ART REVIEW : ‘Cultural Currents’ Sends Message About American Art

What’s American about American art? Art historians have been debating that for decades--sorting through the styles, unable to identify a single definitive quality. Even the abstract expressionists, hailed as the first distinctly American school of painters, imported ideas from Europe and Japan to bolster their brush strokes.

If anything is distinctly American about American art today, it’s a resistance to the notion of a single “Americanism.” Art has begun to attack the assimilating influences in contemporary culture, the attempts by the mass media, movies and language itself to channel this melting pot of values into a streamlined American dream.

The 13 contemporary artists in the San Diego Museum of Art’s “Cultural Currents,” which opened Saturday, are Americans “of distinct ethnic origin.” In shaping their artistic identities, they have probed their personal and collective cultural experience for the signs, forms and meanings that surface in their work.

All but one received formal art educations in this country, which no doubt also channeled them in certain prescribed directions, but this show bypasses all of that. It focuses only on the varied ways in which each artist, working in a contemporary American context, maintains a continuity with traditional ethnic forms of expression.

Curator Mary Stofflet has paired each artist’s work with an object or photograph relating to his or her ethnic heritage. While this strategy seems to invite dangerously over-simplified interpretations, Stofflet steers clear of trouble by never forcing the comparisons.

She lets the artists speak for themselves, and their statements (on the walls and in the show’s brochure) make it clear that the groupings here offer only one of many possible points of access into their work.

What links the artists’ work to the traditional objects alongside them are formal similarities as well as conceptual affinities. Alison Saar’s marvelously rich figurative sculptures evoke the same strong, magical presence as the small Kongo fetish shown with them.

Like the fetish, a small wooden figure pierced by rusted nails, Saar’s work makes palpable the internal agonies of existence. Her men and women, fashioned of wood, woven rubber or a motley assortment of cast-off materials, stare blankly ahead, but their innards churn with memories, dreams and passions. These are revealed in the shards of glass, plastic flowers and other discards hiding behind hinged faces and chests, cluttering these figures’ otherwise pure souls.

Juan Sanchez’s mixed-media paintings combine petroglyph images from pre-Columbian Puerto Rico with impassioned musings on contemporary Puerto Rican identity.

In using these ancient symbols of man and animals, Sanchez’s images plead for the survival of Puerto Rico’s cultural heritage. At the same time, photographs and writings on the works’ agitated surfaces protest against the cycle of poverty and repression that too often defines the contemporary Puerto Rican’s destiny.

In “Never Saw Her as an Oppressed Puerto Rican Woman . . . Only as Mommy,” Sanchez addresses the struggle on autobiographical terms, describing his mother’s frustration and resignation to poverty. For him, the continuity between glorious heritage and present reality is flawed, but his art is one means of restoring a positive sense of solidarity.

Carmen Lomas Garza memorializes the rituals of her Mexican-American community in Texas in a series of playful etchings, gouaches and a paper cutout. With the innocence and simplicity of a child, she shows the extended family celebrating a birthday, making tamales together and playing a bingo-like game.

An original set of cards for the game is juxtaposed with a set of etched cards made by the artist. Garza repeats the process enacted a generation earlier by her mother, and generations before her, filling each numbered square with its corresponding image of a common object, such as a shoe or a butterfly. In so doing, she makes a concrete connection to her cultural tradition, while infusing it with new life.

Akio Takamori’s figural ceramic vessels meet the Japanese woodblock print shown with them on a common ground of cool eroticism. The shape of each vessel is defined by the sinuous contours of the bending, curling bodies depicted on them. Takamori paints the vessels’ rich, creamy surfaces in a fluid linear style, imbuing them with a pervasive sensuality akin to the Shunga tradition.

The exhilarating foam-core assemblages of Ken Chu cut straight through the overlay of Chinese and American cultures with a keen wit and clever style. Chu mixes cultural symbols of each country like a mad chemist, then freezes the explosive results.

In “The Ballad of the Chinese Cowboy,” cactus, wild dogs and horses leap out of the frame with all of the exaggerated tumult of a 3-D movie. In the construction’s quiet center, a cowboy camping in the desert loses himself in reverie of a Chinese pagoda, a mirage floating in a cloud of pink.

Bicultural identity crisis strikes again in “I Need Some More Hair Products,” a comical look at the challenges of assimilation. In this painted assemblage, a young Asian man combs his hair before a mirror while envisioning himself as a bronzed, golden-haired gringo. An offering of oranges has been left at a shrine, in hopes that his wish will come true.

In the meantime, he lives out his dream of America, driving a convertible with a surfboard in the back seat, and eating hot dogs, albeit with chopsticks. Chu parodies the trauma of defining oneself within two clashing contexts, but his work is poignant beyond its obvious humor.

Gronk’s violent forms, Junko Yoda’s shimmering seas of color and invigorating work by Rupert Garcia, Ric Glazer-Danay, Margo Machida, Ann Page, Betye Saar and Jaune Quick-To-See Smith also make an appearance here. The show breaks new ground for this museum as well as for those historians of American art who claim their turf has fixed borders.

The exhibit, which was funded, in part, by the California Arts Council, continues through Sept. 4.