ART / Cathy Curtis : ‘Trade Show’ of Photo Techniques Falls Far Short

Maybe you’re getting tired of looking at photographs with recognizable imagery, straight-arrow humanistic values and standard physical dimensions. Perhaps you’ve been looking for a photograph to burst the boundaries of its pristine sheet of developing paper and grab you by the collar.

Have I got a show for you. At the Fullerton Museum Center, the super-complicated and super-relevant work in “RE: Presentation--Conception/Perception,” curated by Howard Spector, former director of the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, was assembled to put a spin on traditional notions of photography.

But just as notions of “progress” or “improvement” make no sense when applied to the stylistic shifts of the art world, innovative work is not necessarily more worthy (or even as worthy) as the traditions it seeks to overturn.

By showing a potpourri of new approaches related to each other only by virtue of their novelty, Spector has created a glorified “trade show” of current techniques. Had he chosen instead to let us see how a particular theme has been dealt with by both traditional and new-format photographers, the viewer might better be able to understand what is gained by abandoning the old ways and sallying forth with the new.

Even the title of this photography circus is a too-clever vocabulary stunt that keeps the viewer at arm’s length. But there is some fun stuff here, as well as more serious-minded pieces worth remembering for more than 15 minutes.

The best pieces in the show (though unfortunately positioned so viewers must stoop repeatedly to see them through the binocular viewers) are probably Jim Pomeroy’s stereoscopic images. Under their throwaway wit lies an ongoing analysis of the way photographs are “read” and how (contrary to conventional wisdom) they lie all the time.

In his “Considerable Situations” series, Pomeroy uses photomontage to reposition objects in goofy ways unrealizable in the real world (upside-down cars in an “Inverted Parking Lot”) and he demonstrates the power of captions to invest a photograph with additional “facts” that cannot be seen with the naked eye. (In “Mystery Spot?” a brief text assures us that the garbage can, chair and bicycle strewn on a lawn in a banal snapshot were seen to levitate during a lull in a thunderstorm at about 6:30 p.m. on July 8, 1987.)

In another series, “Reading Lesson and Eye Exercises,” Pomeroy gives old mass-distributed stereoscopic images new lives via labeling and photomontage that deliver sly political and social messages.

“White House China Policy,” for example, contains a 1981 presidential press conference Q. and A. about Nancy Reagan’s household needs, superimposed on an 1896 photograph of the Russian Czar’s golden tableware. Of course, “China Policy” also refers to U.S. foreign policy. And it just so happens that 1896 was the year Russia created an alliance with China. There is a lot of cross-referencing information packed into these images.

The contemporary acceptance of “found” photographs and objects from daily life as art material has allowed Nancy E. Floyd to try to come to terms with her brother’s death in Vietnam in “The James M. Floyd Memorial.” The bravado and careless racism of James Floyd’s personal letters and the just-folks corniness of his snapshots are light-years removed from the cold, codified vocabulary of a boot-camp platitude engraved on a metal plaque, the official Army death announcement squeezed into a telegram or the rote condolence letter from the White House.

Nancy Youdelman’s flat, varnished garments incorporate sprinklings of torn snapshots, usually turned upside down so no image can be seen. Decorative? Yes, indeed. But consider why people are moved to tear up photographs. There seems to be a feeling of genteel, suppressed rage in this work, perhaps suggesting the unfairness of fixing people in a particular time--as a photograph inevitably does--while in real life they continue to grow and change.

A group called (ART)2--whose members have expertise in computer programming and the branch of mathematics known as topology, the study of properties of certain geometric figures--makes holograph-like images called “phscolograms.” Rather simple-minded for all their fancy technology, they offer little more than gee-whiz viewer interaction.

The best one, “Messiah,” mocks the hucksterism of televangelism with a bank of images forming a large free-standing cross. A man’s head wags, a pair of open palms move and a couple of dice appear to tumble as you walk past them.

Melanie J. Walker makes old-fashioned zoeopraxiscopes with the primitive allure of a science fair project. Based on an early photographic process, these devices take advantage of a quirk of human vision: a card, with with a blue egg on one side and a bird cage on the other, spins when you activate it by standing on a designated spot on the floor. And, lo and behold, the egg is in the cage.

George Blakely ransacked two prominent photography texts for reproductions that he collages into huge wall coverings. Famous images come rushing pell-mell at the viewer: 150 years condensed into greatest hits bumping casually against each other.

But some work in the show strikes a hollow note.

Mark Durant says in a statement that he intends that his installation bedecked with purple drapery and dried flowers, “Father Learned Nothing in Korea,” as a “memorial to the Cold War, to patriarchy.” Based in part on a couple of wartime snapshots taken by his father, the piece gets lost in the insufficiently communicative bombast of immense photo-enlargements of Eisenhower and Elvis. The point about indiscriminate public idolatry--of crooners or generals--is too easy to make. The issue of whether humankind learns from war begs for more subtle and considered treatment.

Daniel J. Martinez’s enormous photographs printed on huge chunks of steel slice videotape imagery into geometric designs so that it is partially illegible. In a statement, Martinez says his work “comments on the human condition under dehumanizing conditions.” But the mysterious tableaux he creates seem little more than stagy, self-indulgent dramas.

Gillian Brown goes to extraordinary lengths to create a tricked-out variant of a family snapshot, creating her own three-dimensional sets and painting them so they register the desired illusion from just one vantage point. You have to applaud her tactical abilities, but the game doesn’t seem worth the candle.

Kim Abeles pieces together the tortuous story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in mixed-media works that read rather like a rebus. These pieces require attention above the call of duty from the viewer to a multiplicity of separate details without supplying the sustenance of sufficiently meaty imagery or ideas.

Sometimes it seems that artists are cooking up elaborate and near-impossible technical tasks for themselves simply because there seem to be no more mountains to climb, no more ways to package ideas that seem done to death. But certain values don’t change; art that is little more than an elaborate piece of artifice does not answer viewers’ primal hunger for emotional and intellectual stimulus.

Part of the countywide “Photography: Inside Out” series, “RE: Presentation--Conception/Perception” continues through Dec. 18 at the Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona Ave. Hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday. Admission is $2 general, $1 for students and seniors. Information: (714) 738-6545.