BOROFSKY AND GROOMS: TWICE THE CARNIVAL

The circus is in town. The circus is in town.

The foregoing lines were not repeated for emphasis. Two circuses are in town and they are both in the same tent. Traveling retrospective exhibitions of the work of Jonathan Borofsky and Red Grooms have come to roost at Temporary Contemporary, the popular interim quarters of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Little Tokyo. They will leap through hogsheads of real fire until May 18 and June 29, respectively.

Both were substantial and somewhat surprising crowd-pleasers in staid Philadelphia and other metropoli, great and small. Your humble scribe happened to see both in various burgs and was thus a little pleased and a little baffled to learn that they would play back to back at TC.

Heaven knows, this town needs an art arena with the good sense to package-in lively contemporary shows. We lose entirely too many to San Francisco, but does anybody need two circuses at once?

Borofsky and Grooms belong to different artistic generations, Grooms being a veteran of the New York Pop-and-Happenings epoch, Borofsky an undisputed innovator linked to both conceptualism and Neo-Expressionist styles. Yet both produce environment-gobbling, walk-in art that cheerfully subverts distinctions between painting, sculpture, drawing, animation, television, museum and boardwalk.

By now, the elements of Borofsky’s carnival have grown familiar, and the gang’s all here at TC--huge metal silhouettes of men with mechanized arms hammering away, chattering robots, a transvestite clown ballerina who sings “My Way,” an immense figure made of bubble-wrap heaving in exhaustion on all fours, plus a whole chaotic strew of graffiti and several tellingly new elements, of which more in a moment.

The sheer physical size of Borofsky’s work dictates that he take up the larger of TC’s two main spaces. The other is by no means niggardly, but Grooms’ chaotic, Falstaffian art seems suffocatingly constricted therein. Everything he does is as funky and overloaded as a bag lady with eight layers of suppurating garments and four shopping carts full of precious detritus. One encounters old friends from the Philadelphia production, including a woozy, walk-in subway car full of grubby papier-mache figures that look like Mardi Gras-hangover dreams.

There’s a wonderful staggering Woolworth Building where nobody can get through the revolving door, and a witty bicyclist that is like a Populist sendup of Italian futurism. Invariably the mirrors of memory play tricks in twice-seen exhibitions so that some things seem to be missing and others seem new. Here the Target Department Store tableau seems a revelation, with its patient, dopey shoppers and the overbearing lady behind the snack cart that oozes the smell of buttered popcorn and confetti doughnuts. That’s how to suffocate to death with sheer gluttonous ecstasy.

The really new piece is a satire on old Baroque movie palaces called “Tut’s Fever” that serves the practical function of a screening room for Grooms’ films, an occasionally maddening, always good-natured amalgam mixing his drawing with live action, and virtuoso animation with self-indulgent amateurism.

The theater was a bare suggestion in Philadelphia, but the work-up has done little for the idea other than suggesting that movie palaces don’t need any help in the satire department, so the piece just serves to further gum up the disorienting fun-house ambiance.

To some extent, the TC space seems to have confounded both exhibitions, which appear physically muddled. Well, that just goes to show that a material mess need not prevent aesthetic awakening.

The anonymous sage of Exhibition Wisdom has spoke thus: If you want to learn from art by comparative example, use like examples rather than unlike examples. Thus, having two circuses winds up clarifying the character of each.

Borofsky introduces changes in content and presentation that tack down his themes more firmly than ever before--and not necessarily to their benefit. Our introduction to this version is a large silhouette cutout of a briefcase-toting organization man with a long number printed thereon.

We know part of Borofsky’s M.O. is to number everything he does, but here the practice comes across as the tritest kind of sociological cliche about all of us being reduced to numbers in a computer.

Right. We knew that.

In other versions of the retrospective, Borofsky included a Ping-Pong table where people could play. There, the little moral lesson was that the sides were like the superpowers in the arms race. Well, Ping-Pong has been replaced by a real live basketball court that is not only enclosed by a chain-link fence but topped by very nasty barbed wire.

We are all prisoners of the Society. Right. We knew that.

The show is angrier. One of the hammering men appears to be attacking a half-destroyed gallery room. Upstairs, a big video screen broadcasts the most significant new element, a 58-minute putative documentary video titled “Prisoners.”

It represents months of work that Borofsky and collaborators put into visiting prisons and interviewing inmates about their backgrounds. Much of it is, almost predictably, touching and terrifying as it moves from a wide-eyed woman junkie who is grateful her imprisonment helped her kick drugs to an angry murderer who thinks he didn’t get justice. (“Dan White only got four years for murdering all those politicians. I got life.”)

There is a smooth talker who clearly has Borofsky’s number and is conning him shamelessly, a saintly chap who appears to have transcended his cell and a ding-a-ling who revenged a childhood homosexual rape by periodically hacking gay men to death. He speaks of it in cheerful gory detail.

Thus far, “Prisoners” is a potential contribution to both art and life, but Borofsky can’t let it be. He sentimentalizes and moralizes with cliche “statistics” crawling up the screen, telling us about the percentage of prisoners that were abused as children and the number of people who get away with white-collar crime.

Right. We knew that.

This edition of the Borofsky circus begins to ring his art with dangerous definition. It is the landscape of paranoia--arid, unresponsive, hostile. It reduces everything to a self-justifying cliche. Its exaggerations and literal-mindedness often make it as wildly funny as his spinning still lifes, but it is incarcerated within itself, brittle and alone. Question marks float around like big Borofsky stereotypes. How long it will sustain itself?

Oh-kaaay. But a circus is a circus, so all that must go for Red Grooms’ Flying Carnival too, right?

Happily wrong. Borofsky is austere, puritanical and introspective. Grooms is ebullient, florid and extroverted. One of the things you have to look twice to see about Grooms at TC is his virtuosity. He is so busy being a big energetic lovable slob that it takes a minute to realize that he draws with the brio of Rubens and sculpts with the inventiveness of Picasso. The way the guy moves from pictorial imagery to sculptural plane defies the laws of physics. Look at “The Minister of Transportation.”

But is he too nice?

Since when is that a fault?

In human terms, it’s not. Artistically, there is nothing wrong with celebration, but finally Grooms’ art doesn’t have any bones and is incapable of anger. When he sets out to do an Expressionist diatribe against, say, Lyndon Johnson, he winds up with a certain affection for the guy.

OK, which one is better, Grooms or Borofsky?

Gimme a break.

Both are artists of very considerable accomplishment. In some ways, they are versions of the traditional polarities of the pristine, scolding Classicist and the tolerant sensation-loving Romantic, both driven to desperate extremes by the ambiance of the modern city.

Grooms gives us the overripe, bruised metropolis before the fall and it’s like Manhattan or Chicago, smelly and awash in Rabelaisian ooze. Borofsky imagines the city after the fall and it’s like Los Angeles, massive and lost, relishing the Apocalypse on a deserted freeway.

But like people specialized into one-issue personalities by the surrounding confusion, both artists leave you with the feeling of sensibilities that stop somewhere about, oh, here .