Anne Hardy, Outpost, 2007. (Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London)

The approach to London’s Barbican Arts Centre is like a journey to another planet. It’s a bleak spacewalk through an early-’80s concrete jungle — a Thatcherite social experiment with integrated live/work spaces that monopolizes the city’s skyline and polarizes the locals. Depending on your route, you’ll either navigate monster staircases between Brutalist grey towers; cantilevered platforms embedded with modernist fountains that shoot streams of water; or a dark, airless artery blasted through building foundations and spanning several city blocks. If it weren’t unseasonably sunny and warm on the midweek afternoon I decide to visit, the journey would feel like an especially dire expedition to the moon. But I have a touch of spring fever, and I’m feeling intrepid.

Despite its stellar location — at the gateway of the financial district and the north bank of the Thames River — tourists don’t often get around to visiting the Barbican. Its unapproachable greyness is why. London has too much grey, too much confusion, too many alien qualities. Thus the Barbican is the ideal setting for The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, an amusing new exhibit that is charming Londoners.

The “museum” announces its unusual raison d’être on a Martian-green LED monolith at the gallery’s entrance. In a nutshell: Little green men have been observing Earthlings and their obsession with a curious matter they call “art.” In the process, these extraterrestrials have combed our planet for samples (presumably having spent the bulk of their operation lost in SoHo, Soho and East Berlin) and returned home to launch a gallery that explains the stuff to their alien peers.

Július Koller, Universal Futurological Question Mark (U.F.O.), 1978. (Courtesy of Kadist Art Foundation, Paris)

It’s a clever gimmick, and has inspired the London press to haul out some of their best space puns (“Take me to your curator” is one from the Guardian). Francesco Manacorda and Lydia Yee, the show ’s curators, say they were inspired by the opening chapter of Kant after Duchamp by Belgian historian Thierry de Duve, in which an imaginary anthropologist from outer space takes stock of earthly art. (Marcel Duchamp’s controversial Fountain — really a porcelain urinal on its side — figures prominently in the text.) But equally clever is the way Manacorda and Yee have avoided fessing up to what must be the true mission of the show: to educate the skeptical and clueless among us about modern art.

Alas, it is a mission impossible. There are some 200 pieces on display: video, audio, painting, sculpture — and a brass reproduction of Duchamp’s Fountain by Sherrie Levine. But I’ll be damned if I’m any closer to understanding their relevance, even after several loops through the free audio guide, narrated with a wink by a “Martian curator” as articulate as a BBC newsreader.

Just left of Levine’s urinal, Toronto artist and writer Luis Jacob makes an appearance. In all his glory, I might add. The Barbican is showing his 2007 video A Dance for Those of Us Whose Hearts Have Turned to Ice, which was donated by Birch Libralato in Toronto. In it, Jacob does a jig in the snow wearing nothing but a fur cap and a pair of combat boots, while also doing a sort of ribbon dance with T-shirts hanging on plastic coat hangers. It is one of the first things we see as we meander around the Martian Museum. It sets the tone for what is to come.

The works are scattered about in a network of circuits laid out to resemble a computer motherboard and categorized by themes, including “Ancestor Worship,” “Ceremonial Objects” and “ Communication.” From Damien Hirst, we get a minor work incorporating embalmed fish and Perspex. From Joseph Beuys — the late German wunderkind known for his vast installations featuring spears, wolves and dogsleds – we get a minuscule lightbulb-and-lemon contraption entitled Capri Battery. A hot-pink Scott King print features a taut-skinned Cher in a Che Guevara cap (this one hangs, somewhat controversially, in the “Icons” section). Marina Abramovich appears in a nude self-portrait with a pentagram carved into her belly.

Scott King, Pink Cher, 2002. (Courtesy of Herald St, London)

You get the picture — or perhaps, like me, you don’t.

The Barbican punches above its weight in the sphere of avant-garde art, so one can safely assume Manacorda and Yee would have had no trouble getting their hands on some high-profile material — one of Hirst’s formaldehyde cows, perhaps, or Paul McCarthy’s giant inflatable figures. Instead, we get McCarthy’s Heidi File, a floor-to-ceiling reproduction of a VHS box featuring the titular Swiss storybook heroine. Was this the point of the exhibit — to dig up the weirdest of the weirdos and communicate with the Martians on their level? Was it to overload our senses with seriously obscure stuff and force us to find something human in it? Or was all the really good art on loan elsewhere? I’ll give the Barbican the benefit of the doubt — reluctantly.

Having said that, there are some joys here for aficionados of contemporary art at its most outré. In the “Communication” corner, we get Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Surrounded Islands: Biscayne Bay, in which the duo have encircled the Florida islets in what appears to be pink tissue paper. It makes you wonder: Is the entire Christo oeuvre a vehicle for communication with outer space? Leading British light Barbara Hepworth is represented by Icon, a cockeyed, skull-shaped figure likened, by the voice on the audio guide, to the “inhabitants of the Cassiopeian Delta,” a fictional outer-space locale. The Martian narrator goes on to say that a “Cassiopeian agent” might have crossed paths with Hepworth on a reconnaissance tour of Europe in the 1950s and inspired her seminal work. Don’t sweat it if you don’t get it — it’s just lame artistic tomfoolery.

Cultish artist Bruce Nauman is present in My Name As Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon — literally “bbbbbrrrrruuuuuuccccceee” in neon script. Jeffrey Vallance is one of the show favourites; he appears in nearly every room, so we can assume the curators thought his work was really far out. In a 1979 series called Cultural Ties,Vallance wrote to dozens of political figures, instigating an exchange of neckties as a way of forming alliances. He has framed all the ties and cover letters, and in many cases, the recipient has sent a gift of a tie in return. (There are several exceptions: Jeanne Sauvé, Canada’s governor general at the time, was unable to accept the gift, or reciprocate, on ethical grounds.)

Vallance’s work is very amusing. So why don’t we see more like it at the Martian Museum? And why should we even bother to contemplate the opinions of these extraterrestrials who, had they better taste, might have snapped up a Dali or even a Gilbert and George, rather than settling for a naked Luis Jacob? (No offence to Mr. Jacob, of course.)

There’s a conclusion to be drawn here. Human artists go to great and often disturbing lengths to be communicate. Yet they sheath their message in cryptic code. If that’s human nature, why does it seem so alien?

Ellen Himelfarb is a Canadian writer based in London.

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