‘LA2DA’ EXHIBIT IN LA JOLLA : DELIVERING CRYPTIC MESSAGES

These days people like to imagine that the human brain is like a computer--neat, efficient and strung together with zappy fiber-optic lines like a space-age long-distance phone company. Evidence at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art suggests our minds are more like dusty attics, heaped with unruly piles of faded-memory photo albums, broken rowing machines of failed hope and guilty packets of obscene thoughts hidden under cushions of untried adventure.

This insight comes in the form of an exhibition called “L. A. Today” or rather “LA2DA” since it is rendered as if it were a California license plate. The show consists of works by six artists associated with Los Angeles although at least one, Nick Vaughn, lived in Orange County at last report. No matter.

The exhibition (closing Sunday) sails under the banner of the still sadly fashionable tendency to read art as “language structure.” Art is a language, so this approach might provide some insight if the language of the language mavens were not so convoluted as to obscure rather than illuminate. When are critics and curators going to stop writing for each other in cabalistic phrases like “premediated figuration” and “deconstructing empirical forms” and start helping both their audience and the tradition of English letters by writing stuff people can read? Oh, well.

In practice, this work looks like reflagged comic assemblage and funk. Artists take sights from the real world--especially from the compelling trash of bad comic drawings, posters, TV ads, schlock furniture, store window mannequins and plastic toyshop models--and give them back to us encrusted with personal meanings that remain largely cryptic. The net effect is flaky and involuted. Looking at this work is like looking into the mind of an autistic adolescent suckled on swap meets and Saturday morning television cartoons.

Social satire is more than implied and much of it is localized in the stereotype of Southern California kids wandering an intellectual no-man’s land of glitzy shopping malls, sexy beaches and an endless neutral zone of freeways and parking garages. There is nothing to do but gratify oneself and nothing to do it with but junk food and exciting, dead media thrills.

Dede Bazyk makes huge sculpture and cut-outs of internal organs and it is no surprise to find they have titles like “My Brain,” “My Zygote” and “My Blood Cell.” Monomaniacal narcissism in love with cosmic loneliness.

The satire is not all funny. Maybe it is not funny at all because the work is saturated with desperation, guilt and longing for a transcendence it does not know how to seek.

The show participates in a recent tendency to get religion back into art as an object of longing or loathing. Dana Duff shows an ominous hanging grill with a little confessional doorway called “Catholic Object.”

Jim Shaw shows drawings and paintings that are a regular diary of regurgitated junior high annual photos, posters of trashy ladies and kids’ Bible stories rewritten into masturbation fantasies. He shows a videotape cartoon of a nice little family whose son turns into a monster in church, kills his father and attacks his mother. Another video metamorphoses the CBS eye logo into a blond teen-ager with more eyes than a Tantric deity and then spends most of its time drifting through an animated galaxy. Schlock surfer metaphysics.

Religion runs through the show in subtler ways. Its artists, like rebellious kids, are out to do the forbidden. That implies an ultimate deity-like authority figure to do the forbidding. Jeffrey Vallance shows cartoony portraits of obscure significance. They surround central images with heraldic shields whose qualities suggest the character of the sitter. None of this is clear except that his basic selection of trashy ladies and Third-World dictators as subject matter are choices that would make mom, dad and the pastor agreeably uneasy.

For artists, of course, the traditions of art form a kind of religion which each generation must both venerate and destroy. Bazyk’s brain parts are also a send-up of Minimalist sculpture. William Leavitt uses blue-collar aesthetics to sabotage high art. The biomorphic shapes of Miro become a tacky painting of a Manta Ray. Minimalism gets it again when Leavitt transforms it into Sears’ best drapes, golden columns and a Chinese table that says bad taste has its own exotic and forbidden charm.

Using the cliches of the world and the mind as vehicles for expression makes for good satire and--in the long run--accessible art. It also tends to make the artists themselves into cliches. These people have achieved a truly adolescent style that solicits the same sympathy and elicits the same annoyance that adults feel for real kids. Well, he is confused, but he has a good heart and a sharp brain which will serve him well--if he ever grows up.

Artists or poets should never completely grow up, but at a certain point, they are going to have to leave the gang and sort out what they want to do with their lives other than wallowing charmingly in profoundly callow muddles.

Nick Vaughn is a little different. He dresses mannequin figures in clothing designed to poetically suggest character. There is a welcome detachment in such works as the one where a guy wears progressively smaller shirts until one turns into a baby’s dress. It suggests both the genderless child he once was and the father he must become.