Seeking Paradise in ‘Cage’

The sky has fallen in “Paradise Cage,” the collaborative installation by American sculptor Kiki Smith and Austrian architect Wolf D. Prix that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Its fusion of heaven and Earth inseparably intertwines images of fragile beauty and the specter of mortality.

Yet “Paradise Cage,” the first exhibition in the museum’s long-running Focus series to feature a collaborative effort by an artist and an architect, just misses in its aspirations. A literalness that describes its assembled parts, which seem to cleave neatly between the contribution of the artist and that of the architect, tends to deflate the imaginative appeal of the collaboration as a whole.

The installation fills MOCA’s first two galleries. The surrounding walls of one room hold half a dozen large sheets of deep brown handmade paper, on which are inscribed profile images of a wolf (perhaps a pictorial homage by the artist to the architect).

In the center of the room 120, sheets of handmade paper, stained a dark red, are laid out on the floor in a large rectangle, creating a luxurious field on which hundreds of big earthworms, made from painted polymer, have been spread out. (Think of the look of a Jackson Pollock drip painting in the process of being made, before he lifted the canvas off the studio floor.) The earthworms’ squiggling forms, like an orgy of previously hidden life that suddenly erupts after a summer rain, visually compose a linear drawing on the paper sheets.

In the other room, a steel ring circumscribes the square base of the pyramid skylight that rises about 60 feet overhead, through which the sky can be glimpsed. The ring is attached by steel cables to a second ring, suspended in space at a precarious angle, while the cables continue to the floor; there they are anchored by a third and final steel ring, resting on the ground.

The somewhat hourglass-shaped cage that results is stabilized by additional cables. To one side a sturdy plywood stairway leads to an observation deck 20 or more feet in the air, from which museum visitors can gaze down on a kind of celestial map laid out on the floor.

Sheets of deep greenish-blue paper cover the circular space circumscribed by the bottom ring. On them are placed relatively small, three-dimensional stars and animals, each one cast in glass.

Scorpion, rabbit, housefly, lion, snake, crab, eagle, fish, dove, bull--the 26 glass animals look somewhat like ice sculptures escaped from a buffet table. Sometimes they allude to the signs of the zodiac and sometimes not. When interspersed with the stars, the glass menagerie creates an allusive image of a night sky filled with constellations.

Finally, clusters of small brown pellets are strewn about the constellations. Visually, the pellets look as if they could be either food or bodily waste. (Actually, they’re animal scat that has been cast in bronze.) Gazing down from a perch on the observation deck, midway between heaven and Earth, the scat-among-the-stars motif is a witty union of the twin realms you hover between.

It seems pretty clear that the cage and platform are the work of Wolf Prix, partner in the architectural firm Studio Coop Himmelblau, while the sculptures and paper components are the work of Kiki Smith. This is not a collaboration in which architect and artist seamlessly merged their individual talents to create a work whose individual parts are indistinguishable in terms of authorship.

Instead, an idea seems to have been conceived, then each partner brought his or her expertise to creating it. The collaboration has an additive feel.

Prix’s steel cage creates an eccentric room-within-a-room, which functions as an industrial-strength container for Smith’s sculptures of fragile glass. The L-shaped form of his plywood-covered stairs and viewing platform, which angles out into the gallery on stilt-like legs, visually echoes the exterior architecture of the museum’s office wing, designed by Arata Isozaki. Indoors and outdoors begin to trade places in your mind’s eye.

The spatial reversals fit with Smith’s subject matter. Formally, her celestial menagerie and grubby earthworms also recall earlier works by the artist, such as the swarm of glass spermatozoa swirling about atop a field of floor-bound rubber sheets, which is currently in the collection of the Lannan Foundation. Mortality is a perennial subject of her art.

Still, there’s something flat about “Paradise Cage.” Perhaps it’s the feel of clutter--of too much imposing effort brought to bear, such that the imaginative evanescence critical to the provocative image of “paradise caged” can’t quite sparkle. The collaboration between Smith and Prix is surprisingly copacetic, but it’s finally just wide of the mark.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6222, through Feb. 2.