Clever kinetic sculptures and witty one-liners at Grey Gallery

Pedal like mad on one of Chris McMullen's "Modern Conveniences," and you can slowly crank the shaft on a spiffy-looking engine that sets in motion a pulley that turns another device some 10 feet away. This grand apparatus and all your efforts will eventually have an effect, but it may take a moment to figure out what that is. Way over on the other end, almost too small to notice, a tiny ballerina figurine gradually starts to twirl.

McMullen's big, sleek kinetic sculptures require lots of energy to operate — which is part of the joke of "Modern Convenience," his excellent show at Grey Gallery and Lounge. Each of his three large machines — two free-standing and one hanging from the wall — has to be laboriously operated in order to achieve something utterly simple. As mechanical designs, they aren't exactly efficient. As metaphors for the creative process, the work is spot-on elegant. Ask a dancer what led up to her on-stage pirouette and you'll get confirmation.

Any contemporary artist who dabbles in kinetic sculpture follows in the tracks of the witty Swiss-born artist Jean Tinguely, whose mid-20th century follies poked fun at the industrial age — not to mention the era of nuclear proliferation. Tinguely didn't create art for art's sake. The purpose of his anarchic sculptures was their own self-destruction. (Naturally, being an artist, he also wanted them to look cool while knocking themselves to pieces — and they did, starting out as wild assemblages of stuff congealed like frozen whirlwinds.)

Like Tinguely, McMullen takes a jab at the notion that technology has bettered our lives. But where Tinguely assembled sculptures like cross-sections of chaos, bent on destruction, McMullen builds formally concise, cleanly lacquered objects that do their best to look like factory equipment. McMullen's "Conveniences" are actually gentle creators, going about their work in a roundabout way that would drive an efficiency expert nuts. What looks like wasted time to a pragmatic type is a brave necessity in art.

Perhaps with that in mind, McMullen offers a response to the literal-minded pounding of Jonathan Borofsky's "Hammering Man" at the Seattle Art Museum. McMullen's hammering thing is a wall-mounted bit of mechanical symmetry engaged in a time-lapse action: In effect you get to see the full range of motion all at once. On each side of the piece, six hammers undulate in a slow-motion wave. But they work only if we do our part, which means repeatedly shoving a heavy chunk of basalt to keep the pendulum that operates them swinging.

McMullen's sculptures are installed inside the boxlike room of the Grey Gallery, with some of his design drawings along the outside walls. His work pairs nicely with "When the World Was Flat," a show of Alice Tippit's paintings scattered around the cocktail lounge that encompasses the gallery. Combining words and images, Tippit dishes out smart one-liners that pop like little flashbulbs. In one piece, she paints the words "FIN DE" followed by the image of a dripping orange popsicle. Sort of like having Dorothy Parker nearby as you sip your martini.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com