Dream weaving (continued)

The same ¾thereal charge, with its hints of danger and despair and thrill, does not emanate from the other installations in "Dreaming Now." Cai Guo-Qiang’s Dream is a noisy affair whose center is a tremendous swath of orange fabric rippling across the expanse of a floor. Both the wave-like ripples (they can rise to three or four feet) and the relentless noise come courtesy of a half-dozen floor-level industrial fans, which blow into the giant sheet at one end of the room and are exhaled at the other end. If you can make your eyes focus on the undulating cloth, you can momentarily induce the blank reverie that comes from watching a test pattern on a TV monitor. That will require not looking up, however. If you do look up, you’ll see a great number of sizable orange-cloth lanterns dangling on wires from the ceiling. The lanterns take the shape of toy-like industrial objects; among them I counted a nine-car train (it’s the largest, with each car stretching to about two feet), multiple stars, airplanes, rockets, several trucks toting missiles, television sets, and at least one pair of McDonald’s-inspired arches. The text on a nearby wall explains that in Quanzhou, the city where the artist was born, "paper versions of personal items" are burned at funerals to ease the newly deceased into the next kingdom. What that has to do with the din of the fans or the undulating cloth or the make-believe toy department suspended overhead is not addressed.

Gimmicky too but a lot more elaborate is David Solow’s falling bodies blanket me, a work whose dates of creation span an entire decade, 1995 to 2005. What appears to be an out-of-place ramshackle (but elegantly affixed) door must be opened before you can step inside Solow’s shed. Inside, you find the floor rising and tilting like a roof and the ceiling draped with so many blankets, you feel you’ve just entered a car wash. Or you would if not for the loud voices being pumped into your ears (fragments of what sound like terribly meaningful commentaries) and the elongate bathtub in the middle of the room. Approach the tub and you witness video projections of men’s and women’s naked bodies melting awkwardly into each other. They made me think of margarine on a warm ear of corn. Solow comments that he wanted to create a room that was "like walking into a movie." Instead, what he’s done is take us into the editing room. Lots happens, but in fragmentary visual and auditory snippets; in the end, we’re merely part of the tourist group allowed to pass through Solow’s studio. The editor alone is in on the plot, the conversations, the tensions, the meaning. It’s the sort of movie you leave quickly and forget.

I’d argue that what’s wrong with falling bodies besides pretense and confusion is the way it wants and doesn’t want to be film. The two other great works in "Dreaming Now" know exactly where they stand in relation to the great god of video projection. William Kentridge has joined the church; Marina Abramovic has disavowed it.

Don’t make the mistake I did of letting your eyes fall on the text accompanying Kentridge’s evocative, six-minute 1996 animated video "History of the Main Complaint." It would have you understand this eerie and poetic film — whose style reminds me of Central European animation from the 1960s — as part of a political manifesto related to the strife of Kentridge’s native South Africa. The enormity of apartheid in South Africa does not mean it has explanatory power for this or any work of art. Done in deliberately clumsy charcoal drawings, Kentridge’s film follows a sleeping man on a hospital bed ("Illness Now?") who is visited first by one, then by several, and finally by a crowd of stethoscope-wielding physicians. The doctors have a particular need to apply their scopes to the sleeping man’s crotch. While that’s going on, we get a look into the guy’s interior — telephones, typewriters, a notary public’s embossing machine. Interspersed with the unsettling awareness that the patient has taken his office home, we’re made part of his anxious dream life. In it, he’s driving a car at night while pedestrians dart out from behind trees. You can’t take your eyes off it for a moment.

Neither do the accouterments of Marina Abramovic’s Dream Bed leave you be. Much as the artifacts belong to a performance piece, it’s captivating even when it’s not being "performed." You sign a contract promising to lie in a wooden, coffin-like bed with a stone headrest for no less than an hour while wearing glasses that block out all light. For fulfilling the contract, you receive a signed affidavit from the artist attesting to your participation. Abramovic settles for nothing less than having us actually dream.