Exhibitions’ Attempts at Fusion Falter

A pair of exhibitions at UC Irvine’s University Art Gallery and Beall Center for Art and Technology offers a lesson in the difference between complexity and sophistication. Installed in adjoining galleries, the separate shows demonstrate that just because something is complicated doesn’t mean it’s sophisticated.

To step into the first gallery is to feel as if you’ve stumbled into a brightly lit laboratory where a team of scientists has laid out the skin shed by a gigantic snake. Measuring more than 30 feet long and 10 feet tall, the semitranslucent sculpture by New York artist Fabian Marcaccio and Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn wraps around the room, forming a lumpy crescent whose asymmetrical tips nearly meet.

The tubular structure is made of hundreds of segments of vacuum-formed plastic that have been wired together like the plates of ancient armor. Aluminum tubes, like those found in lightweight tents, provide internal support.

Many of the sculpture’s irregularly shaped segments are ribbed. They resemble corrugated fiberglass sheets commonly used to build fences, awnings and sheds. Some have been subjected to intense heat and pulled into extremely distorted forms, like soda bottles awarded as prizes at county fairs. Others have been perforated by series of vertical cuts, allowing viewers to peer into the piece’s interior, which recalls the damaged fuselage of a small plane.

Like the mouth of a cave, a door-size hole lets you take a step or two inside the otherwise inaccessible work. Abstract images cover most of its interior surfaces, which have the presence of mass-produced stained-glass windows.

Both silk-screened and painted, the imagery draws on Marcaccio’s abstract paintings from the last 15 years. Loose grids, frayed fabrics and unraveling strands of rope, all reproduced photographically, share space with oversize brushstrokes and big puddles of color, some of which are hand-painted.

Saturated greens and blazing oranges unify the composition, evoking a hothouse rain forest. A few juicy globs of acrylic gel medium spill from the chinks in its synthetic skin, sometimes congealing into gestural flourishes and at other times degenerating into something like space-age primordial ooze.

Titled after a movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, “The Predator” has one foot firmly planted in the world of abstract painting and the other in that of contemporary architecture. Unfortunately, the fusion of these disciplines fizzles.

As a 3-D painting, “The Predator” is too visually inert to incite more than mild curiosity. Even its best passages look like watered-down renditions of Sam Francis’ paintings from the 1960s, Meyer Vaisman’s from the ‘80s and James Richards’ from the last three years.

As an architectural model, “The Predator” breaks no new ground. While its hodgepodge of references generates a seemingly endless inventory of vague similes, mixed metaphors and free associations, none is sufficiently developed to be more than an amusing distraction. Lacking the playful elegance of Frank Gehry, the primordial intensity of Frederick Kiesler and the loopy extravagance of Bruce Goff, Marcaccio and Lynn’s academic attempt to fuse painting and architecture results in a conventional (and spatially crude) sculpture.

In the second gallery, Grahame Weinbren’s installation of projected slides and video snippets likewise goes to great lengths to provide insights so slight that it’s hard to understand why he bothered. Commissioned by Tokyo’s NTT InterCommunications Center for its 1999 Biennial exhibition, “Frames” combines the worst aspects of a tedious art history slide lecture with the least satisfying attributes of channel surfing.

On one wall of the darkened gallery, the New York artist has projected three sets of images. The central sequence primarily consists of a series of slides reproduced from photographs of mental patients Hugh Diamond made in the 1840s and 1850s. The intimacy and specificity of the original prints are lost when projected at this movie-screen scale. Landscape images occasionally interrupt the fuzzy portraits, as does a videotaped close-up of a professor’s mouth reciting outdated diagnoses of various psychoses.

On each side, videos take viewers through empty halls and staircases. In front of each projection hangs an empty picture frame that functions like a remote-control channel changer. When you reach through either frame, the corresponding projection shifts to a different tape of an amateur actor posing like the anonymous patients. Interspersed among these dull scenes is the mouth of the professor, droning on.

Although Weinbren’s projected triptych presents a variety of permutations, the level at which viewers are invited to participate is so rudimentary that the game gets boring quickly. The mechanics of the setup are more interesting than the experiences it delivers.

In both exhibitions, complicated processes and convoluted messages fail to generate the type of productive confusion that leads to thoughtful contemplation. Undeveloped propositions and mere possibilities are poor substitutes for the clarity and resolution of art at its best.

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“The Predator,” University Art Gallery, through Nov. 18; “Frames,” Beall Center for Art and Technology, through Dec. 2; UC Irvine, 712 Arts Plaza, Irvine, (949) 824-6206. Closed Mondays.