When multi-this and multi-that lack newness

A long time ago, paintings were all about paint, sculptures exclusively addressed weight and volume, films were true to that medium, and architects designed buildings in which form followed function.

The enterprise was called Modernism, and it has been dead for half a century. But its ghost still haunts the present, particularly on the circuit of international biennials, which ritualistically reenact Modernism’s demise as a sign of the art world’s fashionable globalism.

Artists delivered the deathblow to Modernism by making mixed-media works that obliterated the idea that the arts were segregated specialties and that the job of each was to maintain its purity. Arts institutions quickly got in on the act. They further diversified the discussion by expanding multimedia to include multiculturalism. More recently, a multidisciplinary approach has replaced multiculturalism as the dominant trend among art’s expanding bureaucracy.

It’s the banner under which the Museum of Contemporary Art presents a group of recent works by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. At the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, the 38-year-old’s sculptures, photographs, architectural models, drawings, pop-up books and digital projection dutifully reenact Modernism’s demise by linking a multimedia approach with a multicultural outlook and a multidisciplinary methodology. The mixture is neither felicitous nor innovative. It is conservative and opportunistic, in the least interesting of ways.

Rather than fabricating objects so complex or confusing that they require the expertise of specialists to make sense of their multilayered meanings, Garaicoa has designed fairly simple things that neatly fit into the prevailing discourse and institutional structure. His one-dimensional works do not engender new forms of thought or experience as much as they reinforce the status quo by neatly filling in the slots set up for them by the yearly schedule of multinational exhibitions.

As an artist, Garaicoa is a professional. His works are competently crafted and loaded with enough references to other artists’ works and current social issues for a semester’s worth of research by a class of visual studies students. But they are benign, even childish, in their unthreatening playfulness. Put bluntly, Garaicoa’s art mimics the thinking on which niche marketing is based.

The exhibition’s entryway resembles a trendy boutique that specializes in unauthorized knockoffs of Isamu Noguchi lamps. Suspended from the ceiling with nearly invisible strands of monofilament and standing on the floor on spindly wire legs, Garaicoa’s rice paper forms, stretched over thin metal armatures, contain light bulbs that illuminate the otherwise dark gallery. They come in a wider variety of shapes and sizes than Noguchi’s originals and include awkward protrusions that would make the Japanese master cringe. Pyramids, columns, domes, arches and triangular roofs stick out of elegant ovoids and graceful, gourd-shaped forms.

Titled “From the Series New Architectures,” Garaicoa’s ill-designed lamps are meant to evoke a dreamy vision of a futuristic city, its pod-shaped buildings afloat like giant dirigibles. A series of geometric wall drawings, made with common pins and tautly stretched lengths of colored thread, reinforce this suggestion. But the 50-plus electrical cords plugged into numerous outlets drag the installation down to earth, making unfavorable comparisons to overcrowded stores inescapable.

Upstairs, on the main gallery’s walls, hang four pairs of big black-and-white photographs and two architectural drawings. The photos are before-and-after shots of buildings slated for demolition: On the left appear the crumbling or unprofitable structures; on the right, the bare locations from which they have been removed. To mark the loss, Garaicoa has traced each structure’s contours with various colors of thread, pinning it to the pictures where the buildings once stood.

The drawings, measuring 8 and 12 feet long, are simplified renditions of architectural elevations. They depict a multibuilding complex Garaicoa has imagined.

The same complex is realized three-dimensionally in two dioramas on free-standing pedestals. Titled “Campus or the Babel of Knowledge,” they are the most engaging works displayed.

The larger one features a symmetrical campus whose triangular, round and arc-shaped buildings encircle a pyramidal tower that does not rise above the ground but is sunken in an inverted, concrete-lined cone. Like the spokes of bicycle wheels, enclosed walkways radiate from the six tallest buildings, each of which resembles an ancient stupa topped with a heliport.

The smaller diorama is a more elaborately detailed version of a single stupa. It includes figurines walking, studying, watching projected images and hanging out in an upper-level lounge. Unlike most architectural models, which propose improbably optimistic visions, Garaicoa’s six-story building presents a quietly chilling vision of alienated isolation and dysfunctional interactivity.

A nearby wall label describes the six-year educational program for which the stratified and compartmentalized structure is built. Using the language of urban planning, it begins cheerfully. By the end, it describes a hellish world from which idiosyncrasy has been purged and individuality has been replaced by the predictable behavior of automatons.

Even more than Garaicoa’s models, his text conveys a humorously cartoon version of Michel Foucault’s dark vision of modern life: Control and surveillance account for the lion’s share of experience and seem to drive civilization toward an even bleaker future. The wall label is the best thing in the show.

The remaining works retreat from such ambitions, which could be the springboard for serious consideration of the relationship between the individual and the group. Instead, Garaicoa’s pop-up books, oversize chess set with buildings for chessmen and installation of toy trains accompanied by a silly digital projection rehash anodyne ideas. Serving up what’s expected rather than challenging the powers that be, these works contribute to a show that is perfectly respectable and, unfortunately, forgettable.

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Carlos Garaicoa

Where: MOCA Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, with hours extended until 8 p.m. Thursdays, 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Mondays

Ends: July 17

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 626-6222; www.moca.org