ART REVIEW : ‘Centric 38’: High-Minded World of New York’s Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson is being touted as the art world’s hot new kid on the block--a rather surprising development considering that there’s nothing remotely new about her work.

Like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and a host of other Post-Structuralist artists who combine photographic images with text, Simpson makes fervently political work that tends to be a little too high-minded for its own good. Her intentions may be above reproach, but it never pays to forget that art is a seduction of sorts; this visually austere art offers little incentive toward inspiring the viewer to decode its hidden meanings.

Los Angeles gets its first look at the work of this New York artist in “Centric 38: Lorna Simpson,” on view at the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach through Friday. Including eight works dating from 1986-89, the show arrives surrounded by a load of semiotic blather earnestly insisting that a cigar is never just a cigar, and each and every gesture is rife with multiple meanings. Simpson’s work seems rather modest compared with the cathedral of Post-Structuralist theory that’s springing up around it; she should tell the critics to call off their dogs before her work is obliterated by hype.

The raison d’etre of Post-Structuralism is, of course, the dismantling of systems of coercion and power, and being both black and female, this 29-year-old artist grew up well aware of the ways that society marginalizes people on the basis of class, gender and race. Those three societal hot potatoes are the core issues in her work, and she deals with them in a specific, highly didactic way. Touching on a rat’s nest of related issues--how the public accepts media at face value, the implicit racism and sexism of much ad copy, abortion, rape and the tyranny of today’s standards of beauty--Simpson exposes an insidious network of victimizers and victims.

The format of Simpson’s work is largely unvaried. She shoots big Polaroid photographs (mostly black-and-white, a few in color), then pairs them with words or fragments of text engraved on plastic plaques of the sort one sees in offices and institutions. The words she uses are usually vaguely related to the accompanying image and hint at a corresponding narrative, which the viewer is invited to decipher. A work called “Necklines,” for instance, pairs a portrait of a woman’s neck with eight words-- breakneck , necking , necklace , etc.--built around the root word of neck .

The Polaroids usually depict a black model placed in a vacuum of empty space and dressed in a plain white shift resembling a hospital gown. The models often strike poses that suggest vulnerability--arms crossed protectively across the midriff, head tilted slightly down--and are rendered anonymous in a manner evocative of work by John Baldessari. Simpson never shows a complete body or a whole face, for instance, and went so far as to blindfold her models in several early works. Stripping them of individuality in this manner, she underscores the psychological fragmentation of the archetypes that people her work.

For a final touch, she frames her photographs in a uniform and clinical manner and shows her pieces under cool, low lights; the results add up to a show drained of vitality that succeeds in mimicking the way society strips its marginalized members of individuality.