Art review: Little for society to look forward to in "The Violet Hour"

Have you noticed how avant-garde art tends to channel the feeling of the times, whatever it may be? During the Vietnam War and its aftermath, artists got a little crazy. They did strange performances full of burning, shooting, cutting. They bared their souls and their bodies. They showed us the dark side.

Now we get a look at what three young artists today feel about the slow-motion meltdown of life as we know it: "The war on terror," global warming, a teetering world economy, food crisis and whatever else is waiting in the wings to suggest utter doom. The show is "The Violet Hour" at the Henry, curated by Sara Krajewski. The artists are Matthew Day Jackson, Jen Liu and David Maljkovic. All were born in the 1970s. And the feeling they portray in their work?

In a word: ennui.

The listlessness they convey is laced with anxiety, too, but not enough to generate much action except, in Liu's case, a sort of childlike escape into fantasy. There, in her imaginary realm of operatic video and paper, dire impulses are safely enacted in symbolic rituals or purged through intricate picture-making. The exhibition's title, "The Violet Hour," was borrowed from T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land," so you get some idea of where we are headed.

An installation by Matthew Day Jackson, a University of Washington grad, has the most punch. The crashed and charred race-car remains of his "Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me)" dominates the space, with apocalyptic overtones. And his smart assemblage of photogravures, "Missing Link (x-ray)," reveals a body transforming from a natural creation to an artificial one, with a chain-link rib cage. This, it seems, is what we've become.

Croatian artist David Maljkovic's two video installations, "These Days" and "Lost Memories From These Days" (about five and seven minutes, respectively), are so deliberately somnolent and glassy-eyed and repetitive, so what's-the-point-of-all-this, that I feel in danger of nodding off, just thinking of them. I like the way he has them set up, in sort of tunnellike affairs built of plywood, that keep you captive but at a distance from the on-screen inhabitants.

The finale of the exhibition is the dark gallery with Liu's two videos — "The Brethren of the Stone: Comfortably Numb" and "The Brethren of the Stone: Iron Man" — projecting on perpendicular walls. Plan on spending half an hour or so to get the full immersion in the videos, which seem to coordinate together on their separate screens. Here we have young people in white monkish robes, engaged in a mundane language and despondent arias, eating flowers, running outdoors. Obscure rituals take place. Violence creeps in unexpectedly. There seems to be a disconnect between nature, with its green earth and feral young people, and the sterile architecture and monumentalism of industry. The tropes may not be exactly fresh, but the visuals are good, so I stayed with it. Twice.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com