ART REVIEW : The Search for Signs of Truly Absurd Life : Irvine’s ‘Bare Facts, Sly Humor’ Exhibit Has More to Offer Than Just Funny Photos

It’s a wonder more people don’t clamor to become art critics. After all, how many of you get to watch “The Love Connection” on company time?

The TV show (well, OK, a tape of a 3-year-old segment) is part of “Bare Facts, Sly Humor” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center (through Oct. 20). The exhibit is the brainchild of photographer and critic Mark Johnstone, who brought together still and video work by seven artists interested in playing with the implicit truthfulness of photography and investigating the eccentricity that lurks just below the surface of American life.

The surprising thing, given the fragility of humor-in-art, is that some of this stuff is actually laugh-out-loud funny. The rest generally succeeds in coaxing a smile or at least amused recognition of the incredible variety of human experience.

Ilene Segalove takes the cake for her 10-minute video, “My Puberty.” In the tape--which has acting and production values cunningly borrowed from amateur theatricals, TV commercials and old-fashioned instructional films--Segalove is a puzzled adolescent trying to figure out what’s happening to her body.

Segalove’s jolly vintage-1961 family, seated at a table laden with such epicurean delights as Wonder Bread and Velveeta, drops broad hints to her about Life without being the least bit enlightening. She begs for a bra, has heart palpitations over “Gidget Goes Hawaiian” and joins the junior high orchestra in a desperate attempt to get gangly boys to notice her.

The laughter comes from recognizing the incredible theatricality that is and was routine in the teen-age view of the world and from Segalove’s deft combination of nostalgia and mockery.

Her still photographs cover a wide territory. Some play with the associational power of (usually) media-related imagery; others are photographic reproductions of amusing and elegantly typeset vignettes from Segalove’s life.

In “Home Entertainment Center--On the Air,” Segalove juxtaposes black-and-white photographs that radiate the stodgy, yet persistently upbeat, quality of vintage advertisements. The central image is a boy lying on his stomach listening to a pink-tinted radio that emits a space-monster green glow. Around him are photographs of adults in--the phrase that comes to mind is “all walks of life”--who presumably also enjoy the marvelous benefits of Radio. A photograph of rows of canned goods--Bumble Bee and Libby’s, Campbell’s and Cherub--reinforces the homey but firmly commodity-based certainties of this world.

Segalove’s “Female Fragments” plays monkey-see, monkey-do with Famous Works of Art. She poses two women with crooked elbows to imitate the wing of the Nike of Samothrace and snips away at a photograph of a nude woman to imitate the arbitrary contours of what appears to be a stone figure from an ancient culture.

In “Jewish Boys,” one of her typeset-reminiscence photographs, Segalove tells of wearing a skimpy bathing suit at a Jewish summer camp. Reprimanded for the objectionable attire, she responds by pointing to the suit’s “Made in Israel” label. “My bathing suit was small,” her text explains, “but it was Jewish.”

Larkin Maureen Higgins also uses herself as the subject of some of her pieces. One of these is a tape of the “Love Connection” show on which she was a contestant in 1985.

In the tape (complete with commercials), she talks about her date with Kenny, a teacher, whom she described as “slightly ragged around the edges--but I like that in a man.” She tells the TV audience that he brought over a bottle of wine without removing the $5.99 price tag. Kenny says he enjoyed himself, managed to kiss her and wants to go out with her again.

For the viewer, the humor is simply the standard weirdness of the show, with its tales of misunderstandings and rudeness and the occasional conquest, punctuated by the smilingly neutral remarks of the “host.” But Higgins also attempts to give us a subversive backstage view.

In a group of statements accompanying stills from the program, she describes her feeling of being “at the mercy of unseen editors,” who could cut her remarks “to titillate men’s imagination.” An unwhitewashed account captures Kenny at home, pouring her a drink on top of the congealed leftovers in his only spare glass. And she lists the bottom-of-the-barrel “gifts”--Tuna Helper!--she received for participating on the show.

But although the idea of “infiltrating” the world of commercial TV to make a sociological point is intriguing, Higgins doesn’t seem to have fully analyzed the experience. She describes her role as a combination of “performer/participant” and “viewer/participant” without explaining how she felt in these various guises. In the end, she permits too much ambiguity about the intent and meaningfulness of creating an art event out of the TV show.

Higgins’ two other “performance” videos in the exhibit also contain the germs of good ideas that are insufficiently honed into stage-worthy activity or meaningful commentary.

Similarly, Jack Fulton often lets the spacey, pun-filled commentary that dominates his small, sometimes scruffy-looking photographs meander past the reader’s patience.

Affecting the tone of a doped-out wise guy searching for cosmic consciousness, he’ll take an image like children’s swings in the back yard and start rambling on about children’s voices as “chaotic cacophony of reality.” And that’s just for starters. There’s a delicious extravagance in some of the pieces--leaps of the imagination and amusing language-twisting--but Fulton indulges in it with such unrelenting gusto that it tends to cloy.

Macduff Everton is also in love with words. He sandwiches a series of photographs--of his friends, of his “job” or of himself on a Hollywood set--between chunks of tiny, handwritten text that keep spewing out new versions of a story about the people in the photos. “Well, that’s not entirely true,” he’ll write before launching into yet another version of the “facts.”

The idea is that a single image easily lends itself to many “truths.” But Everton is liable to lose the increasingly disoriented and eye-strained reader along the way with long-winded prose. The better pieces manage not to jerk the reader along too many twists and turns of the plot and reveal a dry, literate sense of humor.

For Jim Stone, truth is stranger than fiction. His crisp gelatin silver photographs are portraits of real people--each print contains the subject’s name and hometown--who have some obsessive sort of hobby. The serenely posed, documentary quality of these images wonderfully complements the peculiarities of the people in them.

One is a retired upholsterer in Houston whose house is covered with his collection of beer cans, their light aluminum shapes creating a surprisingly delicate, shimmering curtainlike effect. Another is a fellow from Rochester, N.Y., whose bald head and round, protruding stomach amusingly resemble the strange medley of bowling balls strewn among the rocks in his garden. Still another is of an elderly woman from La Crosse, Wis., who stands in her garden in spic-and-span white shoes and a print dress, primly holding a very long squash.

In a somewhat similar fashion, H. Arthur Taussig is absorbed in a quasi-scientific classification of the many varieties of American experience. In the form of Cibachrome photographs, he “collects” oddball motels, golf courses, garages, drive-in movies, bombs and missiles, peculiar museums, road signs, religious practices, Christmas decorations, indigenous animals and other details of the national landscape.

One of the sights he has seen is a stone sphere at the Sacred Arts Center in Eureka Springs, Ark. A plaque claims the “minimum value” of the stone (a meteorite?) is $1,000 and that “it symbolizes the magnificence of God’s creation.”

Taussig is equally enthralled by a woman riding a wrench on a hardware store sign in New Orleans, a U.S. Army missile parked inches away from a road in Organ, N.M., and a Buddha rising in pink-and-gold splendor on the scruffy acreage of a Goofy Golf park in Biloxi, Miss.

Jeff Gates’ black-and-white photographs and written commentaries are also superficially about aspects of Americana: a park, a filling station, suburban childhood memories. But the texts nudge the viewer into specific, sometimes downright peculiar or unworkable, ways of looking at the image. The issue here is the way a caption creates a mental “frame” through which we see a photograph.

In one photograph, an airplane hovers only a few feet above a filling station, its asphalt damp as if after rainfall. The text is about a guilty 7-year-old Gates watching a small plane drop from the sky and fall into a swimming pool. “I thought by staring at it, I had made the plane crash,” the adult Gates admits.

The viewer sees the aspect of imminent danger in the photo, but it perversely fails to match up with the details of the story.

This is funny? Well, no. But Gates can lay it on thick when he wants to. Each of three photographs shows the storefront of a shop advertising “collectibles.” On the sidewalk, a sentence reads, “This photograph sells for $300.” A few feet away on the gallery wall, in an identical photograph, the price is upped to $400. A third (also identical) photo boosts the price to $1,000. So much for the volatility of the art market and the almighty reign of “collectibles” in the ‘80s.

By simply enlarging viewers’ awareness of what photography can be, guest curator Johnstone has done yeoman service with this exhibit. The only major disappointment is his terse treatment of each body of work in the free brochure. Particularly in a community arts center, people need to be taught how to look at such non-traditional photographs--how to realize that an art form can embody the absurdities and random hilarity of everyday life.

“Bare Facts, Sly Humor” remains at the Irvine Fine Arts Center through Oct. 20. The center, in Heritage Park (14321 Yale Ave . ), is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 552-1018.