wild sex to be benign.

Sitting on a tree stump, a black man uses his teeth and remaining arm to tie a tourniquet around his leg while a woman takes his photograph. Nearby, a rifle-toting woman tosses a bone toward a fat man balanced on a cannon, while a supine woman licks her fingers and wraps her legs around an even larger piece of artillery.

Seven white swans with human heads stuck on their necks occupy the central third of the composition. On the left, a cherub falls from the sky, a sleepwalker prods a woman’s hooped skirt with a swan’s head and a boy drags a ratty dog on a leash. Whether you scan Walker’s bawdy cyclorama from left to right or right to left, it never lets you read it as a story with a beginning, middle and end.

It does, however, invite you to read things into it, filling in its lapses in logic and coherence with stories of your own. The biggest difference between Mouraud’s text-based art and Walker’s picture-based work is philosophical. The latter never presumes that a single linguistic code provides the key to meaning.

While experience may be chaotic, confusing and contradictory, Walker’s images insist that meaning is not limited to those provided by language. Always dependent on a viewer’s emotional involvement, art based in what we see (and not what we read) is always somewhat unpredictable.

* “Tania Mouraud: Wall Painting” and “Kara Walker: No mere words . . .,” UCLA Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000. Through Jan. 2. Closed Mondays.