I went to a car-wash today and there is no exaggerating the spectacle — this is enjoyment. First, observe the menu of magically clean services available for your car’s funny anatomy. Underbelly Slide Wax Sealant. Interior Vac-Down Fragrance Bomb. Straight Sparkle Wash. Next, throw the car into neutral, take your foot off the clutch, surrender all responsibility and decision-making, and sit back to watch the hilarious foam and giggly bubbles as they are smeared and smacked by flapping blue felt. Whirling brushes dance into you and then away as inconsequential anxiety floods in and out. Then through a rain shower and finally a tornado, where little beads of water hover and wiggle in the air under the wind-pressure of 200 pounds. With colder winds, grayer skies, and less exuberant commercial language, Midtown in February has nothing on the car-wash.

Upon entering the Equitable Center’s lobby, a huge Roy Lichtenstein looms like verticality itself above a dark-green marble seating area. A polite security guard request to leave the beverage outside, a rigorous backpack check, a rough jab and jostle by half of New York’s aggressive business population — unpleasantries everywhere. From a less hectic angle outside the building (where I was put to finish my juice), a hundred blue legs dangled from a white tutu, pillowy cylinders forming a smurfish forest. Yeah...this was it, the entrance to AXA gallery. As I crept through the ethereal stalactites (Lee Bronson’s Slurry, 2001) which were about a foot in diameter and thirteen feet long, the sounds from the angry lobby faded bouncingly. Beyond the heavy glass doors, whiteness, a low motorized hum, and an odd humidity tugged me into “Thin Skin: the Fickle nature of Bubbles, Spheres, and Inflatable Structures. ”

The show itself, curated by Barbara Clausen and Carin Kuoni, is anything but fickle, demonstrating a clear visual objective and a commitment to the concept of air and space as an ether-like paradoxical construction of substance and void. Most of the works in the mid-sized show are installation/sculpture or video. With curving, translucent velum walls, light wood floors, a drowsy noise, and balmy temperature the space seemed as though it could float away at any moment. Like the moving floor of the car wash, the pieces compel the viewer effortlessly through the show. With two elaborate structures at the gallery’s threshold, one a foamy web, the other a fishbowl living room, aporia settles nicely into the cracks of these cloud castles. Is this void or substance? Synthesis or dissolution? And what of art if it is neither full nor empty? Weighty philosophical issues for a 20-person Midtown show.

Annika von Hausswolf’s aptly named photographs, Attempting to Deal with Space and Time, show a woman wearing jeans in an embrace with a latex balloon about the size of a bed pillow, though more amorphously shaped. Her arms mold it roughly to their shape, indicating von Hausswolf’s link between the subject’s amorous possession of the balloon (space, if not time) and her ability to “deal with” time and space. The capturing of “space” (or air) in the balloon foreshadows the captivity of the subject in the photograph. The freezing of the moment that characterizes photography has long been accused of leadening the subject in premature death. The obscuring of the woman’s face, then, may be von Hausswolf’s preservation of the present in denial of Barthes’s sense of immanent decay. Von Hausswolf’s provocative photographs are a good example of the precision of many of the seemingly frivolous works in the show.

Fiona Tan’s Lift, a series of three video stills and a silkscreen of a video still, is another piece whose format and medium augments the basic artistic idea. In all three video pieces, children hold large red balloons in an Amsterdam park as they run through the lush greenery under a gray sky. The silk-screen shows a man strapped to a number of large, helium-filled balloons and suspended in the air above aggressively green trees. The jumping of the video images in the viewer’s periphery, as with all LCD displays, is a tribute to the repetitive life of the image, its re-statement of itself at every moment in its existence, which is at once in the present and in the past. The implied motion of the video still as opposed to a photograph alludes to action and possibly even a narrative. The viewer is instantly challenged to imagine what happened before and after the still images.

The inflatable Siamese Breath, by Sutee Kunavichayanont (1999), invites more participation by the viewer. Disposable straws are ready at hand to blow up the seated silicone figures, one yellow, one white, who are joined at the ass. Previous to inflation, they slump over a steel frame that supports their arms and heads, the position to which they return about a minute after you breathe posture into them. The mouthpieces attach to long, umbilicus cords that link the breather’s mouth to the figures who awaken as they are filled with air. The use of the umbilical cord refers again to the spherical, rounded aesthetic of the show, as it invites an image of a domed pregnant belly. In some senses like a mother, the power of creation that the viewer feels in this piece suggests a fallacious power of invention. God-status is achieved by the one who gives life, but is soon rescinded as the creation shrivels and prepares to pay homage to a new creator: the next person who walks by.

Across the room is Elin Wikstrom’s What Does A Human Being Do When There Is Nothing To Be Done? This installation is animated by a highly charged space between the viewer and the subject of the piece, who is hired to sit quietly on a couch. The subject is surrounded at equal intervals by recognizable cartoon-figure mylar balloons while a thunderous whisper echoes in the room, “What does a human being do when there is nothing to be done?” The person remains on the couch, unspeaking and unmoving, as the spectator is forced into the uncomfortable freak-show situation of both watching and being watched. Elmo, Bullwinkle, huge bananas, and the Tazmanian Devil increase the bizarre poignancy with their buoyant, yet frozen stares in no particular direction. Alarmed by my quick descent from life-giver to voyeuse, I scoot quickly into the next room, which houses a reconstructed Andy Warhol installation from 1967, Silver Clouds.

Eleven large mylar pillows hover around the ceiling, twisting and changing places with one another. Occasionally one falls to the ground, or pushes another into a corner where it gets stuck. A fan near the ceiling forces the “clouds” into constant motion. With wisps of my hair sticking to their static surfaces and my reflected face bobbing in a dozen places above my head, I notice I feel clean again, thinking this show is a bit like a Winter Gray Super Twinkle Shine-Up. A cloud escapes the air current at the top of the room and lands on my feet. Its light thud against my shoes sounds restful and satisfying like a penny on a big foam mattress. I can do nothing but look at it and giggle, wondering whether I should toss it back up to the ceiling, or let it move as it will...and which strategy would make me a more responsible viewer of art. I kick it slightly to the side, resume drivership, and emerge from the blue pillow legs onto the steely sidewalk.