Slapstick sculpture

WALTHAM -- Some see the art world as full of overinflated, egotistical blowhards who place an absurd amount of value on perplexing, meaningless objects. Count artist Erwin Wurm among the skeptics.

``I Love My Time, I Don't Like My Time," Wurm's hilariously deadpan and provocative exhibition at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, skewers the self-importance and big thinking of the art-world elite. It undercuts the notion that art occupies more vaunted realms than most of us dally in, then invites everyone to participate.

Wurm, a Viennese conceptual artist, has been making his subversive, comic art, which blurs the lines between sculpture and performance, photography and video, since the late 1980s. He's received great acclaim around the world, but ``I Love My Time," organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, is his first major museum show in the United States.

The artist follows a tradition of 1960s-era conceptual and performance art in which artists' bodies became extensions of their sculptural practice. Wurm pushes the envelope further by using other people's bodies as sculptures. For the funny ``One Minute Sculptures" (offered up in a video and color photographs), he's instructed volunteers to assume odd positions: A man straddles an unhinged door as if it were a steed; another man balances pens on his shoes.

Another funny thing about these photos: Rose director Michael Rush says that some of the willing victims in them are curators and directors of other museums. One, a gray-bearded director, stuffs every orifice in his face with office supplies, effectively deflating his authority. The participants struggle to follow instructions, and once in place, they may tremble; they're sculptures, but their human vulnerability is intact.

There's a slapstick humor to these pieces that makes their stars, struggling to be still and become sculptural objects, both ridiculous and endearing. And while Wurm thumbs his nose at the experts, the very people he makes fools of rejoice in his cleverness by displaying his work. He offers up comedy we can all laugh at, yet that's the sheep's clothing in which he cloaks his bold conceptual art.

Is a sculpture still a sculpture if it only exists for one minute? Is it still a sculpture if we're only seeing it as a photograph? Yes, especially in ``One Minute Sculptures" and ``59 Positions," a video in which volunteers don items of clothing in unexpected ways. That's because Wurm's focus here is on whatever odd form each body takes in space. Mass, volume, and shape become more important than personality -- although the personality always peeks through. Wurm also invites viewers to become sculptures on the spot, offering platforms with instructions (and sweaters as props) for anyone who dares.

Wurm extrapolates from the premise that human mass can be a sculptural object by using fat, or a semblance of it, as material. He sees fat as a symbol of power, as it was centuries ago, when heft signified wealth. ``Curator Imperator Raphaela Platow" is a photo of the Rose's chief curator decked out in a fat suit to signal her position as a wheeler-dealer in the art world.

Today girth is no longer an indication of wealth, but our houses and cars are. The magnificent centerpiece of ``I Love My Time" is ``Fat House," an enormous plaster cottage that looks sculpted from swells of flesh, with windows that pucker and a red roof. It looks like a fairy-tale house in the woods (which would suggest a wolf in grandmother's clothing inside), and it nearly fills the Rose's Lois Foster Gallery. Stand at the doorway, and the pull to go in may argue with a creeping desire to run away.

Go in. There's an animated video projection inside in which ``Fat House" talks and blinks, an overstuffed and bleary-eyed doyenne trying to figure out exactly who she is: a house or an artwork, which would certainly be more important. And is this all a big game? ``I am a beautiful house," she says. ``But as far as I know, this is an art show, and that means I am an artwork. . . . Who says this is art?"

The video that accompanies ``Fat Car," a small model along the same lines as ``Fat House," gives ``I Love My Time, I Don't Like My Time" its title. In the video, the car offers up a bleak monologue that spirals from love to death to fear to food, drawing an effective, anxiety-laden portrait of consciousness in the post-9/11 world.

Wurm tackles our heightened fearfulness in another series of photos called ``Instructions on How to Be Politically Incorrect." One photo, ``Two Ways of Carrying a Bomb," shows two fellows, one with something big stuffed in the back of his pants, the other with something stuffed in the front, making a riotous counterbalance. Another, ``Inspection," has a man sticking his head down a woman's shirt front as she dines at an elegant restaurant. These bring Wurm's sculptures out into the world, adding context that nearly pushes the works into the realm of sketch comedy.

Another series, ``Brothers & Sisters," employs actual monks and nuns. Funny as these are, Wurm should be wary about letting his conceptually sharp work devolve into sight gags.

For all its withering humor, ``I Love My Time, I Don't Like My Time" is a gentle, humane, and ultimately liberating show. Wurm champions ordinary people and deflates the self-important. At the same time, he breaks open and shakes up previously sacred ideas about sculpture. He suggests any of us can make a sculpture, just by crooking a finger or falling out of a chair. And he leads us on a Mobius strip that spirals between making serious art and making fun of art's seriousness.