Competing for attention

Channel surfing may not be the national pastime, but it’s a popular way for folks to end their day, flicking through hundreds of channels to glimpse bits and pieces of programs they’d never watch in their entirety.

“Dark Places” is the high-brow version of channel surfing. The academically ambitious yet visually unsatisfying exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art features a big sculpture that resembles the mutant offspring of the building’s ventilation ducts and the serpentine water creature from “The Abyss.”

The sculpture, designed by servo, an architectural design firm with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Stockholm and Zurich, consists of four tentacles and two dollop-shaped pods. Aglow with fiber-optic lighting, the 6-foot-tall pods stand in the center of the darkened main gallery and house four touch-screen monitors on which background information can be accessed. The tentacles are suspended from the rafters by thin, nearly invisible wires so that they crisscross the cavernous space at eye level or higher. It’s a painfully literal rendition of the information superhighway’s on- and off-ramps.

The tentacles end in eight mouth-like openings, each housing a digital projector programmed to display a looped sequence of images -- large, on specially built walls, or small, on screens affixed to the tentacles.

Guest curator Joshua Decter has arranged the eight sequences by collecting digital files from 76 artists and teams of artists, architects and designers. The still and moving images, some with soundtracks and others silent, run from 35 minutes to 4 hours and 38 minutes.

Some contributions last for only a few seconds. They generally feature digital reproductions of an artist’s photographs (Catherine Opie, Charlie White, John Miller), drawings (Raymond Pettibon, Sam Durant), prints (Franz Ackermann, Aura Rosenberg) or paintings (Alexis Rockman, Richard Prince).

A dozen or so images from Opie’s hauntingly gorgeous “Freeway Series” follow one another as they would in an artist’s slide lecture, minus the audio. But digitally projected reproductions of photographs are not the same as actual photographs, especially in the case of Opie’s exquisitely crafted platinum prints, whose intimate scale, elegiac tone and sensual texture are essential to their bittersweet evocation of the long-gone golden age of Southern California highways. The physical effect of original art experienced in the flesh is replaced with its disembodied, virtual surrogate: electronic information.

Other contributions last longer, generally from three to 20 minutes. These include excerpts from artists’ videos and films (Judith Barry, Monica Bonvicini, Mark Bradford, Anna Gaskell, Douglas Gordon and Yoshua Okon); clips from violent Hollywood movies (“Seven,” “Silence of the Lambs,” “The Godfather,” “City of God,” “War of the Worlds”); snippets documenting previous works (Diller + Scofidio, Gregor Schneider); and proposals for future projects (Acconci Studio, Mans Wrange).

Although these pieces are more suited to the medium than the digitally translated paintings, drawings and photographs, nearly all are diminished by the installation. Considerable effort is required to focus on any segment of any program, partly because the soundtracks from others intrude and partly because of the two-sizes-fit-all format into which Decter and servo have shoehorned everything.

In “Dark Places,” individual works are swallowed up by over-produced busyness and cacophony. Experientially, a visit to the installation has more in common with watching a movie on an airplane than viewing it in the comfort of home, much less the luxury of a first-rate theater.

Still, two segments stand out. Judi Werthein has juxtaposed a series of television commercials for well-known products with quotations from philosophers to create funny sendups of advertising’s attractions and pitfalls. Wrange has collaborated with Spetz-Holst Architects to design “Compromise House,” a wickedly hilarious fusion of a single-family home and a modernist apartment, complete with “The Half-Size-In-Between Floor,” a space-saving feature also known as the John Malkovich floor. In both, it’s hard to know what to take seriously. Cheeky humor, flashy production values and pop graphics intensify each work’s marriage of sensible agendas and dystopian nightmares.

Unfortunately, the exhibition lacks the same intensity, focus and decisiveness.

If you spend 30 minutes in the darkness, you discover that segments appear in different places at different times. In one, Andres Serrano’s color photographs of corpses follow a six-minute video by Stephen Dean and precede a still by Matthew Barney. In another, Serrano follows Barney and precedes Sam Samore. Barry’s four-channel video depicting animated words, titled “the hunt for language before it is born on the tip of the tongue,” ends four programs, following pieces by Candice Breitz, Allan Sekula, Pettibon and Miller.

If you spend more than a couple of hours drifting from one projection to the next, you discover that the sequences Decter set up lack the discipline of artistic compositions and instead mimic the happenstance of channel-surfing with reruns, programs that don’t interest you and, every now and then, a likable surprise.

On the whole, “Dark Places” aims to engineer a type of distracted reverie, a go-with-the-flow vacuity that fits hand in glove with diminished attention spans. Replacing tangible works of art with their digitally transmitted simulacra, the exhibition is a managerial fantasy of 1960s Conceptual art.

Back then, the dematerialization of the art object was supposed to usher in a brave new world of free-thinking, impossible-to-own interactivity. In “Dark Places,” the dematerialization of art results in academically administered entertainment accompanied by elaborate theatrics, serious institutional support and an ominous disregard for firsthand experiences of individual objects.

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‘Dark Places’

Where: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bergamot Station, Santa Monica

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays

Ends: April 22

Price: $3

Contact: (310) 586-6488; www.smmoa.org