TV Reviews : The Hard Work Behind Art-Making

“The Work of Art,” the latest project of KCET’s Arts and Culture Unit (10:30 tonight on Channel 28), has two simultaneous agendas that don’t always fuse, well, artfully.

The agenda suggested by the title is to show how five Los Angeles artists work--more importantly, how art-making is work, hard work. Photographer John Humble traipses through brush and garbage-strewn wastelands to position his large-format camera for the right shot. Sculptor Charles Dickson, looking like a low-budget astronaut, wears protective gear as he creates enormous works out of Lucite and styrene plastic.

Patssi Valdez, late of the performance art scene, has been producing painting after painting in the past year. Comic book artist Geof Darrow’s intricate, post-apocalyptic fantasies look very hard to do, yet he seems like a jolly worker. Elizabeth Garrison and Victor Henderson share their work, as their painting prototype for a piece of billboard art is taken over by the billboard pros, who copy it faithfully.

The other agenda here is to show how art-making in Los Angeles is different from elsewhere. This comes across fitfully at best. Certainly Humble’s extraordinary photo-dramas of nature and industry in beautiful and terrible conflict, and the freeway-perfect Garrison/Henderson billboard work (Lincoln crawling on his knees, with the caption underneath, “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful”) are very L.A. Valdez’s vibrant canvasses, mixing Spanish and Mexican colors and icons, are interesting, but not the most exciting examples of current L.A.-Mexican art. Dickson and Darrow create unique work, but they could be doing it anywhere.

Finally, cramming five artists’ lives into a half-hour segment is simply a terrible idea, and another example of how local artists remain in a time-zone ghetto at KCET.