ART REVIEW : ‘Against Nature’: Profile of a Modern Plague

Sex and death both have juicy histories in art. Even plague, the Black Death of the 14th Century, found its way into paintings of the early Renaissance. But AIDS, sometimes perceived with a mixture of horror, distaste and denial, is a subject seldom seen in the confines of a gallery.

“Against Nature: A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men,” a brave and remarkably strong show at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (to Feb. 12), is by turns salacious, factual, ironic, shallow and sorrowful. The passion behind the work is, of course, never in doubt; even the most debauched imagery is undercut by a sense of doom. But the level of aesthetic control is also surprisingly high.

To be sure, there are scenes of copulating bodies cut from magazines on the borders of the frames Arch Connelly covers with campy gold-dotted veiling and faux pearl clusters. There are scatalogical ceramic sculptures by John de Fazio that cannot be described in this newspaper.

But there are also more complex kinds of shock effects.

Nayland Blake titles a pair of framed linen handkerchiefs spotted with dried blood “After Veronica,” drawing a poignant parallel between an AIDS patient’s vital fluids and those of the female plague-sufferer healed by Christ’s touch.

As if producing window displays for a chi-chi jewelry store, Bruno Cuomo seals pretty little red or white shapes--actually drops of HIV-positive blood and semen--within paperweights arranged among decorative rocks in hollowed-out tree limbs.

Michael Tidmus’ “Health and Morality: A Desultory Discourse,” is a computer program that spits out a terse, coolly discursive condemnation of the Reagan-Bush Administration and the religious right for their evasions and spurious allegations in the face of the epidemic.

Even Mike Glass’ trio of modishly moody photographs of a young man--the remnants of an afternoon of dashed expectations, a would-be seduction the accompanying text describes in voluptuous detail--viscerally convey the fatal attraction of risky sex.

But of the 14 visual artists (the exhibit also includes a booklet of writings and a group of videos), Doug Ischar’s massive wall installation, “Household Misappropriation: Camouflage So Good One Is Shot at by Other Hunters,” has perhaps the most subversive program.

In large Type-C color photographs, we watch a man going about his life: washing dishes, taking a bath, packing copies of True Men magazine in a box. (Is he moving? Might these be the belongings of a dead lover?) Below, “found” images massed like post cards on a bulletin board offer scenes of Boy Scouts and members of the armed forces engaged in comradely activities in close proximity to each other, sometimes semi-nude.

Considered along with accompanying fragments from gay novels and other sources--a book on adolescent development, a description of heterosexual conquest from Flaubert’s “L’Education Sentimentale”--the point of this piece is disturbingly clear. The meanings assigned to images of men or of lust have everything to do with the contexts in which we find them and our own states of mind.

For this viewer, at least, it was something of a revelation to see how valuable the contemporary-art legerdemain with texts and images can be in trying to deal in an honest but disciplined way with issues of sexual preference and the enormity of a highly selective modern plague.