Pretty mixed up

WALTHAM -- Neon lights, garish wallpaper, 1950s furniture, live plants, Hawaiian-style pop music, B-movies, towers constructed from builder's scaffolding, revolving disco balls, a collection of silvery artificial Christmas trees, variously styled abstract paintings, and piles of dirt, books, and bricks: All this and much more makes up the entertaining sprawl of art and kitsch that is John Armleder's exhibition "Too Much Is Not Enough" at the Rose Art Museum.

The show was co-organized by the Rose's Raphaela Platow and by Martin Engler of the Kunstverein Hannover in Germany, where it debuted last November. Filling the entire museum in a continuous melange of paintings, sculpture, installations, and painted walls, the exhibition focuses on recent work but includes pieces dating back to the mid-1980s. It is Armleder's first major museum survey in the United States.

Inspired by early 20th-century Dada and the zanily anti-traditionalist art of Fluxus in the '60s, the Swiss conceptualist Armleder (born 1948) has dedicated his career to breaking down the usual boundaries between categories such as art and life, high culture and popular culture. An infectiously insouciant, antiauthoritarian spirit drives his enterprise.

And yet, the effect of his show is not actually very shocking. In today's postmodernist era, art that promiscuously mixes different types of art, design, and junk is familiar, and it is altogether routine for high-minded intellectuals to take seriously mass culture subjects like, say, the music of Kurt Cobain or the films of Keanu Reeves. What comes across most impressively in Armleder's show is not anarchic rebelliousness but his suave, finely-tuned sense of design.

In one of Armleder's numerous untitled works that he calls Furniture Sculptures, a vertical canvas painted white and neatly inscribed by four small circles is flanked near its top by two tubular metal chairs with white cushioned seats projecting from the wall. More elaborately, in another work, a beautiful modern red sofa and a pair of streamlined white floor lamps are arranged in front of a large painting of wide stripes resembling a Brice Marden, which is hung on a white wall patterned by neatly painted pink silhouettes of rats.

What Armleder is suggesting in these and similar works is that contrary to the old modernist idea of abstract paintings as transcendental objects, things like paintings and chairs -- and lamps, mirrors, and wallpaper -- are all equally part of visual culture. An exhibition brochure explains that Armleder thinks of contemporary culture as a kind of "pudding," in which distinctions between high and low culture are meaningless. Our inclination to accord greater worth to things called artworks over other sorts of objects is arbitrary and snobbish.

Armleder expands this perspective with great panache in the Rose's gymnasium-size main gallery. One wall is filled with a grid of 40 blinking neon light works, each a configuration of colored concentric circles. Another wall bears a gridded arrangement of old kitchen tables, projecting Formica-top first from a wall painted in wide green and white stripes.

A tower of blue steel scaffolding festooned with fake flowers and artificial evergreen boughs rises in one part of the room. Another tower has a wooden stairway that enables visitors to climb to a platform near the gallery's ceiling, from which perch they can survey the whole installation.

Music fills the air: The old-time sounds of crooners accompanied by Hawaiian slide guitar emanate from portable CD players scattered about below. Also down on the floor, large truck tires serve as planters for lovely arrangements of live flowers of many varieties. Several television sets displayed at tilted angles play old Hollywood movies amongst neat piles of dirt, coal, and rubble.

If all this sounds cacophonous, it's not. The light, sound, colors, structures, and textures all combine to create a remarkably pleasant ambience.

Outside the main gallery, beach ball-size disco balls revolve over the museum's shallow indoor pool. In the museum's smaller ground-floor gallery, a big painting reminiscent of the poured and stained paintings of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler hangs on a wall tinted a vivid red near a scruffy gathering of those artificial Christmas trees.

Also in this gallery, works from the Rose's permanent collection by Alex Katz , Cindy Sherman , and other artists and pieces of modern furniture are gathered into an ensemble resembling an art collector's living room.

What all this adds up to is something paradoxical. On the one hand, Armleder delivers a philosophical lesson: Our values regarding artworks and other objects reflect a whole system of beliefs by which we are more or less unconsciously captured. Liberation is to be found in recognizing that hierarchical values are not inherent in worldly things but are products of social conditioning. He invites us to consider a utopian democracy of taste.

Yet for all that, Armleder's exhibition as a whole remains pretty well-fixed in the generally highly valued category we call avant-garde art. It is, after all, presented in a contemporary art museum. In this context, all the different objects he creates or appropriates are just elements of his extended artistic palette. The overall aesthetic harmony that he orchestrates is artful, even if certain objects like truck tires or artificial Christmas trees seem on their own to belong to non-art categories.

Does this mean Armleder has failed? Yes and no. Viewed against the pluralistic background of art today, his project is not nearly as revolutionary as he seems to think it is. It might cause some diehard conservatives to gnash their teeth, but his Duchampian, high-low, art-about-art program is practically academic at this point. Nevertheless, the show has a winningly exuberant, generous, good-humored spirit. For all its anti-art skepticism, it is aesthetically and imaginatively exhilarating, like real art.

Too much, in this case, is just about right.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.