ART / Cathy Curtis : ‘Media Talk’ at Bank’s Gallery Makes Some Strong Comments

It was a great treat to see the first-class art that Security Pacific Gallery assembled for its inaugural exhibition last summer. Still, as someone in the museum world remarked to me, it’s one thing for the bank’s exhibition space to show formally attractive work that’s essentially uninvolved with social issues and another to curate an exhibition with real bite.

Well, Security Pacific’s new exhibit of painting, photography, installation and video art, “Media Talk” (through Oct. 29), is not only intelligently conceived and chockablock with strong, thoughtful work, it even dares to present (in a videotape) the viewpoint of a strongly anti-capitalist social critic.

As arts writer Irene Borger notes in a catalogue essay rich in provocative aphorisms, media culture is both “seductive” and “invasive.” So beguiling and so ubiquitous are the images and messages of TV and print that we absorb them without realizing it. We accept them easily; they speak with the soothing, authoritative voices of Truth.

What they lack, of course, is sober, time-consuming analysis. That’s what the artists in this show supply, in partnership with you, the viewer. You do have to take the time to digest and decipher this work; it doesn’t just glide into your consciousness.

Curator Mark Johnstone has assembled an extremely varied group of American artists for this show. Some co-opt the look of media imagery; others dissect the workings of media on our minds; and still others are concerned with the technological aspects of the subject.

Erika Rothenberg--whose satirical exhibit “America, the Perfect County,” is at Newport Harbor Art Museum through Sunday--contributes three tongue-in-cheek paintings and an installation to this exhibit. Her “Celebrity Simulator” allows viewers to step onto a microphone-encrusted red podium and be broadcast to a TV set positioned in a roomful of furniture. The paintings are done in a simple, cheery, colorful style, and they are garnished with the kinds of imposing statistics the media bombards us with daily. In “Talk Shows,” for instance, a smiling mouth with gritted teeth is juxtaposed with a text revealing a mind-boggling “fact”: “America’s 3,641 talk shows will need 8,912 guests today.”

Martine Aballea creates parodies of advertising messages with hand-tinted bland photographs and deliciously weird texts. “Luminous Sauce . . . a velvety appetizing radiance” reads the slogan, in flowing script, that accompanies a nocturnal view of an urban building with bright colored lights in the windows.

Robert Heinecken’s photographs combine fragments of advertising images featuring stereotypically sexy women. On the one hand, the works create a kaleidoscopic sensual impact of their own; on the other, their visual density involves the viewer in a closer examination of the insidious way the ads work on the psyche.

Kathe Burkhart’s vulgarly colored billboard-like paintings are deadpan paeans to the the visual language of Hollywood movie ads. A selection from her “Liz Taylor” series presents the star in scenes from “Little Women,” “Butterfield 8” and other movies.

Alan Rath has hooked up a group of “electronic sculptures,” small TV screens with their electronic workings plainly in view, that display deliberately simple, continuously repeating imagery. In “Pow II,” a hand slowly, jerkily forms a fist. In “Ambivalent Desire,” three screens show blue images of hands tentatively stroking unseen objects.

The poignancy stems from the disjunction between the “coldness” of the electronic devices and the human warmth of a small personal gesture. But there are several notions at work here--among them, the way TV homes in on and magnifies images of violence and sensuality, and the sheer repetitiousness of TV imagery.

Other works by Rath have no human subjects. These pieces reveal the electronic process as a stuttering, self-contradictory monologue (“(Not) Broken”--in which the title words interrupt static patterns on two small screens”) and as a simple-minded binary system (“Arecibo,” in which a TV screen keeps flashing the number sequence 0, 1).

H. Terry Braunstein is represented in an avalanche of work, all involving advertising imagery introduced into an alien context. The niftiest batch is “Adolescent Series II,” photographs of goofy table-top “experiments.” In one, a wide-eyed kid peers down a cardboard tube at The Future: a tiny couple with a baby carriage.

Harry Bowers’ “Dance of Life” doesn’t seem to have much to do with the theme of the exhibit, but perhaps the point is the way it imitates a succession of movie frames with unlikely subjects. Each shot in this series of eight-foot-high color photographic prints of a robe and a jacket lying on a bed brings the two garments slightly closer together until they seem to embrace.

Carol Flax summons up numbing repetitions of imagery and words in her computer-created ink-jet prints. In her most effective pieces, this visual static suggests the gap between the complexity and rawness of real-life emotions and the simple-minded media messages that stereotype aspects of family life or teen-age rebellion.

Joyce Niemanas’ large multiple-image silver gelatin prints are hard to get a handle on, but they seem to be about the way media culture creates its own heroes and heroines and tends to see literary and artistic heroes of the past simply as grist for the mill of lowest-common-denominator taste. In Niemanas’ “The Copy,” a see-through silhouette of Michelangelo’s “David” is ignobly made to appear as though it holds popcorn.

The exhibit also includes four videos, which visitors can ask to see. Chip Lord’s “Not Top Gun” is billed as a critique of the militaristic values in the movie; it juxtaposes facts about American military spending with images from the “Top Gun” music video.

“Political Advertisements,” by Antonio Muntadas and Marshall Reese, is a compilation of selected TV political commercials made for the 1988 Presidential election, allowing the viewer to assess how Madison Avenue changed its approach as the nature of the campaign shifted.

Jason Simon’s “Production Notes: Fast Food for Thought” zips through seven TV commercials, beginning with a 60-second McDonald’s spot set in a high school, and then (with the cost of the ad superimposed on the screen) takes the listener through the ad agency’s blow-by-blow description of the relevance and meaning of each scene. The video is needlessly repetitious, but it does present a chilling look at all the calculation that goes into insidiously cheerful, low-key commercials.

Judith Williamson, the social critic mentioned previously, took a trip to a Target store for her video, “Judith Williamson Consumes Passionately in Southern California.” She is a better writer than video maker or performer (the piece is overlong and fairly choppy, and she seems shy and nervous), but her analysis is keen. Beginning with “The Advertisement”--a Burlington sock ad--she muses on the absurdity of our “multiplicity of products and functions” that requires industry to dream up new consumer needs.

Williamson notes that these needs are “all centered on the body,” which capitalism examines piece by piece in its search for new areas to “colonize.” She says the illusion of a vast array of products that are markedly different from one another--such as the row upon row of socks at the Target store--are substitutes for our inability to assimilate real differences, such as those of race or culture.

Whether you agree or disagree, this is provocative material relevant to our lives--and not at all what you’d expect to see at a bank!

“Media Talk” will be on view through Oct. 29 at Security Pacific Gallery, 555 Anton Blvd., Costa Mesa. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free, and the gallery will validate parking. Information: (714) 433-6001.