Are we having fun yet?

        Visitors to the Contemporary Arts Center are flying and scooting around the room, spacing out in a laser show, throwing balls, playing Ping-Pong, throwing pillows at each other and ducking a propeller-driven flying plant.

        And that's when they're not watching the cotton candy dance.

OTHER EXHIBITS

An Active Life closes next Sunday. The Elements remains until Dec. 10. Sweet Illusions and Lezley Saar: Africans, Rap Thugs-n-Dimes continues through Nov. 5. Leaf Leap stays until Jan. 14.    The CAC is at 115 E. Fifth St., downtown. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission is $3.50, $2 for seniors and students. 721-0390.

        The CAC is celebrating An Active Life, a group exhibition of artists who make interactive art. This is work that viewers can get involved with, more or less, one way or another. Two other exhibitions, Leaf Leap and Sweet Illusions, enhance the concept.

        The flying is done in Carsten Holler's “Flying Machine,” a device that straps viewers in for a midair merry-go-round ride under the CAC dome. Kids on school tours love it, but they can't fly in it without parents' permission. So they usually watch their teachers flying and that's fun enough. Some who do fly complain that it doesn't revolve fast enough.

        The most spectacular work in the exhibition is Hiro Yamagata's laser installation, The Elements, a mirror-lined room filled with revolving mirrored cubes. Lasers and other lights create a dizzying, hypnotic light show that lasts 45 minutes. Experience it once, and you'll want to go back again and again.

        Jonathan Borofsky has supplied a Ping-Pong table, one-half painted white with a minus sign on it, the other side painted black with a plus sign on it. Get the message? It's not very deep.

        Richard Wearn shows an inflated mattress upon which we are invited to lounge, but it's made redundant by Kim Abeles' installation Leaf Leap, where you lie on the floor and fling leaf-shaped pillows while watching images of trees on a projection screen.
       

Motion and sensation

        The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville predicted this kind of art 170 years ago.

        In Democracy in America,he wrote that American democracy would change the character of art itself. The emphasis would be away from the soul and toward the body; the arts would prefer motion and sensation to sentiment and thought. In a democracy, he wrote, “the productions of artists are more numerous, but the merit of each production is diminished.”

        So watch the cotton candy dance. “Sweet Illusions,” a karaoke-style video on a big split screen, shows cotton candy being spewed out of a candy-making machine.

        Adriana Arenas Illian is the artist, and young love is the theme. The screen is split so that one half of it mirrors the other, making the pink candy move in ways that suggest modern dance. A small screen provides lyrics for a love song. It's an amusing installation, almost as engaging as the lasers.
       

Intellectual theme parks

        Work by work, artist by artist, there's nothing very deep here. And some of the works are not as interactive as they promise. Some have to be demonstrated by gallery guides. But as a group, the works illustrate an aspect of contemporary art that's likely to grow.

        As the fine arts are more and more in competition with popular media, museums and galleries are eager to find artists and art that cater to audiences of today that need constant variety and activity. Motion and sensation are winning over de Tocqueville's “sentiment and thought.”

        Museums may shift away from being places of quiet, aesthetic meditation and become intellectual theme parks, where there are games to be played and volumes to be written about the meanings of the games. But artists are unpredictable, so as soon as museums gear up to become fine art fun houses, artists will be doing something else.
       

An Active Life, Sweet Illusions and Leaf Leap are related exhibitions at the CAC. Lezley Saar's non-action painting exhibition, Africans, Rap Thugs-n-Dimes, celebrates the stars of rap music with sassy, square format paintings that suggest CD covers.
       

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