ART REVIEWS : The Naked and the Dead at Photography Museum : Two exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside focus on modern images of sexuality and Victorian attitudes toward death.

I came for death and stayed for sex. A little strange, yes, but let me explain.

I was lured to the California Museum of Photography in Riverside by an exhibit called “Memento Mori: Death in 19th-Century Photography.” The notion of people routinely having their peaceful, neatly dressed dead children and elderly relatives photographed for posterity--as if they simply had fallen asleep in their Sunday best--seemed wonderfully bizarre.

As guest curator Dan Meinwald explains in his excellent little catalogue, “Death now, like sex then, is hidden, an event which takes place behind closed doors. The opposite is also true: In the 19th Century, death was discussed as freely and openly as sex is today.”

Openly? Maybe. But as the National Endowment for the Arts controversy has indicated, some people still panic at signs of sexual activity in art--especially when it is publicly funded. The other major attraction at the museum is a bold and savvy installation by Richard Bolton that displays 15 wildly disparate nude photographs--from art, advertising and sex magazine sources--together with comments by a broadly divergent group of people who don’t agree on anything.

Off-putting and dull as the “The Emperor’s New Clothes: Censorship, Sexuality and the Body Politic” may sound and look at first blush (Such a woodenly academic title! So many texts to read!), it is actually thoughtful, engrossing, honest, surprising, irritating, sharply revelatory of everyday sexual stereotyping--and sometimes even funny.

But--call it delayed gratification--let’s consider death first.

The Victorians were as steeped in sentimental and pious literature as we are in TV commercials, and accustomed to caring personally for the terminally ill at home, rather than visiting them in hospitals. Infant mortality was high, mourning was a rigidly defined and long-term process, and the grief-stricken were encouraged to dwell heartily on their deceased loved ones rather than getting on with their lives.

Numerous images of the dead--meant to be seen only by family members--show the body at home, resting on a parlor sofa, “sleeping” in the deathbed, or comfortably tucked into a coffin. Some of the infants are held by a stony-faced living parent seemingly still in shock; a few tiny faces are touched up with awkwardly unlifelike daubs of pink, and many tiny hands hold a single flower.

Often, the image of death was stage-managed for maximum sentiment. In one photograph, a slender row of blossoms separates the bodies of two little girls in a coffin, the elder one posed with her arm protectively encircling her sister’s shoulders.

For public figures, however, the deathbed was conceived of as too grand and public place to be left to the photographer’s craft. In the hands of lithographers Currier and Ives, Abraham Lincoln’s death takes on a mythic quality, borrowed from paintings of the death of Christ. A row of grim-faced Cabinet members and other bigwigs and family members--some of whom were not actually present--are shown paying their last respects in a tiny boarding house bedroom that never could have accommodated them all at once.

But it was photography that had brought the messy reality of Civil War death to the public’s attention in a shocking new way. The first major battle in which photographers were able to get to the scene before the bodies were buried was the horrific one-day massacre at Antietam Creek in 1862, in which more than 6,000 were killed and more than 17,000 wounded.

It’s hard to imagine a time when people far from the world’s battlefronts were never confronted by the sight of mutilated bodies that suffered violent death. Writers of the era--accustomed only to newspaper woodcuts of heroic battle scenes--described their strong warring feelings of fascination and repulsion at viewing the graphic scenes of carnage made by itinerant entrepreneurs out to make a buck.

At the other extreme, the cult of death also produced a new species of photographer-quack. Preying on popular beliefs in spiritualism, these individuals claimed to be able to photograph the “spirits” of the dead, which appear as faint, ghostly figures hovering behind the pixilated living subjects.

But enough of such old-fashioned weirdness; we have enough of our own. In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Bolton corralled a batch of contemporary photographs of bodies, including: a Georges Marciano ad that appears to show a young woman carried away by a man to have sex; a Playboy centerfold; an image of an obese woman with mutilated breasts by Joel-Peter Witkin; and graphic scenes of couples engaging in simulated heterosexual and homosexual sex. (The exhibit is open only to viewers over 17.)

The quarrelsome group of commentators whose remarks are printed below each image emphasize the diverse avenues of thought and feeling inspired by sexual imagery and combat blinkered thinking.

California Museum of Photography, 3824 Main St., Riverside (in the downtown pedestrian mall); “Memento Mori” through Jan. 6; “The Emperor’s New Clothes” through Dec. 30.

Did Mother Know Best?: There’s nothing wrong with showing downbeat work at a supposedly festive time of the year, especially when the subject is about the stress between family members--a holiday subject if every there was one. But “The Mother & Child Reunion,” a group of videos by women artists at the Long Beach Museum of Art, is unduly weighted down by tedium, shrillness, shallowness and grimness.

Of the seven tapes, shown in three programs, only two are really worth watching if you don’t happen to be a psychiatrist or a die-hard devote of feminist video. One is “Belladonna” by the mother-daughter team of Ida Applebroog and Beth B; the other is newcomer Natalie Sternberg’s “One Banana, Two Bananas.”

In “Belladonna,” a rapid succession of talking heads--young, old, bohemian, well-groomed, male, female--utter brief phrases redolent of brutality, self-abasement, compulsion and fatally misdirected love. As the tape progresses, it is possible to pick out brief narratives dealing with family interactions, but only at the end do you find out that the quotes actually come from Nazi death doctor Josef Mengele, child murderer Joel Steinberg and case histories documented by Sigmund Freud.

The idea is to isolate the testimony from its source so the viewer can reach conclusions untainted by the notoriety of the testifier. Spread among so many different voices, the ugly facts of socially unpermissible behavior resonate all by themselves, without being attached to specific bogeymen.

“One Banana” is a flatly straightforward chronicle of Sternberg’s mother, Lynn, and her everyday life while she was dying of multiple sclerosis. A handsome woman who once loved to dance, Lynn spends her days seated in a wheelchair and speaking in a slow, disconnected way. The daughter keeps her relentless camera turned on to register the gushing lies of her mother’s friends, the tense denial of her son, and the steadfast devotion of her husband.

As if in a prerehearsed catechism, Lynn answers her 20-year-old daughter’s big questions about marriage, family love and suicide with terse precision. Unflinching even in its portrayal of Lynn’s struggles to rise from the toilet to her wheelchair, the tape is an unsentimental, unmetaphorical, unembarrassed document made by a member of the MTV generation. Yet Sternberg’s deep familial love and serene acceptance of her mother’s decline is oddly reminiscent of the Victorian ideal.

Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd.; to Jan. 6. Programs change every hour between noon and 4 p.m.