Near the end of Wong Kar-wai’s 1990 film, Days of Being Wild, the character Yuddy invokes the legend of the bird with no legs for a second time: “I used to think there was a kind of bird that, once born, would keep flying until death. The fact is that the bird hasn’t gone anywhere. . . .” Meanwhile, the camera peers out over lush Philippine jungle, from the same vantage as during the film’s opening credits. The legend of the bird without legs was not invoked by the artist collective FORT in their recent exhibition “Lou,” yet the show’s stylized, meandering approach seemed to invite such a capricious association. The artists converted Exile’s new gallery space into a theater using four elements: a purple carpet, a collection of brown, one-legged stools, a wall-mounted light reading lou, and a structure supporting motorized blinds to open and close in front of the space on the wall where a sequence of three videos was projected. Together, these elements make up the work Lou, 2012. The extreme attention to detail—the vibrant color palette, the stools’ eccentric design, and the synchronization of sounds, lights, and mechanical movements—bordered on excessive while generating a palpable sense of the artists’ control over the setting.

At the outset of the work’s cycle, the blinds opened to reveal a video of a large indoor pool with swimmers doing laps at different paces. Suddenly, all of them dropped below the water’s surface. The murmur of voices and lapping waves went silent, and the first video came to an end. A Muzak-style sound track filled the gallery, the blinds slowly closed, and the light reading LOU blinked on. LOU, it turns out, is a reference to the name in some children’s games for the safe area where one can’t be tagged, but which one has to leave to reenter the game. After a short interval—the light having been turned off, the music having stopped—the blinds reopened. The second video consisted of a close-up on the face of an orangutan as it fell asleep. After the end of that video and after another interval, the third part began: From a point soaring through the air, the camera peered out over a dense forest and then arrived at a patch of treeless land where a circle of people held a firefighter’s life net outstretched. It was white with two parallel black lines in the center, like a pause button, as if inviting viewers to leap into a suspended state. The blinds closed shortly thereafter, and the cycle began again.

In fact, this sequence had no progression in a traditional narrative sense. Instead, it perpetually suspended any progress in an attempt to give viewers pause. For their part, viewers could bear witness only from a position balanced, ever precariously, on the one-legged stools. With no plot arc to rely on, we were left feeling like the bird with no legs—nothing gained after prolonged drifts in the slipstreams, no closer to concrete meanings than at the beginning. At best, the theatergoing experience could be seen as an end in itself. With an overabundance of style, some humor, a bit of mild excitement, and a ponderous effect, the exhibition developed an odd and appealing type of substance.

—John Beeson