New Eyes on News of the World : An exhibit will include works representing about 20 artists’ reactions to recent international events

These days, the Persian Gulf War is on everybody’s minds, lips and television screens; in the case of some artists, it also has penetrated deep into the studio.

Usually, there is considerable lag time for art incorporating breaking news to appear in galleries and museums, which set their schedules months or even years in advance. But a group of artists is working right now to assemble a show of art made in response to the war.

“In casually talking to other artists, we found they were mentioning that they were doing work about the Middle East war--they couldn’t concentrate on their other work,” said artist Kim Abeles, who is organizing the show with Barbara Benish and Deborah Lawrence. “We thought that was interesting--people working alone in their spaces, very much out of a need to express themselves; they weren’t thinking in terms of audience. So we said, ‘Let’s see who’s out there doing work and put it together as an exhibit.’ ”

The show, which will be titled “World News,” is meant as “an immediate reaction and response to world events of the past weeks,” Benish said. “To begin with, it will include the work of about 20 artists.” Informally and quickly assembled, the exhibition is “definitely grass-roots,” she added.

So far, the artists have two firm venues for the exhibition and are looking for additional space. The show makes its debut this weekend at the Onyx Cafe and Gallery on Vermont Avenue. By March, “World News” should be on view at Beyond Baroque in Venice, Benish and Abeles said.

“There seemed to be a need for a forum,” Benish said. “In a crisis situation like this, any artist questions, ‘What can I do?’ Do you go out into the streets, or do you go into the studio and make things? I just went into the studio out of frustration.”

The organizers are hoping to make “World News” a fluid show that can be added to, subtracted from or otherwise changed according to the various locations or art that becomes available. Abeles said she hopes that the show will be able to travel in “kind of a guerrilla way--one venue may last a couple of days or a month--just to keep the work circulating.”

Abeles, Benish and Lawrence are also adamant about trying to include artists who support the war as well as those who raise questions about it. “We really want to keep it from being another bunch of peaceniks going on the warpath,” Benish said. “We don’t want to just come in with an agenda, but to figure this whole thing out.”

So often, political shows tend to be slanted one way or another, alienating whole segments of the potential audience, Abeles said. This show is more frankly exploratory--an attempt to sift through the glut of information, impressions, even artifacts emanating from a war just over a month old.

“I don’t feel I know anything more about the war than anyone else,” Abeles said. “I don’t know what the truth is either. So I think it’s a way to get more information.”

How long could “World News” conceivably run?

If enough spaces can be found to show it in, Abeles said, “we’d like to do it for as long as the war is on.”

“World News,” 9 a.m. to 4 a.m. today and 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. Monday, at the Onyx Cafe and Gallery, 1804 N. Vermont Ave. For information on “World News,” call (213) 413-5857.

LITHUANIAN EYES: Somewhat obscured by the war in the Middle East is the crisis in Lithuania, another faraway place that can seem abstract when viewed on a world map. But lending flesh-and-blood form and a human face to the beleaguered Baltic republic is a show called “Through Love to the Truth; Through Freedom to Creativity: Two Masters of Lithuanian Photography,” which runs through Saturday at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery.

On view are black-and-white documentary photographs by Antanus Sutkus and sepia-toned photographs of nudes, nature and Lithuanian folk culture by Rimantas Dichavicius. Both bodies of work are from the collection of Herbert A. Belkin.

Sutkus, who worked for two state magazines in the 1960s and went on to found the Photography Art Society of Lithuania, is represented by early portraits of peasants, workers and intellectuals, as well as later photographs documenting the republic’s movement toward what is known as re-nationhood, its election of a president in 1988 and its 1989 demonstrations against a Chernobyl-style nuclear reactor at Ignalina.

Laband Gallery director Gordon Fuglie admits that he was initially skeptical about Sutkus’ work until he realized that the photographer was subtly undermining the tradition of socialist realism that he was basically forced to work in during the 1960s.

Motioning to a portrait of a wide-eyed but rather haunted-looking young boy wearing the scarf of the state youth organization, Fuglie said: “At first I thought, ‘Here’s that grand old tradition of Russian magazine photography--progress is upward and onward.’ But when I held it in my hands and looked more deeply into it, I said, ‘This is not a positive image of the Young Pioneers. This is an ironic image.’ ”

“Two Masters of Lithuanian Photography” through Saturday at Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, 7101 W. 80th St., Westchester. (213) 338-2880. Open 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays, noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays.

LOOK HOMEWARD: There’s no mention of the Persian Gulf War in the show “Themes: Social and Political” at the Jose Drudis-Biada Art Gallery. “Of course, there was no war at the time that I selected it a year ago,” said Olga Seem, exhibitions curator for the Mt. St. Mary’s College gallery.

Pieces by Mariona Barkus and Dale Weiss touch on military matters, but most of the work by the seven local artists deals with more domestically rooted issues, ranging from media manipulation to personal loss to black cultural heritage.

Phora Gerdes and John Trees both address issues of aging from a base of personal experience with elderly parents, Seem said.

In one Gerdes assemblage, a miniature of a young woman holding a baby in a rocking chair--which actually rocks, with a motorized tick--is mounted into the back of the head of a wheelchair-bound elderly woman clutching a Raggedy Ann doll.

In his Rest Home Series, Trees depicts the life of his aging father, using deeply etched lines and pounded nails on institutional-green-painted tar felt mounted on linoleum. The pieces carry titles such as “All I remember were the spaces in between,” “Through the window nobody looks out of” and “Until it ends there is no end.”

“This kind of work is very non-commercial, and I don’t know how many galleries would show it,” Seem said. “We offer really an alternative space for people who have a very strong statement but not a commercial one.”

“Themes: Social and Political” through March 1 at the Jose Drudis-Biada Art Gallery of Mt. St. Mary’s College, 12001 Chalon Road, Brentwood. (213) 476-2237. Open noon to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.

Solomon Gallery--In last week’s Art Notebook column, an item on garage art shows misidentified a pioneering gallery owner. He is Thomas Solomon of Thomas Solomon’s Garage, which will soon move to a larger space.