Dream weaving The Rose takes an alert look at sleep BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Dreaming Now" At the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 415 South Street in Waltham, through April 24

It’s hardly news that the most ubiquitous, profitable, and influential art form over the past half-century has been film. (The budget for a Hollywood blockbuster makes Madonna’s income or the money Christo raised for The Gates look like small potatoes.) Or that the influence of film and television now extends to every corner of life. We’re habituated to their launching political careers, but we’re only beginning to appreciate film’s impact on everything from religion to nutrition, from parenting to disease control.

A small but still strong motive for many of us involved in the visual arts, whether as practitioners or as observers, is to sidestep the prevailing culture, to pay attention to forms of expression that aren’t so pervasive or so baldly profit-driven. So I was a little alarmed when it hit me that fully half the works in "Dreaming Now," the new, renegade, sometimes wonderful, sometimes predictable show of installation art at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, incorporate or refer to film. Is there no escape?

It further occurred to me that there’s an argument to be made for recognizing installation art — in some ways the most highly touted if not the most attended visual art form du jour — as being in direct argument with film. Just as abstraction in painting was born out of photography’s emergence as an artistic medium, so installation art offers to do what the inescapable moving picture can’t: to engage us beyond our eyes and our ears. Movies can’t make you walk through doors or smell wool or find your balance on uneven floors or have you assume a variety of unforeseeable postures, as to varying degrees almost every one of the seven "Dreaming Now" artists does. And when you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. William Kentridge’s contribution to the show is nothing other than a short movie.

"Dreaming Now" was organized around the principle of artists’ efforts at articulating and embodying their dreams, a legitimate theme but one that’s not as tight as you might think. If you accept the idea that all art emanates from the subconscious, dream inspiration turns out to be an ineluctable aspect of any creative endeavor. Newton doesn’t owe his epiphany to the apple, he owes it to the nap. Had "Dreaming Now" been called "Transportation Now," it would still cohere, still make sense. Travel, transport, and transformation are as much a recurrent motif as are dreams in the exhibit, and that should come as little wonder. Dreams deliver us to places beyond the wakeful world. That said, a number of these works take as their starting point sleep, and by far the most inspired contribution to "Dreaming Now" is the extraordinary During Sleep, by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota.

I would not like to be Sandra Cinto or Maria Magdalena Compos-Pons, whose wall-sized ballpoint pen drawings and photographs, respectively, flank the central staircase where Shiota’s work gets quietly under way in the exhibit’s main gallery. If your eyes are like mine, they’ll be drawn immediately to the strands of black yarn that climb over the banisters, snake behind the stairs, and descend to the lower level. Downstairs, Shiota has spun a web of such density and magnitude and complexity, it takes over the walls and ceiling and floor of the entire room; you move as if by crawling. A space that is normally expansive and light now has the closed-in feel of a catacomb. The preponderance of black webbing not only induces darkness where there’s normally light, it mutes sounds where ordinarily you can hear the echo of shoes and conversation. In the ceiling-to-floor thickets of taut, pliable black yarn, the artist has added another element to the mix, 14 institutional beds, complete with pillows and headboards, white sheets and white blankets. Yet the beds lie so deeply within the webbing, not only can you not get near them, you have trouble seeing them. The quietude, the twilight, the barely perceptible beds that belong to a hospice or an asylum — suddenly you’ve stepped into a ward where nobody gets out. Intimations of death are everywhere.

The uncluttered elegance of Shiota’s creation — its clarity and simplicity, the fact that you could pretty much pick up all her materials at a Sears or a Home Depot — is worth paying attention to for the standard it sets. In an era that makes a fetish of technology and pyrotechnics and size, it’s easy to forget the drama of the well-conceived and the direct. A thousand e-mails don’t equal one hand-written letter; the flicker of a candle is far sexier than the dimmest light bulb. But Shiota’s power has nothing to do with anything old-fashioned. Instead, it’s about capitalizing on the familiar; we’re seduced by her vision in part because it takes us in with materials we’re used to. By transforming it, she makes us into participants. Then there’s the physical experience During Sleep insists on. You bend, you peer, you touch, you’re enveloped; above all, you feel you’re being breathed on. Finally, and maybe most important, During Sleep delivers a rare visual experience. (And how often can that be said of art that’s meant to be seen?) We’re allowed to apprehend the objects beyond the netting; at the same time, we’re prevented from apprehending them clearly. Shiota makes the proximate feel terribly far away.

The same æthereal charge, with its hints of danger and despair and thrill, does not emanate from the other installations in "Dreaming Now." Cai Guo-Qiang’s Dream is a noisy affair whose center is a tremendous swath of orange fabric rippling across the expanse of a floor. Both the wave-like ripples (they can rise to three or four feet) and the relentless noise come courtesy of a half-dozen floor-level industrial fans, which blow into the giant sheet at one end of the room and are exhaled at the other end. If you can make your eyes focus on the undulating cloth, you can momentarily induce the blank reverie that comes from watching a test pattern on a TV monitor. That will require not looking up, however. If you do look up, you’ll see a great number of sizable orange-cloth lanterns dangling on wires from the ceiling. The lanterns take the shape of toy-like industrial objects; among them I counted a nine-car train (it’s the largest, with each car stretching to about two feet), multiple stars, airplanes, rockets, several trucks toting missiles, television sets, and at least one pair of McDonald’s-inspired arches. The text on a nearby wall explains that in Quanzhou, the city where the artist was born, "paper versions of personal items" are burned at funerals to ease the newly deceased into the next kingdom. What that has to do with the din of the fans or the undulating cloth or the make-believe toy department suspended overhead is not addressed.

Gimmicky too but a lot more elaborate is David Solow’s falling bodies blanket me, a work whose dates of creation span an entire decade, 1995 to 2005. What appears to be an out-of-place ramshackle (but elegantly affixed) door must be opened before you can step inside Solow’s shed. Inside, you find the floor rising and tilting like a roof and the ceiling draped with so many blankets, you feel you’ve just entered a car wash. Or you would if not for the loud voices being pumped into your ears (fragments of what sound like terribly meaningful commentaries) and the elongate bathtub in the middle of the room. Approach the tub and you witness video projections of men’s and women’s naked bodies melting awkwardly into each other. They made me think of margarine on a warm ear of corn. Solow comments that he wanted to create a room that was "like walking into a movie." Instead, what he’s done is take us into the editing room. Lots happens, but in fragmentary visual and auditory snippets; in the end, we’re merely part of the tourist group allowed to pass through Solow’s studio. The editor alone is in on the plot, the conversations, the tensions, the meaning. It’s the sort of movie you leave quickly and forget.

I’d argue that what’s wrong with falling bodies besides pretense and confusion is the way it wants and doesn’t want to be film. The two other great works in "Dreaming Now" know exactly where they stand in relation to the great god of video projection. William Kentridge has joined the church; Marina Abramovic has disavowed it.

Don’t make the mistake I did of letting your eyes fall on the text accompanying Kentridge’s evocative, six-minute 1996 animated video "History of the Main Complaint." It would have you understand this eerie and poetic film — whose style reminds me of Central European animation from the 1960s — as part of a political manifesto related to the strife of Kentridge’s native South Africa. The enormity of apartheid in South Africa does not mean it has explanatory power for this or any work of art. Done in deliberately clumsy charcoal drawings, Kentridge’s film follows a sleeping man on a hospital bed ("Illness Now?") who is visited first by one, then by several, and finally by a crowd of stethoscope-wielding physicians. The doctors have a particular need to apply their scopes to the sleeping man’s crotch. While that’s going on, we get a look into the guy’s interior — telephones, typewriters, a notary public’s embossing machine. Interspersed with the unsettling awareness that the patient has taken his office home, we’re made part of his anxious dream life. In it, he’s driving a car at night while pedestrians dart out from behind trees. You can’t take your eyes off it for a moment.

Neither do the accouterments of Marina Abramovic’s Dream Bed leave you be. Much as the artifacts belong to a performance piece, it’s captivating even when it’s not being "performed." You sign a contract promising to lie in a wooden, coffin-like bed with a stone headrest for no less than an hour while wearing glasses that block out all light. For fulfilling the contract, you receive a signed affidavit from the artist attesting to your participation. Abramovic settles for nothing less than having us actually dream.