After a bold takeover, a weak message is sent

Eric Wesley is sometimes described as an artist whose sculpture undertakes an institutional critique. But for someone who once went to the trouble of building a swell mechanical donkey to kick holes in gallery walls, that description has always seemed too polite. Institutional demolition is more like it.

So it is with his new site-specific work in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Focus series. Wesley does not tiptoe into MOCA’s upstairs gallery at the Pacific Design Center and execute a few minor gestures of analysis. Instead he arrives like an occupying force. It’s clean-slate time.

That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that once occupied, the gallery seems less baleful than inert, more deadened than deadly.

Wesley has built a platform, raised thigh-high off the gallery floor, and painted its surface a shiny enamel-gray. The platform spans the narrow width of the room, roughly the dimensions of the skylight above, blocking a visitor’s access to the other side. The work’s title -- “Thirty three point three three three (Dimensions vary)” -- presumably identifies the platform’s size in feet. The stage usurps the museum’s exhibition space, which the artist now controls. Wesley literally takes the floor.

Across the platform a square column rises to a soffit-like air duct, attached to the gallery wall. Look beneath the raised platform and you’ll see the column doesn’t go through to the floor below. It’s an arbitrary sculpture, not a structural object, and Wesley’s platform is the sculpture’s pedestal. By extension, the architectural package called an art museum is underlined as a place of fiction posing as fact, somewhere between capricious and dictatorial.

Opposite the column a double-paned window, the glass smudged with fingerprints, stands far above eye-level on a pair of legs. You can’t see through the picture window, but a rubber hose dangling from its frame lets the air out (or in). A ceiling spotlight is trained on the unreachable viewing apparatus, but the illuminating bulb is burned out.

Across the way, a large turntable is cut into the platform’s floor. (The work’s title also suggests 33 1/3 rpm, as in the phonograph speed.) A video monitor, installed on the inaccessible side of the room so that the far-off image is barely visible, shows two men on the platform. They alternately spin on the turntable and seem to wrestle with each other for position -- part play, part struggle -- going round and round, going nowhere fast.

A wall rack by the stairs is normally meant to hold the kind of explanatory texts that curators and educators write for museum visitors; now, however, it holds a rolled up owner’s manual for a motor scooter. The presence of a manual for a missing vehicle becomes an unspoken declaration, along the lines of: “Confused? Get a real life.”

Wesley’s installation is knowing and occasionally provocative. But with every T crossed and every I dotted, a kind of laborious quality pervades the room. It feels formulaic and pat -- almost too smart for its own good, with nothing left to chance.

Descending the staircase to leave the gallery, you finally get to see the video more clearly than you did from across the platform-blocked room above. Yet here the railing in front of the monitor acts as a set of iron bars. Whether they suggest a prison or a security fence is up to you; but I’m not so sure those choices encompass the full range of options an art museum might enclose.

MOCA at the PDC, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (213) 626-6222, through June 25. Closed Mondays. www.moca.org.

One artist enough for this ‘group’

The bracing “Group Show” at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects includes work only by Sean Duffy, but it’s not a heterogeneous assembly of paintings and sculptures done in a variety of styles by one person. Other artists took that unexpected route in the 1980s to confound restrictive notions of individual identity shackled to style.

Duffy is up to something else -- something quietly disorienting and strangely compelling. His work crosses our waning culture of industrial production with our waxing era of digitized virtual reality. At the intersection, art of a distinctive sort arises.

The show’s centerpiece is “Third Motorcycle,” a Yamaha painted in oils.

That is, it’s an actual motorcycle whose every surface, right down to the tires and the torn seat with foam stuffing coming out, is covered in oil paint that exactly mimics the beat-up bike underneath. The sculpture is an object that is a canvas for a painted illusion of the object -- three motorcycles in one, all of them slipping into an untouchable image-world.

“First Helmet,” a similarly painted crash helmet lying on the floor nearby, seems unlikely to protect us from the conceptual head-injury that our transitional era is inducing. Its off-white, egg-shaped form alludes to an emerging new life. It also knowingly recalls a Brancusi “Sleeping Muse,” while dispensing with the elegant, machine-tooled precision of that source.

Although three-dimensional, these works are almost holographic -- virtual realities you can stub your toe on. And Duffy also circles back on his own art of the last five years, which is itself art that circles back on itself. “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” is his latest fusion of three stereo turntables, a quirky form that has been a staple of his work.

Meant to play one record with three tone arms simultaneously, so that a song is heard at three places at once, the sculpture collapses time. (The music, woozy and dreamlike, also sounds surprisingly good.)

The twist in this newest version is that two of the fused stereos are commercially manufactured, while the third was fabricated from wood by the artist.

The manufactured ones exude an aura of iPod nostalgia, like quaint antiques, while the handmade one has the odd quality of a ghost in the machine.

Duffy is building on sculptural precedents set by such artists as Charles Ray and Jorge Pardo. That’s aiming high, which only adds to the pleasure of the adroit result.

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, to May 6. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.vielmetter.com

Japanese motifs in woodblock prints

The mystery of life being inseparable from the mystery of death, New York artist Duane Michals has been immersed in making pictures to ponder both unknowns for close to 50 years. His extraordinary success is partly a result of being unafraid of sheer silliness. (His recent photographic narratives of made-up “Adventures of Constantine Cavafy,” the Greek poet who worked as a clerk in Egypt’s Ministry of Public Works, include marvelous examples.) And partly it comes from unwavering curiosity.

A number of Cavafy works accompany a large selection of photographs made since the 1960s in Michals’ captivating survey show, “Past and Present,” at Fahey / Klein Gallery. The news, however, is a group of nine individual color photographs, each executed in a manner related to polychrome Ukiyo-e woodblock prints.

He’s approached such Japanese motifs before -- one witty photo-narrative in the show equates the sublime sight of snow-capped Mt. Fuji with a young man’s erection inside underpants as he fantasizes a beautiful woman -- but never in single color images until now.

The luxurious, sometimes bittersweet urban pleasures of “the floating world” chronicled in Ukiyo-e meld seamlessly with Michals’ sensibility, which finds freedom in the city, wonder in sexuality and expression in often Kabuki-like pantomime pictures.

As it often is in his art, an elegiac quality is also pervasive in these recent works: “Now That I Am Old” is an exquisite still-life of dried flowers, pinned butterflies and paintbrushes in a burnished silver cup, all infused with a golden light.

The most resonant of the Ukiyo-e photographs is “Masculine Beauty, Feminine Beauty,” which juxtaposes a seated man with a standing woman, both dressed in luxurious silk kimonos. He is the object of Michals’ photographic scrutiny, with light pouring in through an unseen apartment window to illuminate his skin, while she looks into a hand-held mirror so that her reflected gaze meets ours, scrutinizing the picture. Vanity, symbolized by the mirror, crystallizes the complex moment.

A Japanese print hangs slightly askew on the rear wall. Looking at its landscape, I could swear I saw Mt. Fuji.

Fahey / Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (323) 934-2250, through May 20. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.faheykleingallery.com

There’s power

amid the clutter

For his debut solo exhibition, Sacramento-based Conceptual artist Richard Haley has crammed too much work into a small space. The room at first seems filled with debris.

In a sense, though, the clutter at the gallery Another Year in L.A. is appropriate. For this spiritually minded (if uneven) work, the body is but a husk -- less germane in itself than in the imprint it leaves on the world.

The point is made through the prevalence of prints and printing devices -- inkjet for the former and an assortment of stamps, pads, props, rollers and mechanical attachments for the latter. These printing devices leave transient marks in the earth, from replicas of the artist’s knees to texts written in mustard, blood or plaster. Most are banal.

The compelling works are two animated videos, each composed from still photographs. Lines of text, one molded in marshmallow and one in polyurethane, describe the animated action. In one the artist repeatedly sits in a folding chair, attempting to emulate “Soul on Ice” author Eldridge Cleaver. In the other he blows an invisible stripe of air across a studio floor.

As animations, these two performances by the artist never actually took place. Whether a social revolution in political thought, like Cleaver’s, or the simple act of breathing, these works neatly locate authentic power in a metaphysical space.

Another Year in L.A., 2121 N. San Fernando Road, (323) 223-4000. Runs through next Friday. Closed Saturday. www.anotheryearinLA.com