ART / Cathy Curtis : Images Make Demands on the Mind

Contemporary art is: A) wildly diverse; B) more concerned with conveying ideas than being beautiful, C) very demanding of the viewer’s mental energies?

Answer: all of the above. Alas, these are exactly the features that seem to drive lots of people away from much of the art of our time. Not only is it hard to get a handle on all the different styles and “isms,” but you have to work so hard. Not only are there few pretty paintings to admire--there may not be any paintings at all.

Instead, there may be images that weren’t even created by the artist but simply “appropriated” from other sources. There may be texts as well--not just gallery labels, but words and phrases intended to be part of the actual piece. That’s what viewers will find in a devilishly demanding exhibit of collaborative work by Los Angeles artists Connie Fitzsimons and Bruce Meisner at Saddleback College Art Gallery (through Nov. 9).

Both artists are intensely interested in the way people “read” images--the influence of one image on another, the changing meanings of certain imagery over time and the range of possible meanings different people perceive in the same image.

Decoding the artists’ work often involves more time mulling them over than actually looking at them. And obviously, the larger your frame of reference and personal information bank, the more possibilities you’ll be able to come up with. Let’s see how this works.

“The Oath” is one of the three-part pieces in the show. On the left, there’s a blown-up photograph of an old camper in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. In the middle--in an ornate gold frame--there’s a large, rear-illuminated color transparency of a famous painting, “The Oath of the Horatii,” by the 18th-Century French artist Jacques Louis David. On the right, there’s a block of text--”Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party”--repeated line after line, as if in a typing exercise.

Start with the David painting, which dates from 1784-85, a few years before the French Revolution: It shows a courtyard in which three handsome young men in ancient Roman dress are swearing an oath with their arms outstretched toward an older man. On the right side of the painting, a group of seated women in long gowns slump sadly.

Composed with brilliant economy and clarity, the painting is a staple subject of art history survey classes, where students are introduced to the ways artists organize their works in terms of perspective, repetition of similarly shaped elements, lighting, the grouping of figures, and so on. (The crisscrossing red lines on top of the image are visual aids teachers use to explain an artist’s use of perspective.)

But the stage-like space, clear lighting and other devices in the painting were specifically meant to focus viewers’ attention on the “wide-screen” action. On one level, three brothers of ancient Rome are seen pledging their lives for their people, who are at war with a neighboring territory. On another level, the painting was intended as a morality lesson, to encourage the contemporary viewer to live a virtuous, socially responsible--even heroic--life. (The weak, mournful women are just spoilsports in the great scheme of things.)

Here is an example of a work of art that had as intense and specific an effect on people of its time as, say, a major movie has in ours. Yet today the painting’s meaning is obscure to anyone who hasn’t been trained in the history of art. And even when we hear the story, we may be anti-militaristic enough to think the women were right after all.

Now let’s consider the text in “The Oath.” Like “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,” the phrase is used as a test to see if all the keys of a typewriter are in working order.

The adage originally came into vogue in 1867 as a typewriter test--but with a specific political meaning. The Republican Party was in disarray in that pre-election year, largely because of President Andrew Johnson’s harsh attitudes toward the defeated South. Meanwhile, the Democrats controlled many Northern states and a large percentage of the electoral vote. The Republicans were desperately seeking a popular hero for President who would cause “all good men to come to the aid of their party.” (Their nominee, Ulysses S. Grant, was supreme commander of the Union forces during the Civil War.)

Today, most of us are familiar only with the utilitarian, typing-test usage of the sentence, and in fact--since more and more of us use computers rather than typewriters--there may come a day when no one remembers even that.

But what about that camper under the Arc de Triomphe? That one stumped me until I chatted with Patricia Boutelle, the exhibit’s curator. She thinks the image has to do with the changed meaning of that famous Parisian monument. Napoleon commissioned it in 1806 to glorify his military triumphs. But today, an image of the Arc de Triomphe no longer conveys any special meaning except as a familiar tourist’s symbol of Paris.

You may be asking yourself at this point if this game is worth the candle. So what if you don’t happen to have the knowledge storehouse of a “Jeopardy” contestant--should that shut you out of a work of art?

Well, you do need some basic clues. If ever a show needed a brochure of some sort, it’s this one. (An essay by the curator is due from the printer’s next week.) But there is no “right” way to interpret this work. Rather, the artists are trying to get you to slow down and examine the way images are used in our culture. Each image can be compared to a word in a sentence. Its meaning comes in part from the words that come directly before and after it--and in part from the reader’s grasp of what the word means in other contexts.

Some of the works in the show, such as “Crop Damage,” for example, provoke the flow of thoughts somewhat more easily. In this work, a reproduction of “The Wanderer Above the Mists”--a painting by 19th-Century German artist Caspar David Friedrich--is superimposed on a photograph of a mass of men who seem to be bowing to Mecca. On top of the photograph is a four-color pattern of blob-like shapes. If you look closer, you can see a blimp hovering in the sky of the painting.

The conjunction of visual elements in the piece may provoke any number of observations involving changing conceptions of nature, differing notions of religion, the power of the individual versus the group and awareness of global differences.

In Friedrich’s painting, a wayfarer in black stands on a pile of rocks, a dark, sharp-focus figure against the soft white mist enveloping the landscape. Born into a devout Protestant milieu, the artist saw man’s relationship with the divine as a private, lonely journey filled with doubt and struggle. God manifested himself in nature, Friedrich believed, but nature, too, was filled with remote and ungraspable qualities, like the evanescent mist.

The blimp obviously was not part of Friedrich’s experience; it was added by Fitzsimons and Meisner. But it brings to mind the different sort of dilemmas that haunt us today when we look at the natural world. If Friedrich’s disquiet had a religious source, ours is the result of pollution and crassness.

The men bowing to Mecca, on the other hand, are involved in a religious experience in which one communicates privately with a deity, but in a group setting.

The color patterns overlaid on the photo of prostrate men resemble computer-created map overlays, like the kind that tell you which areas of land get more or less rainfall, or have suffered more or less damage from natural--or man-made--sources.

These separate components of the work are the basic “vocabulary” of the language the artists are presenting to you. Now it’s your turn to enlarge on them and draw connections. There are no right answers. There are no pop quizzes. Fitzsimons and Meisner are fitness trainers for the mind, silently goading you to firm up and branch out.

Work by Connie Fitzsimons and Bruce Meisner remains through Nov. 9 at Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Hours are 12:30 to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday (also 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday) and 12:30 to 4 p.m. Friday. Closed weekends. Admission is free. Information: (714) 582-4924.