This Show Is Not Just Kids’ Stuff

Compared with the giddy cacophony of laughter, shrieking, yelling, banging

and pounding that issues from “Seeing,” an exhibition on view in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Boone Children’s Gallery, the more refined language of art appreciation seems strangely inadequate. Given the context of this review, of course, it will have to do, but the limitations should be acknowledged from the outset: Nothing I could say using proper spelling and grammar, for example, would come closer to capturing the spirit of the show than this poetic excerpt from its viewer comment board: “‘Seeing’ is wonderfull and bueatiful and it is like the light on in the sun.”

Organized by LACMALab--the museum’s innovative education and development think tank, which also produced last year’s “Made in California: NOW”--”Seeing” consists of nine smart new installations by established L.A.-based artists, none of whom are regularly associated with children’s art. In commissioning the works, LACMALab imposed three broad but challenging guidelines: that the work explore the concept of “seeing,” that it incorporate at least one object from LACMA’s permanent collection and that it appeal equally to children and adults.

The remarkable thing about the show is that the last of these guidelines holds true throughout: As enjoyable as it seems to be for children, “Seeing” maintains a degree of quality and complexity easily comparable to any exhibition conceived for the museum’s “adult” galleries. Credit for this accomplishment goes to LACMALab, for coming up with a theme that is basic but also essential and important, and to the artists for addressing that theme as artists rather than as pseudo-educators, opening up concepts rather than simplifying or diluting them. This isn’t art made for children so much as art made to be accessible, which ultimately benefits everyone involved and should, in fact, be attempted more often outside an educational context.

The works explore the process of seeing in a number of different ways. Some artists took a playground-like approach, encouraging viewers to become aware of their own physical relationship with art. Eric Owen Moss, inspired by a collection of Persian seals from the 3rd century BC, created an enormous and architecturally impressive tunnel of honeycomb-like cardboard. Jennifer Nelson installed a video image of a 19th century Japanese woodblock print at the end of a long conveyer belt that pulls the viewer away from the screen while a video camera digitally superimposes him or her into it, over the print’s waterfall.

Delia Brown and Nicole Cohen’s delightfully titled “Let Them Have Cake and Let Them Eat It Too” (2001)--a wonderfully pink and girlish installation that emits a soft trickle of harpsichord music--uses similar technology to bring viewers (with dainty fans provided by the artist) into the video image of a Rococo parlor.

Other works encourage the viewer to think of the art object as a mobile entity to be drawn into one’s world like a toy and recontextualized as appropriate. In “Hidden Eye” (2001), for example, Michael McMillen translates a multicultural assortment of objects into large photographs, which he has installed in the garden outside the museum and projects back into the galleries through a camera obscura.

Daniel Martinez takes a similar approach in “We Saved Paradise by Introducing the Serpentine or (This Is Not a Museum)” (2001), installing a silver serving spoon, a cut-glass punch bowl and a decorative plate in small cells beneath the floor of the gallery. Viewed through glass portholes, these antique objects take on an air of illegitimacy that raises oblique but potent questions about class, race and the nature of the museum as an institution.

Another approach to the show’s theme involves drawing the viewer into the process of creativity itself, blurring the line between the act of seeing and the act of creating. Willie Robert Middlebrook’s rather unsubtle photocollage installation raises issues of race and identity and offers a mirrored table on which viewers are encouraged to trace their own images. John Baldessari’s “Instill Life” (2001) allows viewers to rearrange the elements of a digitized 17th century still-life painting to create their own compositions, which they can print or e-mail from the museum.

Kenny Scharf’s “Closet #19” (2001)--made up of two small, fabulously florescent rooms: one decorated by the artist, the other by viewers (a worktable and materials are provided)--brings the viewer directly into the artist’s mind and reveals, perhaps inadvertently, a curious gap between Scharf’s arty, nostalgic presumptions of childhood and the creative output of childhood itself.

The show’s most lucid exploration of the actual phenomenon of seeing is Judy Fiskin’s eloquent “What We Think About When We Think About ... Ships” (2001): a small, blue room that is dominated at one end by a 19th century painting of a ship and pierced throughout with peepholes that reveal a video loop of gently humorous improvisations on the maritime theme.

The first item of the “LACMALab Manifesto” reads: “To paraphrase the poet William Butler Yeats, education is not filling the pail; it is lighting the fire.” It’s a fine philosophy to hold in esteem, but in its second successful exhibition, LACMALab is making good on it as well.

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Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Boone Children’s Gallery, LACMA West, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-6000, through Sept. 2. Closed Wednesdays.