March 12 2003

THE CAPP STREET Project, inaugurated at 500 Capp back in 1983, was the first internationally recognized program to solely focus on installation art. The California College of Arts and Crafts' Wattis Institute took over the project in 1998 and is celebrating CPS's 20th anniversary with a special four-part exhibition featuring Roni Horn, Ann Veronica Janssens, Mike Kelley, and Mike Nelson, all of whom are creating major art installations in the Bay Area for the first time. In his introductory catalog essay for the show, curator Ralph Rugoff mulls over the definition of "installation art." In the end, he writes, it comes down to live, in-person interaction between the viewer and the work, which is where its real content lies. If that's the case, then the exhibit's most powerful work might be Nelson's Pumpkin Palace, a former Green Tortoise Adventure Travel bus that the artist totally gutted and reconstructed into a claustrophobic, mazelike residence. For whom is it built? Its weird gadget-and-propaganda decor brings to mind all sorts of politically loaded possibilities, from opium denizens to homeless veterans or Muslim refugees. Climb aboard and you're suddenly in a windowless anxiety dream that spits you back out with sensory overload and oxygen deprivation. Kelley presents Light (Time)-Space Modulator, a room-size, motorized contraption with an entire spiral staircase extricated from his Los Angeles home. A cleverly crafted slide show creates a kind of time-bridge between Kelley's current remodeling job and the house as it looked when the previous owners lived there, casting the artist as a kind of Shining-esque Jack Nicholson character (but without the murder part) and asking probing questions about spaces and their histories, and how a residence can retain bits of its past lives and even exert influence on its current occupant.