ART REVIEW : Television as ‘Acceptable Entertainment’

Marshall McLuhan said: “Acceptable entertainment has to flatter and exploit the cultural and political assumptions of the land of its origin.” This truism opens the catalogue to the exhibition “Acceptable Entertainment” at the Municipal Art Gallery through Sunday. The show features 26 contemporary artists whose photographic images--shot directly from the TV screen or related to its content--demonstrate the ways that television teases and soothes.

The ubiquitous blinking box that, like it or not, molds by hypnotic repetition our cultural roles, values and contemporary myths, is a ripe subject that might have been the wellspring for a provocative show. That simply doesn’t happen in “Acceptable Entertainment.”

The exhibition offers mostly bland images with peripheral references that miss a golden opportunity to make hard-driving statements about TV’s substantial creative and destructive power. Some artists who do this sort of thing exceptionally well--Gretchen Bender and John Baldessari--are represented in uninteresting or dated works.

Among the general themes in the show is that today, loaded communication is kept at a safe, anesthetized distance via technology: the TV, answering machines, even ideological bumper stickers stuck on speeding machines. The voyeurism and affective ennui bred by this distance weighs like a mantle over Philip Lorca Di-Corcia’s depressing photograph of a wan body mesmerized before the glow of a cheap-motel TV. The same theme figures more subtly in Bonnie Donohue’s potent enlargements of a writhing Mary Decker at the moment of her fateful fall.

Many works suggest a sensory-saturated public bent on their “media fix” regardless of quality. Lewis Stein’s black-and-white screen-shaped image of hazy “snow” suggests that maybe there’s not a lot of difference between the white noise and the programming. George Legrady shoots a backdrop of charged words (acid rain, Beirut, joblessness) behind an utterly silly shot of a housewife’s pot and a TV screen airing a primate dressed in his best talk-show host suit.

The hackneyed notion that TV creates illusory and discrepant personas runs through Nancy Burson’s less-than-challenging computer synthesis of Johnny Carson and sidekick Ed McMahon, as well as Robert Heineken’s equally tepid shot-from-the-screen and manipulated Cibachrome portraits of morning news purveyors Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumbel.

The well-worked “Incoming” by John Maggiotto is made of six unrelated, innocuous color photographs whose edgy meaning comes from the contextual clues each viewer provides. Manipulating graphic violence, historical moment, seductive drama and banality, Karl Bladen’s black-and-white composite “Split” is a nearly perfect metaphor for the many faces and semiotic functions of television--and a breath of air in an otherwise slow exhibition.

The concurrent “About TV: Appropriation and Parody in Contemporary Video Art” doesn’t fare much better. Fifteen Southern California artists show nearly 20 works that range from a few minutes to a half hour, and the fatigue factor of displaying this much video at once detracts from an appreciation of each entry.

Bill Viola, a respected local video artist, makes a poor showing in “Reverse Television/Portraits of Viewers,” silent shots of regular Joes sitting in an array of settings looking out at their TV screens. Kathy Tanney’s lilting narrative describing a lustful union between Mary Tyler Moore and J. R. Ewing spliced from TV ads and archival show footage starts with a great idea but falls just short of convincing parody. Eileen Segalove offers a whimsical, modern-dance look at her transition into womanhood, and in Max Almy’s “Lost in the Picture,” an utterly proper couple contemplate the ill effects of cable porn on their nubile, somersaulting teen-ager.

Using hazy focus and frame-by-frame sequencing, Hye Sook constructs a riveting hourlong segment of the disturbing few seconds when an Asian monk incinerates his body while police pace frantically and passers-by drop to their knees. Equally compelling is Erica Suderberg’s insightful treatment of public and private violence.

Changing the mood, Nancy Buchanan constructs a teeny doll house complete with furnishings, minuscule stacks of yesterday’s newspapers and a perpetually flickering one-inch TV airing the highs and lows of the American dream. A standout is John Goss’ hilarious “Out Takes” that cleverly edits images of Pee-wee Herman, critic Rex Reed’s scathing indictment of the cult figure and excerpts from Japanese adolescent serials where nudity, homosexuality and eroticism are treated with light-hearted openness.