SANTA MONICA

In an age saturated with information, the power of the image is paramount. Whether through magazines, film or television, our sense of self has become mediated by the hands of art directors and PR Men. All anxiety is removed, all psychological ambiguities eradicated.

This is the premise of “The New Who’s Who,” an ambitious exhibition of mostly photographically based works organized by independent curator/author Marvin Heiferman. The show scans 50 artists, ranging in scope from such bona-fide photographers as Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe to conceptual/political image manipulators like Clegg & Guttmann, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Hans Haacke.

Heiferman’s strategy is to focus on work that attempts to explore the gray area of human identity that lurks somewhere between the insecure self and the manufactured, seductive images that “represent” it. For the most part, each artist treats self-knowledge and self-promotion as two sides of the same coin. Thus Richard Prince’s double portrait of himself and Cindy Sherman as androgynous red-heads could be dismissed as theatrical narcissism, yet its allusion to Sherman’s own stylistic vocabulary suggests our own tendencies to remake ourselves to fit the “picture perfect” ideal. Artist and viewer become interchangeable personalities, each living vicariously through an endless reservoir of media images.

The exhibit does well in generating a characterless, monolithic structure of its own. Subtlety and nuance within individual works are superseded by the interplay that takes place between them. Even the visual idiosyncrasies of a Diane Arbus translate into so much homogenized information. By reducing representation to interchangeable media cliches, Heiferman has created a self-fulfilling prophesy of slickly packaged alienation that is as alluring as it is horrifying. (HoffmanBorman Gallery, 912 Colorado Ave., to Aug. 30.)