Festival ’90 : A PENETRATING GAZE : Visual artists, many of whom consider themselves outsiders, focus on the gaps between cultures

The “outsider” viewpoints of people who don’t feel at home within a dominant culture are at the heart of the visual arts component of the Los Angeles Festival.

Some of these artists are looking at each other’s Pacific Rim cultures with a coolly dissecting eye, allowing Eastern and Western ideas and images to invade one another and raise more questions than they answer.

Other artists are in some sense strangers to their own societies--because of cultural roots, sexual orientation or a rejection of the consumer-oriented practices of the contemporary art world.

At the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach (Friday through Dec. 2), Chinese artist Wenda Gu will create a site-specificinstallation, “Red, Black, White, Desert.” The work will involve the juxtaposition of raincoats made of woven palm bark--the type worn by rural Chinese workers--with minimalist abstract canvases painted in alternating fields of red, black and white.

Behind this work lies an idiosyncratic way of viewing the world that, for all its brash contemporaneity, stems from the tradition of the great “individualist” artists of the Yuan and early Ch’ing Dynasties--maverick artists like Hung-jen and Chu Ta, who retired from the world during tumultuous periods of Chinese history and cultivated eccentric signature styles. The difference is that Gu remains very much a part of the world, making art that is political by implication, if not in overt ways.

Gu, who now lives in New York, was born in Shanghai in 1955. As a child of the Cultural Revolution, he painted propaganda posters before attending the School of Arts and Crafts in his native city and studying the traditional arts of (wooden) seal carving and landscape painting.

An obsessive reader and philosophizer, in the tradition of the literati painters of Chinese history, Gu became interested in the writings of such vastly disparate Western philosophers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the works of such modern Western artists as Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys.

He began to see his work as a way of stirring up the caldron of past and present--of combining slogans he saw on the street with ancient poems and making mutant seals in which the calligraphy was fractured and rearranged. Slamming together bits and pieces of diverse eras, lifestyles and cultures in his installations, he finds conflict more fruitful than the aura of tranquility generally associated with Asian art.

Delighting in paradoxes and riddles, he is a black humorist with a strong mystic streak. Describing a 1987 performance piece of his involving bloody gloves, red tubes and a small house structure made of mixed media paintings, Gu wrote, “The atmosphere was very sexual and painful. Only my desire was present.”

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At the Long Beach Museum of Art, “Traversals: Instructions to the Double” (today through Sept. 30) is a program of nine videotapes assembled by guest curator Peter Callas. The works in the show are all by Pacific Rim artists who have visited other cultures and responded not with travelogues but with open-ended, highly subjective meditations. Unconventional editing and post-production work emphasizes the rhythms and layers of imagery the artists perceived in their travels.

In Edin Velez’s “Meaning of the Interval” (18 minutes, 1987), the subject is empty space. Known as ma in Japan, prolonged intervals--of space or time--are considered a source of harmonic energy. They exist everywhere: in buildings, paintings, even on the slow-moving Noh theater stage.

Puerto Rico-born Velez (who now lives in New York) looks at the large and small manifestations of ma in Japan: from the distance between one subway station and another to a stark white line that divides in half--revealed as the space between the two pillars of a Shinto temple gateway. Using post-production wizardry to alter the sizes and positions of his imagery, Velez also emphasizes peculiar juxtapositions of conservative and outre behavior in modern-day Japan. These are the “spaces” that separate different pockets of life in a hierarchical and superficially orderly society.

Naoko Kurotsuka’s “The Palm” (5 minutes, 1985) was shot at a long-abandoned temple arch in the ruins of Ayuttheya in Thailand--a site at once familiar to a Japanese (because of the countries’ shared Buddhist culture) and undeniably foreign. Static shots focus on details of the natural world that continues to flourish despite the lack of human presence. To begin and end each shot, the Japanese artist cupped her hands over the lens, as if helping each image to be born and to die.

Although Westerners consider ancient, unchanging landscape as the essence of timelessness, Kurotsuka writes, in the East, timelessness is equivalent to “the ever-changing state of temporary nature.”

Other video artists represented in the show are Geoffrey Weary, Robert Cahen, Ko Nakajima, Tony Conrad, Steina Vasulka, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto and Callas.

At the Los Angeles Photography Center, “Golden Pool” (Sept. 4 through Oct. 14) brings together the photographic work of 12 artists--some established, some emerging--who live in Southern California and explore different aspects of Asian and Asian-American cultural experience.

Betty Lee blows up stills from Chinese movies of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s to “big screen” size and adds statements reflecting her ironic take on the contemporary status of Chinese-American women. Carol Nye’s black-and-white photographs investigate the ways minority groups in China adapt to the dominant culture. Other artists in the exhibit include May Sun, Patrick Nagatani and Alan Cheung.

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“Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985” at the Wight Art Gallery, UCLA (Sept. 9 through Dec. 9) is a huge show, the largest ever assembled specifically on the art of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. (as distinct from Latino, Hispanic or Latin American art). This emphasis is on the relationship of the art to el movimiento, the Chicano civil rights movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which focused on demands for workers’ rights, bilingual education, the abolition of racist cultural barriers, and the return of land to the descendants of original land-grant holders.

The more than 130 paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures are the work of 90 artists from across the U.S., chosen by a national advisory committee. It remains to be seen whether the show--which unfortunately does not include performance or installation art--will make a compelling case for individually distinctive voices of members of a minority group, or sink under the weight of curatorship-by-committee.

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David Wojnarowicz’s “Tongues of Flame,” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (through Sept. 5) is an exhibit of the artist’s passionate and motley pieces from the past decade, which all deal in some way with his life as a gay man. Wojnarowicz--who suffers from complications of AIDS and who endured a shockingly brutal and loveless youth--works from the position of radical social outcast. By turns darkly fantastic and coldly nihilistic, his imagery of death, decay, violence, male sexuality and technological malfunction is virtually guaranteed to raise bourgeois hackles.

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Robbie Conal’s brand of guerrilla warfare is a kinder, gentler phenomenon, notable mostly for the dogged persistance with which he plasters thousands of his political posters throughout the U.S. Organized by the Pasadena Art Alliance, “Unauthorized History: Robbie Conal’s Portraits of Power” at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena (Sept. 8 through Nov. 9), includes his deliberately unflattering images of such Reagan-Bush era figures as Jim and Tammy Bakker, John Poindexter, Jesse Helms and Ronald, Nancy and George.