ART REVIEW : Vibrant Multiculturalism at Newport Biennial

History gets pictured as a vicious, often insidious battle between oppressors and victims in the Newport Harbor Art Museum’s Third Biennial Exhibition.

Of the seven installations, the most interesting refuse to divide the world into such neat oppositions. The best refrain from championing political activism altogether. Their perversity and oddness stand out in an exhibition otherwise dedicated to art as social reform.

Newport Harbor curator Marilu Knode and Otis/Parsons gallery director Anne Ayres have selected an unusually consistent group of young California artists whose work accurately reflects current art-making. Their show’s title, “Mapping Histories,” cleverly pluralizes art history, allowing divergent approaches to inhabit the supposedly neutral space of the museum. When the authority of Eurocentric Modernism is opened to contending voices and competing interests, a vibrant multiculturalism emerges.

The notion of artist as map-maker also allows personal viewpoints to enter the world of shared, social meanings. Knode and Ayres propose that the imaginations of artists interact with the given images and symbols of their cultures, creating significance by transforming these signs into more meaningful arrangements. Their art is both found in reality and made up in fantasy, an elaborate fiction that shapes and is shaped by its world.

Socially conscious installations by Connie Hatch, Deborah Small, May Sun, and a collaboration by Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez downplay the individual in favor of furthering the political interests of sub-groups. For these artists, art is a weapon in the battle for human dignity. The histories they map belong to those marginalized by dominant culture: They struggle to redeem the suffering of excluded women, exploited minorities and anonymous, undocumented laborers.

“Entrance Is Not Acceptance” by Lou and Sanchez grapples with the issue of immigration. Its mix of mass-media images creates a dark labyrinth in which the viewer gets lost and ultimately overwhelmed by sheer volume. While their installation begins to put a human face--or many different human faces--on statistics, it does little to map the connections between the museum, the viewer and national borders.

Likewise, Sun’s “Underground” memorializes anonymous, immigrant Chinese field workers. Her spiral of upright shovels, hoes, pitchforks and rakes functions like Lou’s and Sanchez’s maze of doors, literally trapping the viewer in a sort of cage. Wall-mounted wooden crates contain oranges that will rot during the show, dramatizing the irrecoverable losses that are part of the invisible history of oppression.

Hatch’s “Sightlines” disinters an aspect of the museum’s usually disregarded history. Her portraits of 13 women from the museum’s staff (plus herself) pay homage to the 13 women who founded the institution.

Hatch’s installation attacks documentary truth and monuments to greatness by emphasizing community and the unremarkable daily tasks of running a museum. It becomes, however, a self-referential exercise: Its images make sense only to fellow staff members. Isolated from a broader audience, it is a map that directs us nowhere.

Small’s giant grids of images and texts propose that 19th-Century narratives of captivity and contemporary pulp-romance novels (“bodice rippers”) form a cartography of consistent violence against women, nature and American Indians. Her book covers, sensational phrases and kitsch souvenirs ambitiously map out general similarities among these fields but are better suited to an academic dissertation than a billboard, which reduces specific comparisons to vague similarities.

The curators’ mapping metaphor suggests that contemporary artists are trying to chart their way out of formalism’s dead end. Rather than making forays into the unknown, like the classic avant-garde, they draw connections among various spheres of our fragmented culture. Their goal is to make sense of society’s confusing complexity.

David Bunn and Greg Colson are the exhibition’s most literal and effective mappers. Unlike the other artists, who emphasize history at the expense of systematic mapping operations, they scrutinize its formal procedures.

Bunn’s installation consists of a circular platform whose rail displays 69 color samples, with the same colors painted on the museum’s walls in an arrangement based on the globe. The colors, such as Beijing Blue, Madras Mauve, Ghana Green and Khartoum Khaki, are this season’s latest fashions. Bunn’s installation mocks abstract painting’s stylishness and consumerism’s fraudulent internationalism. By focusing on what gets erased when one system is mapped over another, his art provides a troubling but funny antidote to more naive mapping procedures.

Colson’s sculptures are odd conglomerations of disparate objects and schematic maps. Symbols that structure the flux of experience are incongruously drawn on objects that make up the material world. His charts, diagrams and maps--inscribed on inner tubes, lunch boxes, laundry and rulers--renew perception by finding wonder in the gaps within systems invented to summarize the world’s complexity.

Nayland Blake’s ghoulish puppets are the only objects in the exhibition that refer to literature rather than social reality. Stitched together like a band of miniature Frankensteins, they are also unconcerned to map anything. Based on De Sade’s “Philosophy in the Bedroom,” they take a detour from the world of politics--not to escape it, but to more powerfully work their voodoo upon it.

Blake’s perverse marionettes, which hang and dangle like a gang of helpless and alienated misfits, invite the viewer to create imaginary dramas about life and death, control and abandonment, community and isolation. His art forgoes the rationality on which map-making is based to explore the uncharted terrain of fantasy and role playing.

* Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, (714) 759-1122, through Jan. 5, 1992. Closed Mondays.