Portrait of an actor as an artist

In addition,Franco’s recent appearances on the soap opera General Hospital as a handsome,enigmatic,platitude-spouting installation artist named Franco have earned him something of a cult following. Against this complex backdrop,art seems to be just one more feather in his cap. But maybe not. Franco is making his New York debut with The Dangerous Book Four Boys,an exhibition of video,drawings,sculptures and an installation piece or two at the Clocktower Gallery.

Not surprisingly,there is quite a bit of boyish danger in the show: frequent violence,mindless destruction,kinky sex of several kinds and a nearly complete absence of women.

Scatter Piece consists of stuff from Franco’s actual childhood room strewn about in familiar disarray; Burning House consists of a plywood house with videos of an identical structure burning rapidly to a crisp projected on its interior.

In the video Rocket,a playground-like plywood rocket ship explodes again and again,beautifully shot from different angles and distances and then edited into rapid-fire bursts. Another video of a perfectly nice little red playhouse being reduced to smithereens by off-camera rifles suggests a new disclaimer along the lines of “No objects were pointlessly destroyed in the making of this movie.”

One film stars Franco with a prosthetic penis on his face,but the real star is the City of Light,dreamily shot to the tunes of French singers. Double Third Portrait is an amazingly pretentious pastiche of performance art,experimental film and appropriated voice-overs and flaming arrows. But at least in these works you sense some kind of artist yearning to be free,or maybe better.

The best by far is Masculinity & Me. This 20-minute sequence of related fragments begins with Franco describing the impression made on him by videos of the artist Paul McCarthy’s often over-the-top performances. It then careers among scenes of an appealing young blond man discussing his father,his inability to use public urinals and his general unease with norms of masculinity; masked men delivering sexually graphic McCarthy-like monologues in hotel rooms; jump cuts of photographs of that artist’s sculptures; and,most hilariously,a staged interview with a bearded clown clearly meant to be McCarthy about the childhood sexual trauma that formed the basis of his art.

A recurring theme in the coverage of Franco’s many interests is that we’re all being punked. That the whole thing is one extended,ironic performance piece. Despite all his industriousness,as an artist Franco is only beginning to make his own “romantic stab at the world.” His emphasis should be on worldliness,not romance.