O.C. ART : Scottish Humor Could Use Wee Bit o’ Tang and Punch

As a carefree tourist in Edinburgh, Scotland, last year, I was loading up on cheap earrings hand-painted in tartan plaids when I got an earful from the shop owner. He growled fiercely at all things overrefinedly and snottily English and proclaimed the superiority of the honest Scottish way of life.

Another side of the Scots, however, is their wonderfully self-deprecating humor. (What other country would have virtually copyrighted the word “wee” for “small”?) And there is also the enduring, if not endearing, stereotype of the gruff football fanatic who wouldn’t know culture from a canary, unless you asked him to recite a sentimental poem about the beauties of nature.

Scottish artists Calum Colvin and Ron O’Donnell revel in enumerating the hoary attitudes of their countrymen, as translated into photographs and installations at the Main Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton, through Oct. 31. Yet some of their work suffers from an apparent inability to quit horsing around or showing off and commit oneself to a sharply honed point of view, even if that means courting the accusation of putting on airs.

Colvin, who was born in 1961, started out as a sculptor, then studied photography at the Royal College of Art in London. Eventually, he began combining the sculpture with the photography.

His recent work consists of large-format Cibachrome photographs of a jumble of real objects, other photographs and painted imagery that crawls over walls and furniture with a cheeky disregard for the notion of a seamless vertical surface.

These dense and ambitious tableaux frequently rely on perceptual trickery and odd alignments of forms, like the intersection of a nude sculpture of a female torso with a painted male nude in such a way that his genitals seem grafted on hers.

“The Misanthropist,” a three-dimensional installation, reveals his working methods. An old desk partially covered with tartan fabric (real and painted) holds a globe, a TV set, postcards of a Van Gogh self-portrait and a (torn) view of Hell by Hieronymous Bosch, a silly, old poetic couplet and a pair of scales weighed down with play money. If you stand in the right spot, you can see various painted images coalescing into a giant face beaming out of the TV and spreading over the table.

The visual gimmick is appealing, and the objects suggest various manifestations of a personality that distrusts other people. The Bosch image, for example, brings to mind Jean-Paul Sartre’s quip that “hell is other people;” the poem bemoans the “untruth” of the world (of course, the entire tableau is “untrue”--a trickery machine manufactured by the artist). But the meaning at the heart of the work remains elusive.

Colvin’s least “busy” and perhaps most accessible pieces are the ones with the most specifically “Scottish” settings. The photograph “Jacob’s Ladder,” for example, combines an image of a mannequin climbing a ladder inscribed with higher human attributes (intelligence, imagination); a sentimental poem about someone who longs for the sea; a perky, adventure-book quote about a “climbing hero” and a cartoon in which a dapper man asks a boy to direct him to the art gallery. The child takes him there and registers incredulity when he calls an all-black painting a “masterpiece.”

Of course, the cartoon reader was expected to take the side of the child; sensible people know modern art is a hoax. Colvin’s linking of the intrepid mannequin--the kind of guy who could agree with the sentiments in the poem and the cartoon--with Jacob’s dream of a ladder from Earth to heaven might be a wry commentary on the lack of (aesthetic) vision possessed by the average Scotsman.

O’Donnell, born in 1952, is a technical photographer in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Although he worked for a decade in documentary photography, he has no training whatsoever as a painter. But that doesn’t stop him from turning rooms in old tenements into odd medleys of furniture and kitschy bric-a-brac.

Normally, he just moves on to another apartment when he finishes revamping the last one; this is not work made for posterity. But at Cal State Fullerton, he offers Type-C photographs of several of his previous installations, as well as a real installation (“The Fall”) made specifically for the gallery.

“The Fall” plays on the word in its double sense of a season of the year and man’s biblical fall from grace. A large airborne cutout of a woman with silver foil wings and a face set in permanent cartoonlike astonishment hangs in the air, about to plummet into a well of cardboard stones surrounded by leaves hand-painted in autumnal gold and silver.

Towering above is a blue sky pieced together out of bits of painted cardboard. On the ground, squashed soda cans mingle with more fallen leaves. The whole tableau is enclosed, like a stage set, in tasseled red paper curtains.

Those soda cans suggest that the piece is also about contemporary culture’s ecological fall from grace. But the sprightly appeal of the tableau--a blend of American Pop art sensibility and the British “make-do” aesthetic--is about as far as you can get from preachy moralism. Praise be.

O’Donnell’s photographs are artful charmers that tend to coast sweetly on surface effects. “The Scotsman” is a photograph of home sweet home, Scots style. A hole punched through a brick wall reveals a room papered in plaid, festooned with knickknacks, from a coat of arms to copies of the strongly nationalistic newspaper The Scotsman. A man in a kilt with a football for a head sits watching a blank TV. It’s a gentle satire of a way of life that--for an outsider at least--could use a wee bit of tang and punch.

Other photographs embody wispy little fancies, like “Two Trees Meeting for the Last Time,” a mass of curling autumn leaves attached to a wall splattered with red paint, with a still life of cast-off objects. There is a homespun pathos in such scenes that hasn’t quite gotten beyond the cute-and-dreamy stage.

Incidentally, this exhibit is yet another in a series of shows at Cal State Fullerton with no accompanying catalogue or brochure to discuss the work and place it in an artistic and cultural context. The university provides no money for catalogues. Special funding for this exhibit from the Festival of Britain was used for the worthy project of bringing the two artists to campus to install their work and speak with students.

Isn’t there an alumnus or education-minded member of the community willing to write an $8,000 to $10,000 check for catalogues? The tangible rewards would be the catalogues themselves, which would be around long after the exhibits closed; the intangible reward would be the knowledge that one was helping to introduce contemporary art to people at a time in their lives when they were most receptive to new ideas.