Mapping a disorderly world

'Out of Order: Mapping Social Space' Through May 27. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays; noon to 5 p.m. Sundays Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 6300 Fifth Ave., Shadyside Admission: $3; $2 for students and seniors (412) 361-0873

A mapmaker is best understood as a scientist, struggling to convey data about the perceived world with the greatest intelligibility. But maps can only convey so much data, and the cartographer has to edit his material.

The analogy of mapmaking is applied, somewhat loosely, to the activities of the eight artists in the current show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, 'Out of Order: Mapping Social Space.'

There, aspects of the world as social organisms, rather than as geography, are pinned down and examined. These eight artists are cultural scientists, probing the confusion of contemporary society, and each one of them has evolved a separate point of view. Modern cultural historians know their work is open-ended and shifting. One has written that 'to be confused by culture is to know culture' (Philip Brophy).

Guillermo Kuitca's paintings and drawings envision a world in which the space allocated for human beings is carefully deliberated. The seating plan for a public theater, for example, sets out in radiating grids the arrangements for accommodating a cultural event - dress circle, balconies, stalls and so on. The individual seats, or cells, AA01 or PP34, seem convenient enough niches.

But suppose these ground plans were to be not a place of cultural interaction, but instead, a prison. Or the site plan of a graveyard. Or a concentration camp. The scenario becomes Kafka-esque. Kuitca's grandparents lie buried in a Jewish cemetery in Buenos Aires, where a large map identifies their location in this mortuary diaspora. Piranesi couldn't, even in his darkest etchings, create a more suffocating environment.

Kathy Prendergast looks down on cities from on high. Her infinitely beautiful drawings trace the patterns of streets and alleyways to reveal the organic evolution of the town plan. The analogy of the heart, with veins, arteries and tiny capillaries is unavoidable, tracing the unending circulatory flow of existence. These drawings are not accurate blueprints of the city, but poetic reconfigurations of it, fitting the material into Prendergast's grid. Twenty-two bird's-eye views of capital cities are on show at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, part of Prendergast's ambitious scheme to illustrate all 180 (or so) of the world's capitals.

Andreas Gursky, who currently has a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, creates monumental photographs that seemingly present the world as it is. However, Gursky has altered his images by elaborate computer manipulation. The interior of a hotel in Atlanta is presented in a 6-by-9-foot format. The detail is numbing. The repetition of the hotel rooms has something in common with Kuitca's, serried, as though it were score on score. The saturated color and lighting effects momentarily convince, but seconds later, a doubletake occurs. How can this all be• one asks. Gursky's analysis is brutal and effective: The superficiality of life is rendered in cinemascope, in technicolor and with cunning artifice.

Flow charts and other forms of mapping are at the apparent heart of Mark Lombardi's tracking of public scandals in the corporate world. Charts of people associated with 'hot money' are presented on the 'six degrees of separation' plan. The Vatican Bank, the Silverado Savings Bank of Denver and Colorado real estate developers are all implicated in the massive graphic indictments.

The DNA double helix, the last word in identity, is taken by Manglano-Ovalle and transformed into a series of portraits. Although the resulting images are decorative enough, the work amounts to a somewhat arid formula. Similarly, Peter Halley's complex installation also is formulaic. A single painting outlines the 'conduits' by which urban society is interconnected, but the clarity of the painting is obfuscated by Halley's decision to surround it with Warholian wallpaper. A computerized 'painting by numbers' program, in another part of the gallery, takes the matter further toward interactivity but adds little to the original painting.

Mary Ellen Carroll's '100 German Men' is a third-rate work that draws on our memories of better art. The well-known series of documentary photographs of German men by August Sander is evoked in Carroll's work. More locally, the work of Lee Herschenson asks the same questions she asks, and does it to better effect.

Barry Berkus is an architect, unlike the other artists in this exhibition, and his approach to the complexities of contemporary culture is more utopian. 'Millennium House,' 1999, is a small installation which proposes a type of building that is capable of adapting to the complex needs of modern man, anticipating the future social landscape. The principle is a good one, except that when you see many such buildings, interacting in the same landscape, one thinks of the analogy of a can of worms.

This exhibition is much better that you might think. It is a little chaotic, but it examines the chaos of contemporary culture. Parts of it are excellent. Unfortunately, the catalog does not help to clarify the more complex passages of the exhibition.

Graham Shearing can be reached at gshearing@tribweb.com .