ART : Video Sampler Has Some Beguiling Takes on Modern Life

Let’s make a deal. You sit tight while I make my case for the fresh visions contained in a program called “NOT necessarily PRIME TIME TV” at Saddleback College Art Gallery, and I’ll try to find something constructive to say about a painting exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum called “Colors and Impressions: The Early Work of E. Charlton Fortune.”

Maybe you’re not a card-carrying member of the TV generation and balk at the idea of video as an art form. Or perhaps you burned out on technically inept, boring works from the early phase of art video. Not to worry. Connie Fitzsimons, the former video curator at the Long Beach Art Museum, has gone out of her way to find significant work that is practically guaranteed to beguile the novice or reluctant viewer.

“The Thinker,” by Max Almy and Teri Yarbrow, takes only seven minutes to zip through man’s evolution from ape to, uh, sound-bite generation moron. A TV sportscaster type monitors the scene (“I think we’re seeing history today”) while the ape successively turns into an ancient Greek in a toga, a medieval monk in a blanket, a Renaissance man in a ruff, a 19th-Century fellow in a tail coat and an ‘80s zombie in a jogging suit.

Speaking at a supersonic pace, thanks to the magic of tape splicing, the speaker keeps rattling off famous sayings associated with each era (from “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance” to “Don’t worry; be happy”) against a background of graphics indicating chief intellectual movements and artistic styles. The net effect is both hilarious and scary: How could we have sunk to this?

John Arvanites’ “Blues for Piggy” has a completely different rhythm. This 12-minute piece is a ruminative view of odd moments in the daily life of Los Angeles. The sights include a house fire as seen from a distant vantage point, growling dune buggies tearing up oceanfront land, and a painter creating a mural of pigs in a field alongside a freeway. Repeated cuts to a virtually motionless lizard reinforce the skewed relationship of these events and sights to the more deliberate processes of nature.

Paul Tasse’s “Remember Flavor” is the most fanciful of the tapes. It uses camera tricks recognizable from TV commercials, ostentatiously fake mock-ups of nature and amusingly apt or out-of-kilter sound effects to make silly and sometimes rather unexpectedly lovely things happen. Xylophone music plays while a spoon zips around a kitchen, tapping itself mischievously on empty air, and walks down a road. A blimp with blue lips floats above a city. The lips’ message is reassuring: “Don’t worry; you’re doing the right thing.” Other images, more fragile and marvelous, resist being reduced to the cold logic of sentences in a newspaper.

In “So, You Want to Be Popular?” Jeanne C. Finley uses an old-fashioned didactic film about personality types in high school (in which Eva, the most unpopular girl in class, “has a tall, rather ungainly build . . . and sometimes wears unusual scarves”) to point up the continuing enigma of popularity. Finley explores the subject in an open-ended way, with such diverse ingredients as a man’s bittersweet reminiscence about an odd high-school friend who once fell asleep in band class, images of Ollie North testifying about his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal and clips of undesirable guys on TV dating shows.

The video sampler also includes Nancy Buchanan’s “Mouth(piece),” a strong-minded work about individual responsibility and political choice, which begins with a cocktail party in which people munch on canapes in the shape of South Africa.

If you’re still wondering why videotapes can be considered part of the wide world of “serious” visual art, the short answer is simply that art is no longer an activity bound to specific media. Today, art is an attitude of investigation and inquiry in which any subject is potentially valid. Value depends chiefly on the artist’s degree of perception and imagination, and how successfully these are conveyed to the viewer with the materials at hand.

And now for a word about “Colors and Impressions” at the Laguna museum. On the positive side, it’s certainly worthwhile, from a feminist perspective anyway, to draw attention to women artists of the past (the E in E. Charlton Fortune’s name stands for Euphemia). A few of the works she did in her 20s and early 30s--such as “A Poet’s Reverie” (1907) and “The Secret” (from about 1916 to 1920)--have a wistful period charm. Her sketches from about 1910 of Isadora Duncan delightfully capture the doyenne of modern dance in characteristic movements from her repertoire.

But that’s about all the praise I can muster for this exhibit. With perhaps one or two exceptions, her seaside and landscape paintings of scenes in France, England and Monterey are no more (and sometimes less) than routine reinterpretations of the lessons of French Impressionism using a more high-keyed palette and broad, choppy brush strokes.

She stuck quite faithfully to the old-fashioned notion of dividing the canvas into fore-, middle- and background rather than risk a Postimpressionist flattening and tilting of the picture plane. One exception, illustrated in the catalogue, is “French Harbor Scene” from the mid-’20s--surely one of her strongest works. Either I overlooked it in the show or it didn’t travel to Laguna.

Even when Fortune incorporated strong local color (as in “The Green Boat, St. Tropez”) or abstract patterning (as in the group white sails in “Drying Sails No. 2”), she did not allow it to dominate the composition, remaining stubbornly rooted to a conventional, dated notion of how a painting ought to look.

When you realize that French Impressionism was utterly passe by the mid-’20s, when these works were painted, and that significant art movements such as Fauvism and analytical Cubism had already had their days in the sun--you can’t help reflecting on the provincial aspect of Fortune’s work. Not that she was alone, of course; plenty of men were also turning out utterly forgettable landscapes in the so-called California Impressionist style. But when a museum commits its resources to resurrecting a forgotten artist, one hopes that the work will be worth the trouble.

This exhibit was originated by the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, which offers--in the catalogue--a lovingly detailed account of her life by Msgr. Robert E. Brennan, a longtime friend, and an earnest, detailed discussion of her work by art writer Merle Schipper. If in fact Fortune was considered “one of the most influential artists of the area for that time,” as Schipper maintains, you can only thank your lucky stars that you live in the 1990s, when California artists no longer lead such blinkered existences.

“Southland Sisters, 1910-1945: Works by Women Artists From the Collection,” a small companion show organized by the Laguna museum, has the single virtue of making Fortune look good. The dull and amateurish paintings--and the one workmanlike bronze relief--by 13 female artists who settled in Southern California are little more than curiosities today. As a matter of fact, one of the women--Agnes Pelton--did produce a body of interesting work with quasi-spiritual, quasi-astronomical imagery. But in this show, she is represented only by a run-of-the-mill watercolor of irises.

Both shows would have been much more stimulating had someone ventured to supply some information about the economic and social constraints during these decades.

What art did the women see? How were they trained? Did they have to squeeze art in between dishes and diapers? (Fortune never married, and Brennan’s silence on her romantic life is absolutely deafening.) Did these women paint strictly for their own amusement? Or in hopes of showing and selling? (Brennan also piously avoids the subject of Fortune’s sales.) Locating works of art in the real world of market supply and demand--or the demands of a family--is one way to acknowledge a corner of the very large world of art without necessarily asking the viewer to admire it for intrinsic reasons.

“NOT necessarily PRIME TIME TV” runs through March 9 at the Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. The tape plays continuously during gallery hours, 12:30 to 5 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, 12:30 to 5 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, and 12:30 to 4 p.m. Friday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 582-4924 or 582-4747.

“Colors and Impressions: The Early Work of E. Charlton Fortune” and “Southland Sisters, 1910-1945” remain through April 15 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except Monday. Admission is $2 general, $1 seniors and students, free for members and children under 12. Information: (714) 494-8971.