ART REVIEWS : TWO EXHIBITIONS THAT SHOW AND TELL

Two current exhibitions sponsored by USC bring us people up close and personal. Any closer and we’d see the fillings in their teeth; any more personal and we’d read their diaries. Such exercises prove just how far art’s emotional pendulum has swung since Minimal Cool reigned supreme in the ‘70s. Now we have art inspired--if that’s the right word--by the horrors of mental retardation, nursing homes and cancer.

At Fisher Gallery on campus, Ruth Weisberg (a USC professor) bares her soul in a group of large paintings and smaller graphic works collectively called “A Circle of Life” on view through March 4.

USC Atelier, the university’s outpost in the Santa Monica Place shopping center, offers “People: Close-Up,” an exhibition of photographs and videotapes by six artists, through Sunday.

Addressing universal truths through personal experiences, Weisberg paints and draws herself (as well as family members, friends and historical kindred spirits) involved in consequential issues: her Jewish legacy and the Holocaust, her own confrontation of death during a bout with cancer, her hopes for her children and her perception of life as a “journey into exile.”

The overarching theme of the show is continuity and renewal. To this end, Weisberg has worked out a technique of showing overlays of time and place in a single picture. Her oils--on big, unstretched canvases--look rather like watercolors or her familiar lithographs, with representational images drawn on washy backgrounds.

Reliving memories of her youth, Weisberg sets herself in the Art Institute of Chicago, amid Indiana sand dunes where her family used to vacation and in Perugia, Italy, where she lived as a student. A ghostlike presence, she also visits the bombed-out Danzig synagogue and appears with re-creations of admired artworks--Masaccio’s “Expulsion From Paradise” and Velasquez’s “Las Meninas.” Generally light in color and eerie in atmosphere, her work is heavy with historical and sociological meanings.

According to catalogue essays, including excerpts from interviews with the artist, Weisberg intends this art to be hopeful and “healing,” but it has a relentlessly mournful quality. The smiles flickering through the thicket of time are those of a damaged person who may have survived her own trials but cannot unburden herself from a self-inflicted responsibility of ministering to the universe.

There’s nothing phony or narcissistic about Weisberg’s calling. She has thought through every aspect of her work, determining not to waste her time on trivial subject matter or to fall into traps of fashion. She’s willing, maybe even eager, to be considered old-fashioned because she believes that’s the way to timeless expression.

All of this makes great good sense in words, and one cannot help admiring Weisberg’s principles. But sincerity and virtuosity are not the only essential components of artworks that yearn to be masterpieces. It isn’t enough to illustrate important themes, however skillfully, and it’s difficult to convey a conscious commitment to spiritual values without preaching.

This work is so controlled, so well accounted for, so determined to be significant that it seems emotionally restricted and far too literally illustrative. The wail of pain that seeps through it finally seems oppressive, making it difficult for an outsider to feel much more than respect for the effort.

“People: Close-Up” has a lighter tone, though the six photographers and video artists featured don’t shy away from depressing subjects. Aging, ill health, poverty and racism are all on view, but so are humor and empathy.

Carrie Mae Weems trots out all the skeletons in her family closet and makes us feel the joy of her discoveries in a group of black-and-white photographs and text called “Family Pictures and Stories.” These are her folks and she loves them, and we love her for exuberantly saying so.

Photographer Peter Reiss works with mentally retarded students at the Exceptional Children’s Foundation of Los Angeles, taking their pictures and helping them photograph each other. Both are posted in the exhibition. The students’ works are straight images of affecting faces, while Reiss’ subjects are deliberately blurry and cropped--as if they are too big or too unsettled to be contained in a mere picture.

Elderly residents of a Cambridge, Mass., nursing home are both the subjects of Jim Goldberg’s photos and the authors of messages written on their wide borders. Like any cross section of humanity, they react to their situations (and photographic images) with unpredictable variety: anger, resignation, bravery, fear and humor. One of the most telling comments comes from inmate Margaret Thompson: “I would like to see a picture of you close up when you are 76 years old.”

Joshua Touster keeps his distance from his chosen subject of baseball and thus seems a little out of sync with this “Close-Up” theme, but he presents a well-rounded view of America’s favorite sport--its heroes, fans and trappings--in well-composed pictures.

Joan Logue and Branda Miller, two video artists, have an eye for local color and absurdity. Logue’s interviews with New England fishermen present a collective portrait of unshaven men who don’t mind saying they’re proud of their profession and don’t mind telling fish stories either, once you have their confidence.

Miller’s “Unset Boulevard” is an impressionistic tale of a spirited young black actress who won a screen test, a trip to Paris and a Honda Civic in a billboard-sitting contest.

From the starlet’s flamboyant publicity stunt to elderly patients’ desperate appeals for attention, the “Close-Up” artists have cut a generous swath of human experience by going up-close enough to touch it and feel it.