FESTIVAL ‘ 90 : ART REVIEWS : L.A. FESTIVAL : East Meets West in Multicultural ‘Traversals’ Collection

The visual-arts component of the multicultural Los Angeles Festival opens officially this week with several Long Beach exhibits that explore the influences of pan-Pacific artists and culture on the local art scene.

The Long Beach Museum’s presentation of “Traversals: Instructions to the Double” investigates various cultures from the subjective perspective of the outsider.

Curated by Australian video artist Peter Callas, “Traversals” is a diverse collection of videos by 10 artists who have spent extended periods of time in other countries. Some used their cameras to examine the alien qualities they see in their respective host countries. Others returned home to regard their native country with the objective distance of a visitor. Artists include Robert Cahen, Tony Conrad, Naoko Kurotsuka, Steina, Edin Velez, Geoff Weary and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

“Faraway, Part 1, From Occupied Japan” by Australian Weary shows the cool distant eye of the stranger at work. He turns an impassive, undiscriminating camera on the Yasukuni Shrine of World War II kamikaze pilots. This video record of war memorabilia, enlivened only with realistic sound like the buzz of strafing fighter planes and the question “In whose name and by what criteria are judgments made?” is a slow perusal of old photographs, toy planes and bits of clothing.

Other videos explore the Japanese/American cross-cultural exchange on ideas of space. Along the way we become sensitized to the stereotypical conceptions Japanese and Americans have of each other and the threat America feels at being edged out as a world power.

Callas’ tape, “Neo Geo: An American Purchase” is a covert reference to the “New World” of America and to economics as the new power of imperialism. His installation, “The Fujiyama Pyramid Project,” which acts as a portal to the video room, expounds on currency as entry into American culture and on Callas’ use of computer-generated icons drawn from popular signs.

In the center of this dark and sound-active room, dotted high and low with monitors, is a tall pyramid. From the entrance, this structure appears as a mystical dollar bill, crowned with a blinking eye of God, emulating the Great Seal of the United States.

The reverse side, or exit, is Mt. Fuji, Japan’s enigmatic symbol. Along the base of the pyramid and on the hovering monitors are colorful, cartoonish images of aggressive bicultural authority figures, flaming falling bodies, ladders and a corpse seemingly being consumed by a blaze of greenbacks.

Also on view and also part of the festival is a selection from 0 years’ worth of oil paintings and pastel drawings by Seattle artist Norman Lundin.

In the tradition of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth’s cool American domestic spaces, Lundin’s art offers realistic time and light portraits of studio interiors. Seductive in their monochromatic formalism, they use bright light on empty canvas, empty glass jars and graffiti on walls to drive home the visual poetry of time, emptiness, light and dark.

Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, to Sept. 30.

Avant-Garde Chinese: Chinese artist Wenda Gu’s installation at Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum is a dark and seductive space that extends the boundary between representation and the formal properties of painting.

“Red Black White Desert” consists of seven triptych panels, all designed according to the Renaissance proportional theory of the golden section.

Six of the triptychs have a hand-woven palm bark raincoat from the rural provinces of China as the graphic central image. On either side of the coat is a large solid-color panel of red, white or black painted in flat acrylic and splashed with a gesture of shiny oil in the same color. The seventh triptych is simply three of the bark raincoats side by side. Fine, colored lines incorporating the colors of the two flanking panels run down from the neck of the garment onto the floor, creating a network of lines that meet and unify at one point. Over the top of each coat is a sheet of clear plexiglass suspended and held in position by four shiny brass plumb bobs.

The effect is to render the coat as a preserved object yet turn that panel into a flattened surface like the two flanking paintings. The coat then becomes almost a fossilized gesture--a bold, solid mark on the light background equal in strength to the solid colored panels with their faint floating splashes.

For Gu, a product of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and centuries of traditional ink-and-wash painting, these works are an attempt to harmonize his culture as well as his interest in Western theories of painting and philosophy. This installation reveals an art where the process of thought and creation is an all-consuming meditation of tighter and tighter circles. Remarkably, it never feels restrictive but as delicate as his gentle splash of color into color.

University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach ; to Dec. 2.