“Fun isn’t fun!” I called out, cramped in a roomful of silver
balloons (or, to be precise, cramped among Martin Creed’s 2004
installation of balloons taking up “Half the air in a given
space”).
“Now you get it!” came Eric
Fredericksen’s response. Fredericksen is the director of Western
Bridge. He curated the show of interactive artworks You Complete
Me, which includes the room of balloons, a large tunnel machine
that squirts paint on the walls when you walk inside it, several
toylike objects displayed in a gallery with a cream-colored shag rug
like an upscale rec room, and a bouncy house. After the rambunctious
opening, Fredericksen was worried the anxious side of his exhibition
wasn’t coming across. And it wasn’t. Sometimes a bouncy house is just a
bouncy house. Or worse: a bouncy house impersonating art.
It’s not that there aren’t interesting works of art here: Jeppe
Hein’s tiny, exhaling hole in the wall (powered by an unseen
fan); Olafur Eliasson’s vision-framing device Eye Eye; Mark
Soo’s stereographic 3-D photographs reconstructing Elvis’s first
Memphis recording; and the dark misfit of the show, Alfredo Jaar’s
black boxes bearing captions about disasters but showing only voids
where images should be. Some of the pieces might even give more in a
better context. But the theme, “artists working against the passivity
of the audience,” makes everything feel a little thin.
In his written statement, Fredericksen wonders whether literal
engagement with art leads to the “micro-utopias” imagined by
theorist Nicolas Bourriaud. He quickly adds, “Or should the work retain
the potential to express antagonisms and conflict?” Clearly, he falls
on this side—on the side with an awareness that staged fun
(anyone who has worked in the corporate world is familiar with enforced
team-building “fun”) is not only a part of the domineering “positivity”
of American pop psychology but can also be a tool for covering up
whatever you want to ignore.
Takes by artists on this point are old, and seem to have moved
through the 20th century and into the 21st with great ambivalence and
the increasing throwing-up-of-hands: avant-garde political protest art
answered by Allan Kaprow’s innocently liberatory 1961 invitation to
climb on rubber tires answered by Eliasson’s blank perception-oriented
gifts. The dark side of fun, meanwhile, is covered best by Takashi
Murakami’s toothy, looming balloon characters—but even he has
moved on to more basically ruthless ventures, recently setting
up a Louis Vuitton retail shop smack in the middle (in the gallery) of
his American retrospective.
I’m tempted here to write about the luxury and wild inequity of
American life, and entertainment-based culture, and hair shirts, which
means it’s time to stop thinking—and certainly time to stop
writing—about the subject of fun art. Fun art, paradoxically, is
a headache. 
