ART REVIEW : ‘FUTURE’: MORE THAN A WISTFUL LOOK AT A BOMB

“Imagine There’s a Future.” What a solicitous title for a festival commemorating a nuclear holocaust. What a pacific way to remember a military attack that instantly snatched more than 100,000 lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and insidiously devastated thousands more.

The name has a wistful ring, and that’s fortunate. Few art lovers go to galleries to get bummed out by bombs, and no one really wants to celebrate the 40th anniversary of such an appalling event. With that knowledge in mind, festival organizers wisely chose to look forward as well as back, offering the sanguine thought that there could be a future and, what’s more, a future free from nuclear threat.

This, of course, amounts to a liberal political stance. No simple memorial service for Asians incinerated in a nuclear blast, “Imagine There’s a Future” has moved squarely into the controversial arena of the arms race and fanned out to address everything from prejudice against Asians to alleged evils of the Reagan Administration.

The visual art component of the citywide event (which also encompasses symposiums, religious services and theater) is as complex and scattered as the festival itself. Exhibitions roam through nine show spaces and range from dry documentation and political tracts to juicy artworks.

The festival has the sound of a grass-roots happening, booked into an odd assortment of community galleries and social centers, but it has the look of a movement that has cut a wide swath through Los Angeles’ population of artists. You can count dozens of unknown participants along with names as prominent as Lita Albuquerque, Jonathan Borofsky, Edward Ruscha, Mary Corse, Robert Heinecken and John Baldessari.

“Imagine There’s a Future” is nothing if not expansive. There’s a ragged entourage of predominantly political work at the Social and Public Art Resources Center (SPARC) Gallery in the old Venice jail (to Aug. 31); a fashionably messy gathering of Neo-Expressionist art at Attack Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard (to Aug. 10); a carefully selected little show of trenchant photographs at USC Atelier in the Santa Monica Place shopping center (to Sept. 1), and an elegant exhibition of first-rate art by well-known figures at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo (to Aug. 4).

Predictable? Well, only partly. Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies’ provocative show, “Outspeak” (to Aug. 16), includes some mixed-media works as well as expected photographs. And one of the best feminist pieces is not at the Woman’s Building but at Thinking Eye, where Dave Quick has installed his “Peacekeeper Pig” assemblage in the window (to Aug. 10).

You push a red button “to activate the pig” and thus set in motion a plastic phallic-missile on the back of a toy porker, a diaphragm as radar screen and who-knows-what-all. A sign announces that this hilarious send-up of macho war games celebrates Helen Caldicott’s concept of “missile envy” and pays homage to Norman Meyer, “who died at the base of Washington Monument while trying to red flag the arms race.”

The Woman’s Building, on the other hand, has two engrossing shows (to Aug. 30) by artists who don’t believe there will ever be enough shovels to dig ourselves out of a nuclear aftermath. They point out the absurdity of planning for life after radiation by posting enlarged newspaper articles on such subjects as contingency plans for processing the U.S. mail, post-holocaust.

Laura Silagi and Megan Williams bring this tunnel-vision mentality into television focus in “Media Bird.” Their life-size paper sculpture of an ostrich sticks its head through the screen of a TV set that protrudes from a pile of sand. The piece has nothing to do with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it has everything to do with thinking before doing it again. The big bird says it all with a strong image and a shot of wit.

In the cafe gallery, Deborah Small has done an ambitious installation called “Half a Still Life/Still a Half Life.” Two little round tables hold handmade, illustrated books mixing memories of Dick and Jane readers with realities of The Bomb. Behind the tables, Small has covered two walls with square, cheerful-looking canvases bearing such statements as “No one sends a postcard from Bikini Atoll,” along with a tropical scene, or “Atom follows atoll” on a panel with dictionary definitions of both words. The painting--done in a childlike style with bright colors and black outlines--is so gay and the message so grim, experiencing the art is rather like biting into a cookie that detonates in your mouth.

In context with such blatantly political works and art addressing such horrifying subjects as injuries sustained by bombing victims, the exhibition at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center seems strikingly out of character. Guest curator Noriko Fujinami has assembled a superior group of works in the most proper-looking art show of the festival, but the art presents some curious conundrums.

In the first place, several pieces have been shown before in relatively neutral situations with no anti-nuclear connections. Yet here we see Mary Corse’s seductive black paintings and Susan Kaiser Vogel’s wooden abstract sculpture, “Mother and Child,” related to the 1945 bombing. Tom Wudl’s paintings of figures and symbolic life forces have always seemed to be about mystical matters, but now they are in an anti-war show where they acquire the onus of radiation. Likewise, Lita Albuquerque’s installations, continuing her long involvement with spiritual transcendence and cosmic order.

Morgan Thomas’ “Cold War Negotiating Table” and “Unarmed Chairs” stand almost alone in their direct connection to the festival. Even Masayuki Oda’s “Winter,” a chilling floor sculpture with little architectural remnants and trees scattered across a vast white base, might not be seen as a nuclear winter if it were shown elsewhere. And Edward Ruscha’s quite marvelous paintings of the word future and of the Earth floating between two green onions set the mind to spinning in all sorts of imaginative directions.

This makes you wonder whether these artists intended their works to be seen in current context or whether the festival has given them new meaning. A more interesting question is whether the high level of sophistication in their art automatically renders it more subtle than works cranked out for a theme show.

Collaborative festivals always have their problems. This one undoes itself with too many unwieldly group shows. Some artists dissipate their works through several galleries when a single, larger installation would have more impact. People who actually make the full rounds are bound to yearn for more distinction between shows and for more cohesion within them. They are also bound to get the point that concern over the arms race is pervasive.

“Imagine There’s a Future” was organized by the Hollywood Women’s Coalition in association with the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race and other religious and humanitarian organizations.