Dada for The Valley Girl

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So at one end, you have pointless conceptual art: Richard Jackson's room, whose walls and ceiling are covered with hundreds of clocks, all telling the same time; or, with a tiny smidgen more sculptural content, Liz Larner's visually inert installations of hanging chains and mirrors. At the other end, you have the stale recycled leavings of Pop. Charles Ray does fiber-glass mannequins that look like dumb footnotes to the far more exacting work Duane Hanson and John De Andrea were making 20 years ago. Nancy Rubins would like you to know that she is scared by the production of junk in our bulimic, gorge-and-puke culture, and so she constructs a huge semirandom object out of trailer homes and hot-water boilers, laced together with steel cable, like a maximally inflated Rauschenberg. It provides one of the show's few faint sensations of risk -- but gravitational, not cultural.

At its none too impressive best, the show offers Chris Burden's Medusa's Head, a seven-ton lump of scarred, dyed concrete and rocks laced by serpentine model-train tracks and hanging by a chain -- a fearful image of a terminally polluted planet. Nothing else in MOCA measures up to Burden. Size is not scale, a fact almost forgotten by American artists, but by none as completely as Victor Estrada, whose Baby/Baby is 30 ft. long, made of urethane foam, and depicts an enormous pair of Siamese twins whose bodies meet in an imposing penis that, rising 16 or so feet toward the roof, becomes a mushroom cloud. At least this gross bibelot has some authenticity, as do Manuel Ocampo's frantic, heavy-handed but indubitably sincere paintings in an idiom derived from Filipino popular religious art. You can't say that for much of anything else here.

It is odd, in a show so dedicated to pretensions of confrontation, to see how little real cultural alertness it contains. Hey, folks, guess what? This culture sucks, and we're part of it! In a daze of bad-boy posturing, the artists wander passively along, picking up images the way a marshmallow picks up carpet fuzz. When Mike Kelley builds a set of offices and covers their walls with blowups of the kind of semi-dirty-joke drawings that people in the mailroom fax to one another to relieve the boredom of the workday, what kind of point is being made? None that has any satirical, let alone aesthetic, value. It's just visual zit popping.

Probably the nadir of this Valley Girl Dada is reached by Raymond Pettibon, whose fatuous, vaguely wistful scribbles, done in a comic-book style but so ineptly that he couldn't land a job as an inker for real comic books, are one long free-associational natter. "Pettibon," says the catalog, "puts his finger on the restless anxiety underlying adolescent experience." Wrong digit; it's his toe, with which he apparently draws. But adolescence is key here. America invented it; Los Angeles glorifies it; and for the moment, MOCA is its Louvre. Nobody could see this show without realizing what a scam the making of art-world reputation has become.