ART REVIEW : Mark Heresy’s Work Sticks Too Close to Home : His pieces at the Art Loft in Costa Mesa dwell so resolutely on biographical material that he obscures the larger issue.

If you’re a young artist who wants attention, one way to do it is by posing as a bad boy, doing stuff likely to irritate people and create a stir. Publicity is power. Outrageousness is fun. If you get lots of ink, maybe people will remember your name. Maybe they’ll buy your art. Maybe you’ll get your 15 expensive minutes of fame. Maybe you’ll be worth it. Then again, maybe not.

Mark Heresy, a Los Angeles artist who created a flap at the Laguna Art Museum last fall when he claimed the museum had censored some of his American flag pieces (made of such objects as currency, toilet paper and beer cans) has come up with another, more gleefully in-your-face device. His mixed-media works at the Art Loft in Costa Mesa through Sunday consist of various objects or images of objects arranged to form swastikas.

The objects include pop culture symbols (peace symbols, flower decals, smiling face stickers), a cultural artifact (a copy of a Mondrian painting), portions of the human anatomy and political symbols (pieces of an American flag, a hammer and sickle).

In a handout text, Heresy bitterly profiles his father, whom he describes as a member of Hitler Youth who became an American patriot after emigrating to the United States. Obliged in his own youth to polish his father’s wooden furniture, Heresy sees these pieces of wood as “a symbol of white male European wealth, prestige and power.” In one piece, he translates this oddly sinister vision into polished wooden bones and a skull.

Coors beer-can fragments in another piece supposedly relate to his father’s alcoholism and the German-founded beer industry in this country. The American flag was intended to cover the coffin of a relative who died fighting World War II. In his will he stated, for personal reasons, that the flag could not be put on his coffin. So Heresy got it and used it as a rug, but his father told him that was disrespectful.

After looking at a book of Nazi propaganda photographs he found at home, the artist relates, an intrigued 7-year-old Heresy drew swastikas until his mother discovered them. In tears, she made him promise never to draw another one.

This anecdote illuminates the real meaning of Heresy’s body of work: The extraordinary human fascination and power of symbols, conveying messages both harmless and menacing. Some symbols are purely personal (like the beer cans or the notion of stained and polished wood--you’d have to know about Heresy’s father to understand what they mean to the artist). Other symbols are so widely understood that they serve as touchstones for entire populations.

This is potentially a rich area for an artist to mine. The problem with Heresy’s approach, however, is that he doesn’t bother to sort through his bag of bad-boy tricks and keep only those banal-seeming images that serve as meditations on the banality of imagery.

The work also makes the viewer much too reliant on the handout statement. Perhaps a text could be incorporated in the work--not this text, but one that offered a more coolly self-conscious take on the business of growing up in a world bristling with symbols--yours and theirs.

Heresy is right in one respect: For all its push-button shock-value, the work isn’t about politics. But it also really isn’t about hating his father and all things German. By dwelling so resolutely on biographical material, Heresy obscures the larger, and much more potent, issue of symbolism as a human phenomenon.

* “Inheritance,” works by Mark Heresy, remain through Sunday at the Art Loft, 711 W. 17th St., Suite J, in Costa Mesa. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, Sunday and Monday by appointment only. (714) 642-8247.