ART REVIEW : ‘Living Color’ Spreads Itself Too Thin in Civil Rights Video Show

Video art is a very tough thing to pull off. Our responses to the TV screen have been waterlogged by years of incubation in the warm bath of prime time, and consequently most experimental video is apt to strike us as amateurish and crude--not as slick as we’re used to. Moreover, all those years of mainstream media haven’t exactly left us programmed to look for anything particularly deep, poetic, or challenging from video; we expect to be massaged, and if we don’t come away from the tube with the sense of having been painlessly entertained, we feel slightly cheated.

“In Living Color: Representations of Race and Civil Rights,” the video exhibition on view (through March 18) at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, compounds the basic challenges intrinsic to video in its choice of subject matter. Civil rights is a dicey and highly charged subject, a huge subject that touches nearly every area of life, encompassing politics, economics and sexuality. Many different groups are oppressed in different ways for different reasons, and any investigation into the subject threatens to veer off in a million directions.

It took PBS several weeks to shed some light on a small chapter of the civil rights movement of the ‘60s in its recent (and very good) series “Eyes on the Prize.” “In Living Color” undoes itself from the git-go in attempting to cover too much ground; it winds up offering but a cursory view into various aspects of the issue at hand.

Jointly curated by Claire Aguilar, assistant film programmer at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and Reginald Woolery, who works for the Media Alliance in New York, “In Living Color” strikes the expected emotional posture of righteous indignation. The subject hardly allows for much else, although humor and irony are acceptable tools. Humor and irony are employed here too, although more often the work speaks in the drab, didactic voice of the sort of educational films one snoozes through in high school.

Oddly enough, the most compelling piece in the program is also the most artless. Presented in a flat documentary style, “Red Dawn” is a profile of an Ute Indian who splits his time between working in the white man’s world as a telephone lineman and life on a Utah reservation where he leads a group of Indian vocalists who perform traditional music. Produced and directed by the Ute Indian tribe, this video has power for the simple reason that the central character is a commanding man with an uncommonly engaging manner. It’s pleasant to listen to him talk, and the music he and his group perform (vocals with simple drum backing) is extraordinary. However, the relationship between this enjoyable video portrait to the subject of civil rights is vague.

A group of Boston high school students successfully combine substance and flashy production values in “The Civil Rights Rap Video,” a six-minute rap that chronicles three central episodes in the black Civil Rights Movement. This bouncy tape could play on MTV, but from there, the program really begins to lose steam.

“Albert Pastor’s First Video Project” is ostensibly an expose of Chicano stereotypes, but in fact is riddled with the kind of goofy, good-natured racism typical of a Cheech & Chong movie. Ruby Truly’s “And the Word Was God” is a painfully sincere recitation of poetry, while Lawrence Andrews’ visual meditation on violence, “An I for an I” is so oblique and fragmented, it’s virtually incomprehensible.

“Wok Like a Man” is an irreverent inquiry into the various faces of Asian men in modern America. We see a cook, an affluent businessman and a young skateboarder, all of whom seem to be enjoying themselves. What is director Art Nomura attempting to tell us here?

Amy & Philip Brookman explore the lives of Chicano artists in “Mi Otro Yo--My Other Self,” an informative and professionally done tape that is curiously uninvolving--something that can be said of this show in general. It takes some kind of backwards genius to drain the subject of civil rights of emotional punch, but that’s the central achievement of “In Living Color.”