As far as appreciative adjectives go, ‘cute’ ranks somewhere in between ‘nice’ and ‘pretty’; unless one is referring to the precious hijinks of a domestic furry animal, describing something as ‘cute’ is what we in the biz call “damning by faint praise.” In other words, ‘cute’ is short-hand for “the person who made this collection of rank garbage is somewhere within earshot.” So, ladies and gentlemen, it is a small wonder that, in this, the tail-end of the age of pastiche and irony, no one has yet managed to exploit ‘cute’ with as much success and panache as Bill Burns, in his “Safety Gear for Small Animals” show at the newly installed downtown MoCCA (or, for those among us who refuse to fall into line, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art).

Indeed, Mr. Burns exploits cuteness to such a degree that we are inclined to say that he has managed to turn it into an entire aesthetic unto itself. The premise of the show is deceptively simple: Mr. Burns makes himself out to be the director of a well-meaning (and fictional) society for endangered animal rescue. The show is set up as part of the output of this society – its itinerant museum, to paraphrase his website. And so, upon entering the distinguished industrial-chic white cube of MoCCA, one finds one’s self in the middle of something that would not look out of place in a children’s exhibit at a science and technology museum: precise blueprints, sterile dioramas (both actual and photographed), Bateman-esque wildlife sketches, carefully displayed artifacts with wee tags to inform and educate. And it is all unbearably cute: the three-inch tall safety vests, the miniature camping tents, the itty-bitty safety goggles, the teensy-weensy helmets. If nothing else, this show is certainly consistent.

But the question lingers: so what? Consistent exploitation of cuteness does not a good show make. What’s remarkable here is not so much the cuteness, but rather, what the cuteness is underscored by. Not to sound too much like a bushy-armpitted Greenpeace rainbow warrior, ladies and gentlemen, but when we refer to something as ‘cute,’ we are, in essence, taking the sting out of it; animals aren’t cute, they’re animals. Any doting anthropomorphizing of a pet is done to alleviate our guilt at trapping a wild animal and turning it into what amounts to a helpless, furry infant. And so, what becomes apparent, whether laughing at the “animal rescue strategies” (i.e. smuggling a small crocodile in the hollow of a drum kit) or cooing at the teensy chipmunk safety goggles is that, not only can animals fend just fine for themselves, but if they do find themselves in need of these humanizing accoutrements of survival, it’s because humans are the ones responsible for putting them in that position in the first place. To put it bluntly, the cuteness renders helpless the animals whose precarious fate (endangerment, extinction, etcetera) is the fault of our own greedy rape of Mother Nature.

But let’s not sing any interpretive hosannas quite yet: this isn’t exactly fist-pounding activism; it’s not even Edward Burtynsky. The tone here has more in common with Shauna Dempsey’s and Lori Millan’s Lesbian Ranger performances than anything else. The irony at work here is a gentle irony, and, if there is any tree-hugging passion, it’s blunted (to say the least) by the smugness engendered by Mr. Burns’ mode of presentation. And so we find this show to be floating in something of a limbo. “Safety Gear...” is too bound up in farce, irony and cleverness to achieve any kind of sincerity as a polemic. On the other hand, however, Mr. Burns’ approach is considered and consistent, resulting in a show whose layout is utterly convincing, whose illusion is complete, down to the last screw holding down the glass domes that cover the dioramas, or the “Safety Gear” logo that appears printed alongside the show’s financial sponsors. And perhaps that is the crux of the problem; unlike other work that requires illusion and fictions (like, say, that of Walid Raad), there are no built-in problems or contradictions to set the viewer off on an interpretive tangent, no clue that will uncover the claws behind the cuteness, so to speak. So, it seems that, no matter how thorough one is, the cuteness will always prevail.

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We are of two minds, ladies and gentlemen, about how to proceed with this little review. The show in question is BGL’s (an art collective from Quebec) installation “Need to Believe” at Mercer Union. The elaborate installation is structured like an equally elaborate movie: there is plenty of lead-in, and it concludes with an amusing twist. We ourselves were told not to read reviews of the show before going to see it, as the spoilsport reviewers went and gave away the ending. Thus, we wonder whether we should be equally spoilsport-y; after all, this little apprécie will probably only see the light of day once the show is over and done with, and BGL has stricken the set. So let us, then, proceed apace; it’s not a spoiler if it comes after the fact.

Upon entering an unrecognizable Mercer Union, we immediately think they are under renovation and forgot to lock the doors (although their sidewalk placard was squatting proudly outside the gallery). The only way to go is forward, down a narrow hallway, past a flower pot overflowing with water dripping in from the roof. We approach an unmarked swinging door, and pass through it into another hall. Again, our path is determined for us, leading us through a hole smashed in the wall to our left. Through it we squeeze, into a literal car wreck; the front of an old Chevy has been smashed through the built-in wall, the fluorescent lights overhead flickering on and off. We walk into the next room through yet another enormous hole in the wall, and pass a false fireplace on our way out (to what is, in fact, the front of the gallery proper). The next room is the obverse side of the car wreck; the back of the aforementioned Chevy greets us, and a rudely constructed banister invites us to clamber up atop the trunk of the car and onto its roof. And what do we espy from atop the Chevy? The back of a greasy-haired rocker, whizzing with abandon, “GOD” emblazoned in rhinestones across the shoulders of his Led Zeppelin-esque leather jacket.

So there it is: the set-up and the punch line. And therein lies the rub.

The problem with jokes, ladies and gentlemen, is that you can only tell them once. Likewise, the problem with gallery shows that are set up like jokes is that, past the first visit, the charm tends to wear off, and fast. This is not an installation of much subtlety, or probing wit, so the immediate surprise of seeing “GOD” peeing on our heads is all we get. The quandary, then, is this: if it is a joke, the show is essentially self-sabotaging; our interest tends to droop and wane once the initial frisson wears off. Furthermore, if BGL did not intend this as a joke, but as some sort of Grand Revelatory Statement, well darlings, casting God as a delinquent prankster is trite enough to set our teeth on edge.

This is not to condemn the show; after all, everybody but heaven knows we like a good joke as much as the next artfag. And as far as good jokes go, this rather labour-intensive installation has its tangible rewards; we thought it was worth a titter or three, at any rate. We only wish that the BGL collective had put as much effort into the conceptual structure as they did the physical structure; with all this resourcefulness on display, we tend to wonder what could have been produced had they set their sights higher than a clever punch-line.

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What comes of having a long, untrammeled career is, eventually, garnering a reputation that precedes you. And so, while a generally well-informed plebeian might not necessarily have a flash of recognition at the names Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who have been furiously busy for the past 40 years or so, they most certainly will have a flash of recognition at the descriptor “those guys that wrap things.” Along with that flash of recognition will come the (by now) long belaboured, entirely tedious question “so wrapping things is Art, now?” And so the AGO has structured Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s retrospective, culled entirely from the collection of a certain Mr. Weston, in an effort to circumvent this question, or at least to cut it off at the pass.

Upon entering the first (and least impressive) room of the show, one is faced with what we have come to term the Informative Wall Plaque (IWP, for short), which gives the standard biographical fare, and then takes the most bizarre left turn. All of a sudden, strange details and phrases start creeping up in the text; for instance, the apparently groundbreaking designation “famous yet ephemeral,” as if Chris Burden never had himself shot. And the inclusion of, and emphasis on the fact that Christo is a classically trained drawer and painter in the European tradition, the fact that each project is preceded by innumerable, finely honed sketches and elaborate drawings, to satisfy Christo’s European-trained pictorial rigorousness. Citing their “incorruptibility,” the IWP notes that Christo and Jeanne-Claude are funded solely by sales of aforementioned drawings, plans, etc.. “Incorruptibility”? Now, ladies and gentlemen, we are accustomed to superlatives and hyperboles in IWPs, but the language here is downright ecstatic. So: what can all this subtextual carnie-barking be in aid of? A short look around the room gives us our answer.

We are surrounded by documentation of their finished projects: a photo of a curtain drawn across a valley here, a wrapped Australian butte there, a silver fabric-bedecked Reichstag stretching across middle of the room. And the one thing that strikes us about all this is how unimpressive it is. Don’t mistake us, ladies and gentlemen, the real things must be spectacular in every sense of the word; a 20" x 24" signed photo, however, fails to muster much of anything, let alone awe. And this, we think, must be the reason for the IPW’s lionizing vocabulary. The AGO is at pains to convince us that, lest we doubt the “talent” needed to surround a Floridian island with a swath of pink fabric, we are indeed in the presence not only of blue chip masterworks, but of Art; thus, in case we still haven’t bought this particular bill of goods, the assuaging assurance of the painterly background. Ah, but if only they’d structured the show differently, such pedestrian justifications would have been entirely unnecessary.

The next two rooms are filled with the aforementioned preparatory sketches and drawings of both the pair’s smaller-scale wrappings (telephones, store-fronts) and monumental projects (towering oil barrel Mastabas and enveloped Parisian bridges). Given the inevitable absence of the real sites and finished products, these drawings are the knock-outs of the show, the high points being the sketches for the California/Japan umbrella project.

Even (or perhaps, especially?) for preliminary sketches, they are wonders of technique and concept. All that laborious European tutelage is clearly in evidence: the complicated perspectives, the precise optical effects of site-specific natural light, the dizzying dynamic compositions are all diligently and expertly negotiated. Done in charcoal and pastels on an enormous scale (most of the drawings are wall-sized), the deliriously frenetic marks and smudges tiptoe the line between draughtsman-like precision and all-out anarchic Expressionism. The almost-white eponymous subject of the Running Fence drawing zips and darts its way over a vast smudged-charcoal plane, careening into the distance. In the California/Japan Umbrella project plan, the rhythmic pattern of electrically coloured umbrellas forms a dynamic vertical swoosh set against the frantic umbers and greens of the horizontal landscape. In the Colorado River project, the fabric moves into the distance with just as much ferocity as the river below it. These great, swooping vistas manage to possess the haptic intensity of painters like Pollock and DeKooning, while recalling the Sturm und Drang of romantic landscape painters like Friedrich and Bierstadt.

Thus, the documentary photos are made instantly quaint; they cannot hope to compete with the monumental drawings. The photographs, after all, partake of reality, and are thus woefully limited. This is not a mere matter of scale - the photograph of the wrapped Reichstag is as large as some of the drawings. And this is not to question the potential of photography as a medium; put simply, it is the nature of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work that emasculates the photographs. As massive, site-specific installations, they demand immediate witness and physical presence, thus turning the photographs into mementos, postcards. After all, a document of an experience cannot compete with a lived experience. The drawings are hampered in no such way, precisely because they are plans. What they refer to hasn’t happened yet; they are projections of imagination and ambition, and therein lies their power, their sublimity, and (if we absolutely must get crass about things) their Art.