The stars shine bright, but vacant

Art isn’t rocket science.

But it’s more complicated than it’s made out to be by Lita Albuquerque’s new installation at Pepperdine University’s Weisman Museum of Art.

Titled “AOR,” after an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic meaning magic light or electricity, the veteran L.A. artist’s multi-gallery, multimedia extravaganza is at once too arbitrary and too illustrative to achieve its admirable goals: reconnecting alienated urbanites with the sublime beauty of the heavens by demonstrating that everything is interconnected, that all is flux and that life is a magical mystery.

On a flat-screen TV in the foyer, a digital video Albuquerque made in collaboration with artist Jon Beasley introduces visitors to these themes. The looped, 4 minute and 33 second video, titled “Starkeeper,” begins with the camera focused on a dense bank of fog. Invisible winds blow the white mist away to reveal a figure in an astronaut suit standing still against a black background, face to face with viewers. The figure’s face is hidden behind a tinted mask in which tiny specks of light are reflected. A sudden cut shifts the point of view 180 degrees to reveal a night sky full of twinkling stars.

This simple trick is meant to bring viewers into the picture -- to suggest that we are no longer standing outside looking in but are behind the astronaut’s mask, looking out at the star-studded infinity of deep space.

It’s a lovely sentiment. But it’s also a sentimental cliche that has been overused. Too many Hollywood movies, inspirational posters and well-meaning greeting cards convey similar messages.

“Starkeeper” is too bland and flat-footed to distinguish itself from such run-of-the-mill triviality. Its pace is too hurried, as if the artists do not trust viewers to have the patience for slowly unfolding stories and so cram everything into a format not much longer than a music video. Aiming for the sublime, it comes off as trite.

In the dimly lighted main gallery, Albuquerque uses rudimentary materials to make the same point about viewers being in the middle of things. Forty-nine bowling-ball-size rocks rest on the gallery’s carpeted floor. Nearly one-third have been dusted with red, white or blue pigment, and one has been covered with a layer of gold leaf. Some are illuminated by bright spotlights. Chalk lines divide the floor into arched slices, suggesting that “Rock Field” is a flat map of three-dimensional reality.

The 24-by-55-foot rear wall, which has been covered with a light-absorbing coat of blackboard paint, is an approximate mirror-image of the floor. Red, white and blue as well as gold disks have been painted in positions that correspond to the rocks on the floor. Smaller, less color-saturated disks occupy the spaces between them. Many of the disks are labeled with astrological symbols. The catalog identifies the configuration as the celestial bodies visible from the South Pole.

To look at “Star Map” is to feel as if you have come face to face with a larger-than-life-size diagram copied from a scientific textbook. But the rocks around your feet recall the instructive installations in children’s museums, or the pedagogical exercises scout troops undertake on camping trips to study the night sky. You feel stuck between two overblown illustrations.

Albuquerque gives art short shrift, using it to merely illustrate ideas rather than to physically embody experiences. It’s a tedious form of Conceptualism, in which an artist’s intentions are meant to be sufficient. The ideas she outlines -- that we are all part of the cosmos, on personal journeys through infinity -- are too generic to be moving or even argued with.

Albuquerque’s unpoetic, quasi-scientific work pays insufficient attention to aesthetics. The layout may be accurate, but it resembles amateur landscape design and seems dopey in an art museum, where questions of composition are usually addressed more seriously and engaged in more challenging, formally inventive ways.

The abstract paintings in an adjoining, even darker gallery fare better, largely because they are less diagrammatic. All of the walls have been painted black. So have the five vertical wood panels and 22 square canvases. Albuquerque has sprinkled powdery pigment across their surfaces, arranging diaphanous blue bands on the vertical works and nebulous clusters of red on the square ones. A light-handed breeziness animates these works, which invite pleasant reveries and are as pretty as any picture of deep space.

Upstairs, a pair of projected digital videos returns visitors to the plodding literalism of the first video. “Beekeeper,” made by Albuquerque, Beasley and Chandler McWilliams replaces the astronaut of “Starkeeper” with two figures dressed in full protective suits.

Each of these still images quickly disintegrates into a buzzing swarm of pixels, which disperse across black backgrounds so that they resemble a slow-motion rendition of the Big Bang. After a few minutes, the flecks of light reverse course, eventually reconfiguring themselves into the images of the beekeepers.

The technology used to produce this computer-generated animation is more sophisticated than anything else in “AOR,” but the point is the same: All is flux, everything is interconnected, nothing lasts and life is a fragile balance.

Permanence may be an illusion, but that’s no excuse for making forgettable art.

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‘AOR’

Where: Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Tuesdays through Sundays, closed Mondays

Ends: March 26

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 506-4851; www.pepperdine.edu/arts/museum