Dinner to Go (and Go)
Gallery society frozen on video
KENNETH BAKER, Chronicle Art Critic
Friday, February 28, 1997

Anyone who attends a few gallery show openings learns quickly that they are about seeing people, not art. Contemporary art offers, among other things, a pretext for socializing, even if it tends to attract the same crowd over and over.

Bay Area conceptual artist Guy Overfelt has made these facts the basis of his show at Four Walls. Overfelt invited 18 guests -- art mavens chosen to represent the region's cultural elite -- to a dinner at Four Walls, served by the gallery proprietors and himself. As servers, Overfelt and the gallery owners acted out their dependence on collectors and other art benefactors. Abjection has been a preoccupation of much '90s art, but here Overfelt gives it the emotional blankness of a convenience-store surveillance tape.

A table for 18 was set among four freestanding walls that Overfelt built to lean against the gallery's own walls. The guests, table and leavings are long gone, but the internal walls remain, helping to darken the gallery by blocking off the windows.

The show consists of the artificial walls and a two-hour-40-minute sound-synch video of the dinner party. The tape is projected on the north panel from the same vantage point the camera had, the upper southwest corner of the room. The panel that now serves as a projection screen is included in the image we see thrown onto it.

A mishmash of references shakes out of Overfelt's dinner-as- art, from Leonardo's ``Last Supper'' and Pierre-Auguste Renoir's ``Luncheon of the Boating Party'' to Allan Kaprow's ``Happenings,'' Daniel Spoerri's assemblages of unwashed dishes and Judy Chicago's feminist pantheon, ``The Dinner Party.''

Of course, the action in the unedited video transpires in real time as we watch it.

Yet the two time tracks seem to diverge and merge again as one's attention moves into and out of the recorded dinner party. One is by turns amused, bored or incensed by the idea of an exhibition's private opening as its content, and ultimately sorry or glad not to have been invited.

Overfelt shows that our feelings about certain collective rituals are a factor in how contemporary art is framed socially. The idea of art world sociology as sufficient art content is not new. It goes back at least to the early work of Hans Haacke and Tom Marioni. But give Overfelt credit for helping the culture to get this idea out of its system.

``Four Real Walls.'' Video installation by Guy Overfelt, through March 8 at Four Walls, 3160-A 16th St., San Francisco. Noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. (415) 626-8515.