EUROPEANISM.(Douglas Gordon, Franz West; video installation art; Gagosian Gallery)

A video installation at the Gagosian Gallery features a performance by an Indian elephant. The video, which is the work of the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, who shot it last year in the gallery, is entitled "Play Dead; Real Time."The elephant's name is Minnie. Viewers enter a vast, darkened room to watch Minnie "playing dead"on two standing screens and a TV monitor. Brightly lit in pristine, empty surroundings, the immense animal lies on one side, perfectly still except for an open, blinking eye that is as soulful as anything the size of a bowling ball can be. Getting up is tough for her. She rocks on her back to build momentum, then heaves herself over. One leg is caught under her flabby mass. She pauses wearily, surges to her forefeet and hind knees, then hauls herself erect. Being an elephant is hard work.

Like most installations by Gordon, who is a thirty-seven-year-old fixture on the circuit of grand international exhibitions of contemporary art, "Play Dead; Real Time"is visually elegant and conceptually nuanced. In sequences that slip into and out of synch with one another on the different screens, the camera glides around Minnie, scrutinizing her baggy, wrinkly, bristly mountainousness--her pachydermity. I felt that I had never looked seriously at an elephant before. Was her gaze, as she did her dopey trick, pained and reproachful? I felt embarrassed for her and for myself. As viewers walked around the room, performing their own kind of learned behavior, their shadows fell on the screens, making them part of the spectacle. A meditation on the extremes of nature and artifice, the piece creates theatre out of some pretty basic philosophical questions. It does so with no-comment cool.

Gordon's installation is one-half of a two-man show at the Gagosian. The other artist on view is Franz West, an Austrian who is represented by, among other things, large paper and even larger aluminum sculptures. The paper constructions are rugged, boulderlike masses, approximately five feet high, that are splashed with many colors of lacquer and acrylic. They taper toward the bottom, resting daintily on embedded paint cans, metal tubing, chair legs, and other bits of junk. Executed with the elan of a lyrical abstract painter, they look like huge floral bouquets for a cartoon giant. The metal sculptures are welded, woozy shapes; they include a circular corral of zigzagging, crumpled tubing, more than sixteen feet in height, and a long vertical stem, twenty feet tall, that swells at various points into lumpy spheres, like a monstrous topiary. These works come in startling colors--nursery pink, seasick green, milk-fed-baby's-diaper brown--and they are utterly infectious. Suitable for a public setting, they suggest Apollonian monuments striving to hold their shape against inchoate Dionysian impulses. Like Gordon's "Play Dead,"they have a gregarious aplomb that strikes me as peculiarly European.

West, who is fifty-six, is an important figure in European art, but he is not well known in the United States. He first made his name in Vienna, in the late nineteen-sixties, on the heels of a crazy local movement called Actionism, which involved the performance of blood sacrifice, self-mutilation, infantile tantrums, and other assaults on bourgeois propriety in the name of a violent, socially cleansing anarchy. The movement's high point was a group effort at Vienna University in 1968. One artist stripped, cut himself with a razor blade, urinated, excreted, drank his own urine, smeared himself with excrement, masturbated, and vomited. The audience sat stunned. Then a student stood up and said, "Thank you very much. I enjoyed your performance enormously."Turning to the audience, he said, "I think these gentlemen have earned a round of applause."The student was Franz West.

Over the years, West has lost none of his puckishness. He is a masterly, droll manipulator of exhibition spaces as zones in which art overlaps with life. He blurs private and public behavior in his own life, having embraced communal living arrangements and a certain degree of chaos. (He gave up drinking a few years ago, on doctor's orders.)

West's art satirizes dewy presumptions of creative spontaneity. His largest body of work consists of what he calls "Passtucke"("Adaptables”)--oddly shaped plaster and papier-mache objects that suggest prostheses or medical implements. They are meant to be picked up and played with by the viewer, who may ...