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Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: Perfect Spaces - Pictures and Films by Oliver Boberg; Visual Aid at Sixteen with David Cannon Dashiell's Queer Mysteries; The Museum of the Lost Artwork - New Work by Robert Kusmirowski.

Comment: Another fun triple-header from YBCA, and that's what's great about this museum-- they make art fun-- even serious art. More importantly, they make art accessible. (How can you know it's fun if it's not accessible?) And they play to a younger audience, which is brilliant because younger people frequently get older, plus some of them get really rich and successful, and when that happens, you don't want them wasting all their discretionary capital on Ferraris, thoroughbreds, Presidential Suites at the Ritz, and tripe like that. So, OK. Let's talk art.

You know those videos of fish swimming around in fishbowls that you buy for your cat and then play on the TV? Well, that's what Oliver Boberg makes, except they're for people. He constructs scale model dioramas, usually nondescript generic industrial or street scenes, and then either takes still photographs or makes videos of them. His work is near perfect-- you can't tell his mock-ups from the real thing, but they're better than the real thing because Boberg completely controls the outcomes. The results are idyllic mini-meditations on reality, places you can go to be at complete peace where you know exactly what happens forever and ever and ever.

Robert Kusmirowski transforms a large room. He covers a third of the floor with dirt, props it with several dead schrubs and a large wooden packing crate set on its end. On the far wall center, he constructs a plain white frame that looks like a fireplace mantle. Then, according to the crib sheet, he glues a fly in the center of that framed blank wall space-- you can see a tiny black dot there with the naked eye, but you can't make out what it is. You're supposed to be able to see the fly in detail through a telescope positioned at the opposite end of the room, but you can't because something's wrong with the scope's focus or position. Kusmirowski can't fix the scope himself because he's standing motionless on top of the upended packing crate, wearing only a loincloth, all painted up like a weathered marble sculpture, holding a sceptre, butt cheeks to the viewers. But back to the fly, next time Kusmirowski should show an assistant how to reset the scope, unless, of course, the crippled scope is a meaning-infused ruse, in which case, he got me-- and everybody else who struggled to see the fly. The installation's got messages, mainly specific to Kusmirowski's native Poland, but you don't need those to enjoy and appreciate the imagination and effort that went into creating it.

David Cannon Dashiell used a series of Pompeian frescoes as the skeletal structure for his roomful of oversized reverse paintings on plexiglass showing people either doing really strange things to each other or engaged in solo acts of equivalent strangeness, many of those acts being highly sexually charged. It's sort of a raunched up version of Fornicon by Tomi Ungerer (Grove Press, New York, 1969).