Art: A gloomy horizon

Were the past 50 years really a period of endless dissolution and anomie, fragmentation and fracture, repression, angst and bad housekeeping, all lived under the specter of a mushroom cloud of atomic dust? Are a beggar's hand, a sighing mirror and prayers in an unfamiliar script the best we can cough up to mitigate the pervasive gloom of recent decades?

Bummer.

Would that it were otherwise, but "Event Horizon," Walker Art Center's three-gallery sample of topical and personal art from its collection -- films, videos, photos, installations, paintings, sculpture, collages -- is really heavy weather. And it's going to be up for nearly three years. True, there will be changes along the way. Films and videos will be switched periodically. Performances will be injected, and paintings and photos may change, too. But it's difficult to imagine a significant alteration to the pervasive mood, which is glum.

Reinstalling a museum's collection is an intellectually and aesthetically demanding balancing act in which curators attempt to lay out a cultural narrative using a small subset of the available art. Because the Walker owns more than 12,000 works in various fields, and the collection galleries can hold only 100 or so, tough choices must be made. Chief curator Darsie Alexander, who joined the Walker's staff a year ago, decided on a broad theme that allows maximum flexibility.

The title comes from physics and astronomy, where, loosely speaking, "event horizon" refers to perceptual shifts in space and time as objects approach black holes. It's sometimes thought of as the point where a black hole seems to gobble up everything that reaches it -- dust, meteors, even light itself. Metaphorically, it might be imagined as the end of the known universe, the spot on ancient maps where ships toppled off the edge of the Earth. For the Walker's purposes it's a classy play on words that lends a patina of scientific sophistication.

Psychology vs. chronology

While historic events are alluded to, the display ignores chronology in favor of psychological continuity between past and present.

The bomb dominates the second gallery, where Bruce Conner's mesmerizing 1976 film "Crossroads" is shown continuously in a temporary theater. Collaged from government clips, it documents a test explosion in which a Pacific island was vaporized by a nuclear bomb.

The third and final gallery is the most diffuse, alternately emotionally repressed and yearning for transcendence.

An alcove of Joseph Cornell collages (framed, boxed, filmed) injects poetic fantasy, a wedding picture on a stack of faux newspapers by Robert Gober recalls limits on gay rights and Kara Walker injects black history into Civil War lithographs. Some vacuous recent Walker purchases show up here, notably a sprawling particleboard "Plateau," by Manfred Pernice of Berlin and an abstract collage by Mark Bradford of Los Angeles.

As a sample of the Walker's multifaceted collection, "Event Horizon" succeeds in dropping a lot of important names, exposing various media and emphasizing a slew of topical issues. But it often feels preachy, disjointed and obligatory. For decades, the Walker's mantra, like that of many contemporary art institutions, has been that contemporary art breaks down the barriers between life and art. If so, it's a gloomy and dispiriting job.