ART : High-Tech Look at World’s End Lacks Earthy Originality

In the April 8 New York Times Book Review, an ad placed by the Turner Broadcasting System Inc. announced the “Turner Tomorrow Awards” for works of fiction about the immediate future, 1991 to 2021. The top prize: $500,000. The catch: The books must offer “creative and positive solutions to global problems” and have themes “ensuring the survival and prosperity of all life on our planet.” No apocalyptic visions allowed.

The ground rules betray a curious lack of understanding about the nature of art. It’s one thing to write a self-help book, a religious tract or a formulaic science-fiction novel. These are books that paint the world as a bright and shining sphere in which problems always have solutions, positive thinking or prayer always produces miracles, and the good guys--with their wonderful, death-defying technology--always win.

Significant literature is another thing entirely. It deals in complex ways with minute gradations of good and evil. It is open to the ambiguities--moral, political, sexual, psychological--that shape human life and make it so ultimately mysterious and unpredictable.

Significant visual art also tends to pose questions instead of delivering answers. (That’s not the same thing, of course, as the kind of fumbling, stumbling art made by people who aren’t thinking about anything in particular.) This art recognizes the ambiguities inherent in the ways we think and behave. It generally comes in packages that take time to unwrap and tends to provoke more outside-the-gallery thought than in-the-gallery bedazzlement.

A colorful, high-tech installation by artist Michael Hardesty at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery appears to deal with the burning issue of global environmental calamity. Yet once you leave this coolly seductive environment and start thinking about it, the piece shrinks in stature. Hardesty’s use of materials seems oddly naive, and his stress on high-tech style at the expense of freshly conceived ideas is ultimately disappointing.

The piece is divided between two darkened galleries. In the first one, a large sphere attached to the wall is washed with a pale green light. Just below the ceiling, a light-emitting diode sign continuously spits out the names of the earth’s components: “helium, argon, neon, sulfur dioxide, carbon, water. . . .”

In the next room, a huge perforated aluminum sphere sits on the floor. Inside it, the word was burns brightly in red neon. On one wall, each of 45 small, square video screens arranged in a grid format twitch with a stroboscopic pulse: sky-blue squares, squares divided into swaths of sky-blue and grass-green, and squares carrying an indistinct pattern that looks somewhat like an aerial landscape.

There is also an aluminum bracket high on the wall that once held a candle; its melted wax has puddled on the floor. And there are sound effects: a low electronic hum and muffled pounding.

The piece seems tailor-made for the TV and rock-show generation, the kind of audience used to sitting back and letting the magic of electronics do its frenzied or lulling thing. This is art for people who want it pretty, dramatic and easy to follow. (Maybe we can blame Hardesty’s bread-and-butter work in advertising for the flash-and-dazzle aspect of his work.)

First, the Earth sits for her portrait as a shy green will-o’-the-wisp. Then she becomes an inert old bag, with only the flickering colored screens as reminders of her charms. The candle drips mark the passage of time.

On the technology front, Hardesty seems curiously behind the times. LED signs have been used so tellingly by New York artist Jenny Holzer--who recycles cliches on them--that their use has taken on a specific ironic quality. It’s fine to try something different, but Hardesty seems to be using the scrolling words in a naively straightforward way that doesn’t appear to tap into the way these signs are used in real life. The LED sign comes across as a cute gimmick, rather than a meaningful device.

Similarly, the neon sign inside the weathered metal globe seems reminiscent of the kinds of juxtapositions favored by Italian artist Mario Merz. But in Hardesty’s hands, the image holds no mystery. It’s a flat declarative sentence, while Merz would have offered an allusive snatch of poetry.

The flickering bolts of color are the most expressive aspects of the piece, yet even they seem curiously inert. Like a schoolchild who frantically waves his hand in response to a teacher’s question, only to stutter a vague answer, the TV screens call a lot of attention to themselves without having much to say.

Now in his late 30s, Hardesty grew up in Kentucky and moved to New York eight years ago.

Some of his other works--some of which sound considerably more subtly evocative than this one--have been shown at PS 1 in New York, a respected alternative art venue, and at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum.

Hardesty was quoted in the April issue of ARTnews magazine as saying that he is “looking for poetic relationships that are just beautiful in themselves . . . universal messages that all of us experience but tune out.” He has also been quoted as saying his art is not meant to have any particular “social, political or religious” implications.

Granted that quotes often get twisted around and unmoored from their contexts, something seems confused here. Creating “beautiful” images of the Earth that are intended to have no ramifications in major spheres of thought and passionate involvement is not only a meaningless endeavor--it’s an impossible one.

If an artist doesn’t endow such work with meaning, we viewers will look for it anyway. If all we find is a visual form of New Age Muzak, we’re going to be disappointed. It’s too late in the day for “Oh, wow” art that simply washes over passive viewers and gives them a moment of dumb sensory input. We’re not looking for Turner Tomorrow-style “positive solutions,” but we want to feel we’re in the presence of an authentically fresh vision with a finely honed point of view.

By the way, although admission to the exhibit is free, visitor parking in the new structure off Bridge Road is $3. As an alternative, you might try parking in the 20-minute “strictly enforced” zone next to the administration building and sprinting to the gallery.

Michael Hardesty’s installation remains at UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through April 29. The gallery, in the campus Fine Arts Complex, off Bridge Road, is open from noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: free. Information: (714) 856-6610.