ART REVIEW : A Deadpan, Rich Look at the Bland

If you wanted to title an exhibition to discourage people from seeing it, you couldn’t do much better than calling it “Typologies.” The dictionary says it’s the study of types, symbols or symbolism. That sounds like something halfway between an occult science and a box of file cards. It sounds like a bad combination of the esoteric and the dull.

As it turns out, the title is about the only thing wrong with “Typologies,” which just opened at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Organized by New York curator Marc Freidus, the traveling show comes with a catalogue that was not ready at press time. The show offers photographs by nine contemporary artists who take deadpan pictures of such subjects as gas stations, blank-stare people, trees or factories. This approach to art has been around at least since the ‘60s, but this exhibition claims to be the first to survey the phenomenon.

It speaks well that the 200 pictures on view feel like far fewer. They slowly absorb one’s whole attention, like chanting a mantra or trying to discern differences between identical twins. In the end, the experience becomes so compressed you feel like you’ve seen just nine incredibly rich images.

Classified by nationality, artists divide about equally between Germans and Americans with one Canadian thrown in for good measure. Despite this internationalism, the whole becomes mantled in a kind of German sensibility. That’s probably because we think of Germans as world champion classifiers. If the ancestor of this whole exercise isn’t some anthropologist or naturalist it’s probably the late 19th-Century German photographer August Sander who went about sorting people according to their jobs and thereby whispered volumes about the nature of German culture, its stolid conventionalism and attraction to regimentation. Part of the fascination here is playing detective, deducing from the evidence.

One of the immediate elders of this tribe is L.A.’s own Ed Ruscha. He shows pictures of anonymous service stations that eventually made up his 1963 book, “Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations.” Even this quintessentially American talent looks a little Teutonic in this company--reminds you of Wim Wenders’ film “Alice in the Cities.” The hero drives desolate stretches of the U.S. taking Polaroids he hopes will show some character in the deadly populist uniformity.

Ruscha’s pictures reveal pungent personality to anyone who looks twice. From the Fina station in Groom, Tex., to the Texaco in Jackrabbit, Ariz., the whole thing reeks of the American longing to stand out. We’ll do anything that works. We’ll design a canopy that looks like a flying wedge or make a ghastly pun on our own name like the pumpery that calls itself, “Knox Less.” You want insight? Compare the Ruschas to serial photos by Germans Bernd and Hilla Becher. They make Deutschland’s water towers look like huts for malevolent elves. Blast furnaces become fire-breathing dragons with an erotic charge. If Ruscha makes the states seem peopled by honest rubes aching for snappy style, the Bechers see a Germany burdened by history.

Look at Thomas Ruff’s pictures and you think at first they’re the work of the American Chuck Close. But Ruff is German, a student of the Bechers, and his work is the drop-dead entry of the show.

Symmetrically, he shows four passport-style color portraits, each four times life size, two men, two women. The prints are so technically brilliant that when you stand close up they literally look three-dimensional. You can watch the men’s beards grow and dive into the women’s limpid eyes. By the time it’s over you’re in love with a green-eyed dishwater blonde in a leather jacket. This is amazing work, as refined as a Holbein drawing, as fleshy as a Grunewald painting.

Other Becher-school artists include Candida Hofer, who takes images of unpeopled public interiors like libraries, museums and the famous spas Europeans like to visit. Her use of color makes the images sensuous but the archeological distance she maintains pushes everything away as if the present already existed in the past. Her image of plaster casts of classical sculpture in a Bonn museum has an air of finality and regret.

Thomas Struth’s pictures provide food for city planners’ thoughts. He records office buildings and multiple dwellings that seem to say they did things better in the past. Old stacked buildings in Naples look as organic as Indian pueblos. Corporate offices in Chicago’s Loop are as heartless as they are slick.

L.A.’s Judy Fiskin chimes in with a discouraging word. Her postage-stamp size shots of local dingbat apartment buildings talk about a culture so indifferent to the modest individual that even their quarters seem to hold them in contempt.

The real lesson of “Typologies” is that an objective look at the way human beings arrange themselves and their surroundings can be devastatingly revealing.

In his pictures of trees at different seasons and roadside basketball hoops, Roger Mertin looks like a nice guy, but don’t let him take a picture of your Christmas tree. His “Die Tannenbaumserie” shows a lot of affection for people’s kitschier leanings but you’d hate to be the guy caught making a Noel tree by tacking a string of lights on the wall. What was intended to be chic turns to schlock.

More humor of the blacker sort comes from the Canadian Lynne Cohen. She shoots a corporate office with such patently fake skyscraper wallpaper you can scarcely believe the artist didn’t set it up. She gets edgier in her observation of observation rooms. Even if they are as innocent as nurseries, such places are inherently creepy. Worse still are Cohen’s ruminations on cavernous indoor firing ranges where people hone their killing skills.

Maybe they should have called it, “Beware the Eye of the Artist.”

* Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, to June 2; (714) 759-1122. Closed Mondays.)