ART / CATHY CURTIS : ‘A Dilettante’s Conversation’ Says a Real Mouthful : Jean Lowe’s exhibit at South Coast Plaza makes a case for the way Western culture has despoiled nature. It also gives “mall art” a good name.

“H ave you seen those rooms of furniture by Jean Lowe at South Coast Plaza? Such lovely decorations and sweet little scenes painted everywhere.”

“Now wait just a minute. Did you see what those paintings are about? She’s blaming us for wearing diamond rings and cotton shirts, for drinking coffee and eating meat. She’s whining about the perfectly ordinary things nice people do, just because there is pollution and some people have to kill animals or mine diamonds.”

Although the above conversation is entirely imaginary, Lowe’s installation, “A Dilettante’s Conversation on the Topics of Anthropocentrism and Western Consumerism”--at the South Coast Plaza satellite of the Laguna Art Museum through March 8-- is likely to elicit some conflicting opinions.

The piece consists of two rooms of fussily ornamental furniture and bric-a-brac, painted in a loose, generalized way. Floors, mirrors, paintings, walls and furniture are awash in painted-on decorative devices: fake fabric patterns, swags, dados (ornamental wall borders) and trompe-l’oeil moldings. Viewers, who serve as the actors in this curious stage set, are asked to pretend that the numerous small painted scenes are actually woven into fabric, lacquered on furniture, inlaid on the floor or framed in gilt.

The net effect on first glance is a garish, updated, cartoon version of the interior of a “stately home” in England or a minor French chateau.

On closer view, the little vignettes painted on the furnishings of the rooms make a case for the way Western culture has despoiled nature for its own ends, and the broad gulf between the toil of workers and the pleasures of consumers. The images assail the mistreatment of animals, chemical pollution and rose-colored myths about the lives of people in rural areas and the Third World.

The painted scenes show manual laborers at work (miners, sheep-shearers, coffee plantation workers); golden-hued, idealized versions of life on the farm; suburban yuppies enjoying carefree lives (exchanging engagement rings, barbecuing, posing in a bathing suit); and 18th-Century figures striking haughty poses in aristocratic clothing. We are scarcely different from those wealthy colonialists, Lowe seems to be saying, in our indifference to the damages inflicted by our greed.

Strictly on a visual level this piece--which was shown earlier this year at the New York gallery called Gracie Mansion--probably will strike some viewers simply as a sloppy approximation of a period style. Other viewers may be struck by the way Lowe sugarcoats an anti-capitalist harangue with such a perky collection of objects.

But I was most struck by the way Lowe creates a dialogue between the 18th and the 20th centuries, in terms of both style and substance. Despite the passage of 200 years, Lowe seems to be asking whether we aren’t still in thrall to an overwhelming two-tiered society of rich and poor, and whether our social gains haven’t lagged far behind our noble proclamations about equality of opportunity.

She borrows architectural detailing from the frothy French 18th-Century style known as rococo, a feast of lavish ornament that imitated objects in the natural world, like feathers and shells. (Even in that innocuous context, natural objects were being “transformed” at the whim of the upper class.) But she also invokes the high-minded side of the 18th Century, which is known as the Age of Enlightenment.

It was a time when modern scientific thought began to gather steam (Carolus Linneaus’ system for classifying plants and animals by genus and species, Denis Diderot’s and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s “Encyclopedia”), when the hoary notion of divine rule began to wane (the French and American revolutions) and when humanitarianism overrode ancient privilege (Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man,” Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “Social Contract”).

Lowe acknowledges such developments in her piece, in a characteristically tongue-in-cheek way. For example, her painted chart, “Introduction to Parasitology,” scrutinizes the life cycle of human beings as if they were insects (a bow to Linneaus). Even the full, long-winded title of the exhibit is a play on the elaborate book and essay titles common in the 1700s--and on the important role played by “dilettantes” in an era that lacked today’s stress on degrees and specialization.

An upholstered sofa (“Post-Colonial Divan”) is sprigged with scenes of logging and mining--as well as images of paper money from various countries, gold crowns (symbol of kingship), the Pope, and the nymph Daphne struggling from the clutches of the god Apollo--a Greek myth popular in Italian Baroque and 18th-Century art. In other words, images of pillage and power are juxtaposed with a myth about a power struggle that ends in transformation benefiting the Earth (Daphne escapes by turning into a laurel tree).

The notion of the “sportsman”--someone with leisure and resources to commit hunting for reasons other than hunger--is deeply identified with 18th-Century aristocratic life. Lowe’s mocking “Fancy Sportsman’s Glasses” are broken-off beer bottles painted with a hunter and animals--clumsy, plebeian objects you’d never find at Abercrombie & Fitch. These glasses conflate the “manly” leisure time activity of beer drinking and subsequent careless disposal of the bottles with the “manly” sport of hunting animals.

A set of blue, white and gold statuettes in a glass case (“Knickknack Story”) refer to the sort of 18th-Century porcelain figurines (still manufactured by such companies as Royal Doulton) that celebrated the simple rural life. A figurine with a monkeylike face, a natty cap and suit and a pushcart is labeled “Rag Picker”; a bent figure with a flower on his hat is a “Fruit Picker.” Of course, the real laborers who worked for the wealthy owners of country estates who collected such knickknacks generally lacked the sweetly picturesque charm of the porcelain variety.

Lowe, who lives in San Diego, is a graduate of UC Berkeley with a master of fine arts degree from UC San Diego. Her work has appeared in solo exhibitions in California and New York, as well as in group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.

In this piece, as is common in political art generally, she goes in for broad typecasting (her middle-class people apparently live problem-free lives; her workers never seem to have the day off). Her wholesale condemnation of middle-class creature comforts also offers no viable substitutions or solutions. But rarely is a socio-political agenda delivered with such good grace, and with such a tantalizing historical grounding.

Of course, South Coast Plaza is the perfect place for this piece. Think of it: A savvy critique of consumer culture planted in the midst of one of the largest and most profitable shopping malls in the U.S. It’s enough to give “mall art” a good name.