VIDEO ART REVIEW : ‘Magnetic Youth’: Videotape and Teens Attract

Sergio Martinez lowered his head and grinned selfconsciously as videotaped images of him talking on the telephone flashed by on a video monitor. Martinez, 19, endured a few good-natured jabs about his screen image from Lou-ee Munoz and Gina Padilla, friends from the Para Los Ninos center in downtown Los Angeles, as they sat facing two screens in a cluttered corner of the third-floor office of Visual Communications.

Video artist/instructor Gina Lamb joined in the banter, but she quickly refocused attention on the work at hand--introducing the three downtown youths to the rudiments of editing videotape. Martinez, Padilla and Munoz have never worked with video before, but their maiden voyage in the medium will be premiered at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions on July 29.

That’s the final day of the “Magnetic Youth: Teen-Powered TV” exhibit curated by Lamb that is running at the downtown facility. The exhibit features 3 hours of video work created by teen-age youth working with artists across the country.

“My major goal is to let them know their opinion is important and video is a way that people will see it and take notice,” said Lamb, who had been doing video art work with youth around Los Angeles for five years. For the past two, she has been a full-time artist-in-residence at Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles.

“Video works on a lot of levels. One is that you can use the medium creatively, have complete control over it and make this thing that is different from television.

“It gives a certain sense of . . . empowerment is this catchword now, but it does (apply) with the kids because they can show it to their friends. In a sense, they build a certain self-confidence in who they are. It gives them a direction.”

Lamb, a Baltimore native who moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and received her master’s degree in fine arts from UCLA in 1987, got the idea for the “Magnetic Youth” program when she attended a media arts conference last year that focused on education. She found other video artists doing similar work and, when new video art curator Adriene Jenik arrived at LACE with a background in education and documentaries, the wheels were put in motion.

Most of the “Magnetic Youth” tapes are the work of inner-city youth and fall in the documentary vein. The subjects include abortion, media coverage of the Bensonhurst killing and Central Park “wilding” attack, rap music and graffiti art. “My Three Friends” relates the harrowing escapes of three refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam who became friends at Belmont High here.

“My Soul Is . . .” depicts a Living Haiku Society meeting over pizza in a New York City school, while “Sundance” is a celebration of nature that is the most purely “artistic” of the lot. The most sophisticated is “We Have the Force,” which combines a cartoon puppet family with documentary footage that shows that battling addiction is more complex than “Just Say No” sloganeering.

“There’s a really nice tape of Navajo kids talking about their work called ‘Have You Ever Seen a Rainbow at Night?’ ” said Lamb. “That was professionally edited, but the kids shot and narrated it and they come through strongly.

“The work is beautiful. You see the beautiful mountain ranges and then a flying carpet with a TV on it that says ‘Dynasty.’ The kids are really funny--they tell the viewer at the end how they can have an imagination.”

Lamb’s Para Los Ninos residency, funded by an Artists Projects grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, has already had a few ups and downs. One participant was grounded, a second who was scheduled to edit didn’t show up, and a power outage at Visual Communications left the rest working amid a jury-rigged maze of extension cords and hot lights.

Sergio Martinez plans to document the contrast between rich and poor sections of Los Angeles, and Gina Padilla is doing her individual piece on addiction. Lou-ee Munoz, who plans to do a piece on the aesthetic side of graffiti art murals, found a connection between video’s editing process and the way he mixes records as a music deejay.

The Para Los Ninos tape won’t be the only new work debuted at the last of the LACE exhibit. Lamb’s Jefferson High students will also present a documentary on the anti-narcotics barricade surrounding their school.

Two recent Jefferson graduates, Teresa Mercado and Irene Esquivel, were helping Lamb. Esquivel had been undecided about future plans until she got involved last year in a 10-minute documentary on Jefferson graduate and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Richard Berry, who wrote “Louie Louie.”

“The surprising thing was (discovering) that working with video was the thing I wanted to do,” said Esquivel, who plans to enter Cal State Los Angeles in September and major in broadcast and mass media. “The camera is a little box of magic where you put your ideas into reality and show them to people. It’s another form of expression.”

It’s stories like Esquivel’s that give Lamb the most satisfaction.

“I see myself as a person artist,” she said. “I’m interested in people and that’s why I like working with kids. (It’s) like Diane Arbus, going in and becoming like your subject, but for me taking it a step further and turning the camera over to the subject. For a lot of artists, the youth fill them with energy and push them forward so they’re learning as much as the kids are.”