ART REVIEW : UCSD Faculty Displays Sanity in Its Diversity

Without knowledge of its raison d’etre , the current show at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery would seem a chaotic array of intentions. Knowing that the exhibition represents the faculty of UCSD’s department of visual arts doesn’t alter that perception, but it transforms it from a detriment to an advantage.

Such diversity of styles and sensibilities is healthy among the faculty of a university art department. It allows professors to serve as subtle checks and balances on one another, and prevents the department from resembling a totalitarian regime. Shared interests can be detected among the 21 professors included here, and factions--though unstated--begin to form as one looks beyond the disunity of the show’s parts.

There are storytellers, whose handwritten narratives describe journeys of discovery. Faith Ringgold’s two-part quilt, “South African Love Story,” tells the moving tale of a young couple separated by circumstance and the struggle for freedom that finally unites them. Patches of dyed, printed and painted fabric surround the text, with the central panels bearing a pattern of entangled human forms that echoes the story’s content.

A section from Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison’s extensive “Lagoon Cycle” integrates tinted maps and photographs with a continuous look at the relations between human-made constructs and the earth.

In one panel, they write: “Clearly there is something about technology/that does not like that which is not itself/yet this is not a necessary condition/this unfriendliness to the land.”

The complexity and depth of these artists’ tales and their engagement with crucial human issues cause their work to sink into the memory with enduring resonance.

This is also the case with the best of the artists here who critique the media and question the reliability of received information. Louis Hock’s installation “Seeing is Believing” undermines our automatic trust in news imagery by demonstrating how easily such images can be manipulated. Against the center of one wall he has stacked two television monitors, each showing a similar image of a young man fallen, as if by force, on a tile floor.

Each scene looks credible enough until we realize that both originate right beside us. One is taped from a small snapshot and the other from a fabricated set-up, the figure being merely a chicken-wire construction and the tile floor extending only to the edges of the camera’s imposed frame. Hock’s installation simply and brilliantly defies the integrity of the recorded image, and by extension, any such visual information whose truth we take for granted due to the evidential quality of photographic media.

Martha Rosler’s video, “If It’s Too Bad To Be True, It Could Be Disinformation,” attempts a similar attack on the trustworthiness of the news media, specifically in the coverage of a presumed shipment of Russian arms to Nicaragua. She makes her point within the first minute of her tape by playing a news broadcast whose sound and picture are partially erased. The remaining 16 minutes of interrupted and uninterrupted broadcasts are more tiresome than enlightening.

The malleability of history is more evocatively suggested by Eleanor Antin’s video, “From the Archives of Modern Art,” in which Antin assumes the roles of both “irrepressible archivist” and elusive subject, the fading ballerina Eleanora Antinova. Interweaving footage from Antinova’s more desperate days starring in films of “questionable character” with titles filling in the blanks about the dancer’s life, Antin constructs a fiction then legitimizes it through the means of a documentary. Her antics as both historian and historical figure are carried out with equal aplomb and, in appropriately schizophrenic manner, are both entertaining and deeply provocative.

There are also artists here who do not challenge or subvert the documentary format but use it in a more traditional manner to reveal their subjects. Seaver Leslie’s illustrational watercolors contrast the Hopi Indians’ affinity with nature with “the White Man’s rational, mechanical view of agriculture--agribusiness.” Fred Lonidier’s crudely-made video, “Nick by Fred,” aims to memorialize a friend through a shallow selection of photographs of the man’s work as a trade union activist.

Elizabeth Sisco’s series of black and white photographs, collectively titled “Work in Progress,” apply the most penetrating gaze to their subject. Within her straightforward views of border patrol agents arresting suspected illegal aliens during sweeps of city buses, Sisco plants clues alluding to the act’s broader societal implications. She frames several of the scenes so that fragments of bus advertisements spell out the situations depicted. “Twelve in a Row” reads one poster, putting words to the grin of an officer’s face as he escorts a suspected alien off the bus. Only the words “advantage/American” are legible on another poster, but these two words together sum up the scene Sisco witnesses. Sisco’s method is understated but the collusion of words and images in her photographs yields a remarkably powerful impact.

Others round out the show with a wide range of concerns, from Ernie Silva’s poetic trilogy of a painting, tent and boat, and Italo Scanga’s vibrant, kaleidoscopic visions in paint and wood, to Robert Sanchez’s mysterious and frightening “Bunk Bed,” a mixed media work that instills terror through its oblique references to violence and surreptitious practices. The show suffers from the inclusion of Phel Steinmetz’s shamefully amateurish photographic collages and Harold Cohen’s candy-colored computer drawings, but there remains much to chew on in this smorgasbord of disparate tastes.

The show continues through May 15. A screening of Jean-Pierre Gorin and Babette Mangolte’s film, “Routine Pleasures,” will be held on May 12 at 7 p.m. in the Mandeville Auditorium.