Wiener
Pound Gallery, 323-0557. Ended Nov 26.

RECENTLY, I HAD the opportunity to visit two installations over the course of one day, and it got me thinking.

The first work I saw, Gilbert Neri's Tend, is in the basement at Richard Hugo House (and it's up until some unspecified future date; call first if you want to see it). It's in a kind of utility room behind the theater, an overheated, low-ceilinged room with no windows, lit by one hanging lamp. In this space, Neri has built a path from one end of the room to the other and lined it with downside-up shoe soles. They make for an interesting landscape, mostly flat with the occasional interruption of heels, some tapered, some needle-like, some modest and low. There are the bricky shapes of flip-flops, rugged, ridged hiking boots, a pair of children's shoes with "munchkin" spelled out on each one. On one side of the path, Neri has embedded rulers and yardsticks into the wall; on the other side he has stamped an amorphous stack of numbers. As you walk down the path, a metronome clicks loudly, the only sound in the room. At the end of the path, in a hole punched through the wall, a video shows a hand smearing something over a clear surface. The hand's movements are regular, sometimes obscuring the lens, sometimes revealing.

I was struck by what seemed to be references to the Holocaust: the piles of shoes at Auschwitz, the numbers tattooed on concentration camp victims. It turns out this wasn't what Neri was aiming at--he was thinking about waves of people moving from here to there, about crossing borders, about familiarity and newness--although when I talked to him later, he didn't seem to mind my misreading. Regardless, there is an undeniable sense of pressure when you're in the installation, a menace intensified by the metronome's insistent click, an inevitability shaped by the path and all the shoes pointing in the same direction. It's a pressure exerted by all the instruments of measurement, of ways of breaking things and time down into units (the metronome, the yardsticks, the shoes of babies, children, and adults) that reminded me of all the ways we are organized by external instructions--height, weight, date of birth.

Later, on a much less sober note, I went over to the Pound Gallery to see a repeat performance of Wiener, a work by Gary Smoot. At the beginning of the evening, the gallery was empty except for some pillows, a video camera, and a big tube extending into the middle of the space from the room next door. Through this tube, you heard pops and scrapes and then the sound of a bell--and then out of the tube would float a translucent balloon twisted into a dachshund, the wiener of the show's title. One by one, the dogs drifted into the gallery, and up to a blue field on the ceiling, slowly filling the skylike space like bubbles or glassy oblate cells. Viewers were invited to sit on pillows and watch the gallery fill. Every so often, a dog detached itself from the pack and fell slowly to the floor in a comical slow-mo nosedive that was also oddly sad.

I went into the room next door where Smoot's friends and volunteers were frantically twisting balloons in a cheerful sweatshop atmosphere. Smoot gave me a quick tutorial in making a wiener dog, his movements efficient and professional, as if he were demonstrating a cooking technique or CPR. This is what he does so well, mixing humor and pathos, professionalism and absurdity, theater and spectacle, so that the experience pulls on you in different ways and refuses to be easily categorized. Further complicating the intent, Smoot is photographing each dog with forensic care, giving deliberate attention to each ephemeral piece. The documentation, after all, is all that remains; when I went back to the gallery a few days later, the deflating dogs were strewn around the space, which had the air of the morning after a very strange party.

These two very different works reminded me that installation art is a commitment: You simply have to give yourself over to it and feel what you're going to feel. The built environment acts on the viewer in a different way than the single art object, since the viewer becomes part of the work instead of a consciousness acting on it from the outside. It's somewhere between theater and amusement park ride, the best kind of mind game. I recommend it.