ART : ‘Insistent Landscapes’ Is Mostly a Collection of Bland, Trite Viewpoints

Now here’s a good idea for an exhibit: Round up a bunch of artists who have dreamed up new ways of interpreting an old subject--landscape--and find a fiction writer to embroider some vivid landscape-related reveries for the catalogue.

Of course, everything depends on who the artists and writer are and what, if anything, they have to say. Make the wrong choices and you wind up with a show as disappointing as “Insistent Landscapes,” at the Security Pacific Art Gallery through April 1.

In a vaguely worded foreword to the catalogue, curator Mark Johnstone says the six East Coast and West Coast artists in the show “use powerful psychological aspects of technique or choice and treatment of subject matter.” Powerful, pshaw--the power here wouldn’t run an electric toothbrush. For the most part, the paintings register either a pasteurized, yuppie version of Angst or a desperate attempt to be outrageous. Even Terry Wolverton’s essay is little more than a collection of cliches about memory and landscape and art, presented in tiny post-modernist sentences.

Tobi Kahn reduces landscape features to uniformly textured, soberly colored basic shapes. In “Alohm II,” three oval black islands poke into a burnt sienna lake. In “Ehlak II,” vaguely triangular black mounds appear in a deep V-shaped valley between a pair of umber hills. These spare little works seem too neatly resolved; they lack the elements of surprise and tension that would give the images more presence.

Vicki Teague-Cooper paints objects that hover in an empty world: broken bones floating over a transparent curving orange body of water; a dunce’s hat airlifted above a sparse outcropping of trees; a tree plummeting through black space. Again, it’s easy enough to figure out what the work is supposed to suggest--a surreal state of mysterious tension and foreboding. But the juxtaposition of mundane objects and vast, colorful space is too pat and cute and, frankly, unoriginal to suggest larger issues.

Marcia Gygli King attempts to set the tradition of easel landscape on its ear by adding hunks of three-dimensional materials to flesh out her garish painted landscapes and enclosing them in flamboyantly carved glittery and painted frames, some of which rest on equally loud-mouthed easels.

With titles such as “Southampton Salad” and “Coastal Front,” these paintings are conveyances for all sorts of flotsam: plastic tomatoes, carved swaths of drapery, carved shells and unidentifiable stuff that oozes from the painted sea onto the frame. These resemble a prescient allusion to the garbage that washed ashore on New York beaches last year, after these works were painted.

But King’s works ultimately straddle the fence: They are are too campy to be taken seriously but they aren’t outrageous enough to be a real menace to the polite fictions of landscape painting.

Also represented in the exhibit are works by Jean Towgood, who reduces landscape imagery into unremarkable patterns of scribbly brush strokes, and Richard Sedivy, whose blend of landscape and architectural imagery was reviewed here for his show at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery last month. (Those works demonstrated a considerably greater range than the pieces at Security Pacific.)

By far the best works in the show are by Los Angeles painter Lawrence Gipe. For one thing, they are pleasingly substantial paintings, with commanding compositions and a richly evocative use of paint. More important, perhaps, given the context of this show, are the big, meaty themes Gipe favors. In these black-and-yellow images of railways and industrial landscapes, unabashed nostalgia for icons of the industrial age mingles with a brooding concern for the fate of the Earth.

“Diptych for Krupp” is a luminous quayside scene framed by the silhouettes of smokestacks and tanks. The smoke and gases wafting through the soft lights blanket the night sky with an apricot haze--the painter’s homage to the Impressionists, who created their atmospheric landscape imagery under the shadow of increasing urbanization and pollution. (In some paintings by Monet, for example, the air is colored by the byproducts of industrialization.)

At the bottom of Gipe’s painting, the colloquial German phrase “Wo gehobelt wird, da fallen Spane” is painted in red. It means, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.” The bitter reference is to the activities of Krupp, the giant steel company founded in the early 19th Century that became known as “the arsenal of the Reich” after it supplied guns for the Franco-Prussian War. During World War II, the firm plundered property and plants in occupied countries and used concentration camp inmates to manufacture steel weaponry. Owner Alfried Krupp was convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg Tribunal after the war, but the company soon recovered its economic clout. It seems symptomatic of the superficiality of the show that no effort was made in the catalogue to explore the specifics of any of Gipe’s paintings. The wall labels don’t even offer translations of the German words.

The new piece in the gallery Project Room (through July 29) is Michael McMillen’s baffling “Train of Thought” installation. As you walk down an angled corridor, you encounter a mirror, an old sash window mounted high on the wall, and a tall, thin wood construction. Then you enter a mock-up of a seedy room with useless pipes and wires on the walls and yellow rust stains running down the faded floral wallpaper. A book called “Practical Engineering” is anchored to a table with wire. A stained lab coat hangs on a hook, and an upside-down globe rests on a glass case filled with various items that include a skull, a dried rose, a mannequin’s hand clutching a revolver, a baby bottle nipple and a 100-peso bill that says it was issued by the Japanese government.

After examining these items--most of them either old or bogus, or both--you can sit in an armchair and contemplate the workings of yet another curiousity: a conveyor belt contraption mounted on tall scaffolding somewhat like a railroad trestle. The machine drops a steady trickle of tiny alphabet pasta onto the floor, where it forms a golden hill.

“Train of Thought” appears to have been intended as a meditation about time, history and memory. The image of a train moving over great distances and the mind stringing together free associations come together in a pleasing way. In the piece, the ever-growing mound of fallen letters--the building blocks of language--marks the passage of hours and days. But the letters have no more meaning than the grains of sand in an hourglass. Time, it seems, can turn even language to meaningless dust. The stains on the wall are traces of processes that occurred in some unspecified past.

But the jumble of items in the case and the other miscellaneous objects in the room--including what appear to be wartime photographs of a skeleton with a rifle--don’t have a readily decipherable common denominator. Fakery, death, health concerns, war, engineering--it just doesn’t add up. You sit there willing the piece to reveal itself, and it remains bundled up in an enigma.

“Insistent Landscapes” continues at Security Pacific Gallery, 555 Anton Blvd., Costa Mesa, through April 1. Michael McMillen’s “Train of Thought” installation remains through July 29. The gallery is open Tuesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.. Admission is free and parking is validated. Information: (714) 433-6000.