By Glen Helfand

THE FIRST PICTURES in "I Love My Time, I Don't Like My Time: Recent Work by Erwin Wurm," the Austrian artist's first full-scale U.S. survey, are from a 2002 to 2003 series called Politically Incorrect. In one of the large color photographs, one man kneels before another, placing his arm impossibly deep inside the other's pants. Title: Looking for a Bomb. The deadpan expressions on the men's faces are businesslike – this isn't a sexy scenario even if it does elicit an uncomfortable chuckle. It's more like an airport security pat-down, a topical, serious manifestation of contemporary life.

In this satisfying show, organized by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the balance between humor and seriousness is key. Wurm is an artist who seduces with dry physical comedy and low-tech video tricks, yet he deals in themes – like religion, humiliation, and the transitory nature of time – you wouldn't laugh at directly. In other words, he's an artist whose worldview is a good match for these difficult days. He creates things that have the capacity to make us smile and hopefully think.

Wurm is best known for his One Minute Sculptures, wacky actions that can be enacted by anyone daring enough to make an endearing fool of him- or herself. Wurm offers instructions for futile actions, such as balancing a potato on top of a toilet brush; holding many mineral water bottles between your arms and legs; being pinned to the floor with a full suitcase; or stuffing office supplies in your nose, mouth, eyes, and ears. These actions, with playful roots in Fluxus performance and Alan Kaprow's "Happenings," are presented in a number of forms. There's a video compilation of the One Minute Sculptures, color photographs, and a white platform with instructions modestly written in pencil for gallery-goers to squeeze into, two at a time, a single sweater or dangle a coat hanger, with coat, from their mouths. These latter actions can be immortalized in a Polaroid shot by the security guard. For $100, you can send it to Wurm, who will sign the thing, notarizing its status as art.

Questioning, if not quite challenging, the idea of turning a goofy gesture into an object of aesthetic or art market value is but one of the intriguing aspects of Wurm's project. There's a democracy in the points of entry, yet the decision to notarize the experience with an official signature is up to the viewer. It almost seems like Wurm is poking fun at the self-seriousness of the art's context.

On the wall labels, the organizers make much of the accessibility of Wurm's art. The Red Hot Chili Peppers' 2002 video for "Can't Stop," which was officially "inspired" by Wurm's art, plays in the lobby. It demonstrates the adaptable nature of the artist's conceptual strategy – it functions quite well as commercial-art-as-high-art, not to mention as a form of amusement.

While most of the exhibition is photographic, Wurm considers himself a sculptor. It therefore makes sense that the centerpiece is the three-dimensional Fat House, a life-size cabin with bulging exterior walls that resemble the protruding flesh folds of the Pillsbury Doughboy. The storybook-style abode, topped with a firm, rust-colored roof, is the kind of large-scale sculpture the main Yerba Buena Center gallery was designed for, and it fills the space nicely even if it isn't Wurm's strongest work. On a wall inside, you can watch a video featuring a similarly bulbous Fat Car. It has an animated face and a deep male voice that utters strange phrases like "I became a gangster / I wanted blue mist / I needed a friend." It's drug dealer lingo, which seems to be part of the subtext of expanded frames, be it flesh, buildings, or states of mind.

Throughout his career, Wurm has used common clothing to create sculpture. The 1992 video 59 Positions features people squeezed into sweaters and pants in unusual ways that have them looking quite unlike human figures. The effect is delightfully sculptural, not to mention eerie. Over the years, the artist has also persuaded his curators to don layer upon layer of clothing to the point of bulking them up. Here Yerba Buena Center curator Rene de Guzman submits to the potentially humiliating process, padding himself with bubble wrap. That Wurm titles the piece Curator/Imperator, and enlarges the photo to just larger than life-size, reveals how size may indeed matter, or at least is metaphorically projected on people, when power is concerned.

Wurm's universe equates largeness with the sin of sloth. In How to Go from Men's Size L to XL in 8 Days, a text-based piece from 1993 (included in the hefty catalog published for the show), Wurm prescribes late sleeping, slow movements, and a version of the Atkins Diet with carbs restored. (In the United States, the subject of weight gain opens a direct line to various forms of social discomfort, if not the supreme theatrical sacrifice of, say, Renée Zellweger becoming Bridget Jones.) For Instructions for Idleness, a series from 2001, the artist appears in captioned photographs that instruct viewers to yawn, remain indifferent, nap on the office toilet, and regularly get stoned. Both pieces imply a commitment to a practice that extends far beyond a single minute. It's clear from this seriously entertaining exhibition that Wurm is in it for the long haul. 'I Love My Time, I Don't Like My Time: Recent Work by Erwin Wurm' runs through Jan. 9, 2005. Sun. and Tues.-Wed., noon-6 p.m.; Thurs.-Sat., noon-8 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, S.F. $6, $3 seniors, students, and youths, free members (also free first Tues.). (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org.