O.C. ART : ‘Other Side’ of Gulf War Spotlighted : Massive Fullerton exhibit, ‘World Events,’ focuses on media coverage of conflict. It’s not a pretty picture.

In my neighborhood, yellow ribbons tied to tree trunks and car antennas were ubiquitous during the Gulf War--and for many months after the ground war ended in March, 1991. Tattered streamers of yellow fabric baking in the summer sun and rustling in the late autumn wind were symbols of people’s support of the soldiers who had been dispatched to the Persian Gulf.

But from the outset, voices were raised against the war--its purpose, methods and results--as well as the way it was covered by the media. Some of these voices belonged to artists.

“World News: Artists Respond to World Events” is a massive exhibit of work by more than 70 people that was originally shown at several Southern California sites in 1991. Now it is spaciously installed, through July 19, at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton. Organized by artists Kim Abeles, Barbara Benish and Deborah Lawrence, the show contains work primarily by little-known and amateur artists (including a couple of children).

Many of the artists in the show attempt to document “the other side” that was ignored or sketchily reported during the blast of super-patriotism, Patriot missile hype and Arab-bashing that ripped through the United States throughout Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Other artists focus on ongoing issues that predate this particular war: shabby treatment of homeless veterans, the double standard pertaining to homosexual members of the armed services, the special lure of military benefits for impoverished members of minority cultures.

In general, the pieces with texts generally prove more persuasive and involving than the ones offering solely visual imagery, particularly of the traditional variety. That’s partly because images of bloody, shrieking people and dead babies have been recycled so often in art that they’ve lost their built-in poignancy to a generation anesthetized to viewing horrible deaths--real or enacted--on television and in movies.

Meanwhile, the power of the word in contemporary art has risen to new heights (witness the impact of works like Barbara Kruger’s “Untitled (Questions)” mural painted on the side of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles).

The text pieces also seem more evocative of the widespread frustration with the way military censorship severely limited access to hard facts about death and suffering. We don’t remember this war for its visceral battlefront imagery but for its cunning presentation as a media artifact, a blend of seemingly unassailable facts and rah-rah emotional appeals.

(One piece that almost overwhelms the viewer with facts is Nancy Buchanan’s “Peace Stack,” which gives the viewer access to an array of information downplayed by the headlines via a--slow-moving, alas--interactive computer program.)

Ultimately, the strength of the exhibit comes from the massed testimony of many different voices, rather than specific individual works. But a few are worthy of special mention.

In “Family Album,” one of the most haunting works in the show, Joyce Dallal invites viewers to sit in a comfortable chair and rest their feet on a “rug” made of concentric rows of painted Arabic inscriptions. Two slim books combining typewritten, printed and handwritten texts, pleasingly reproduced on paper and translucent vellum, sketch the troubled perspective of a family of Iraqi refugees with American-born children.

Dallal’s album of family photographs is interspersed with annotated reproductions of newspaper clippings. For the reader, they transform an “enemy” country into a former homeland, a repository of family memories. While the world associates the Al Rashid Hotel with reporters’ breathless dispatches during the war, for example, Dallal recalls the hardware store her grandfather owned on Rashid Street. When her father sees an “Iraqi mother on TV fleeing with her children to Syria,” he tells his daughter, “She looks just like you.”

The other book, a memorial to Dallal’s uncle--a 19-year-old Jewish clerk in the Iraqi ministry, executed in 1949 for subversive activities--is particularly eloquent. It contains the last letter Uncle Sasson wrote to his brother, in which he says, “I am dying tomorrow because I have faith in mankind to master their destiny which is democracy, peace, and the perfect life. . . . I am free because I know the truth and neither prison nor execution can take away that from me.”

Sealed cardboard boxes scattered throughout the exhibit are part of Stephen Callis’ cleverly insinuating piece, “The Real Terrorists Are . . . “ On top of the boxes, casually propped up, are black-and-white photographs of supposed acts of Arab-American terrorism--mysterious cardboard boxes abandoned in various Los Angeles locations. Texts explain that one of these boxes “was seen threatening a gas station”; another “was seen endangering a pro-war tree (tied with a yellow ribbon) on Larchmont Boulevard.”

Another stack of boxes in the gallery holds Callis’ list of “the real terrorists,” which include multinational corporations “in their search for profits,” the media’s “parade of anti-terrorist ‘experts’ . . . fanning the flames of racism and hatred,” and the U.S. government “for supporting despotic regimes,” killing more than 200,000 Iraqis in the war, and “funding smart bombs but not smart children.”

Judith Hopkins’ “Politics of Thanatos: The Yellow Ribbon” presents a verbal exchange between the artist and a man in a copy shop, occasioned by his observation that she was reproducing an article unfavorable to the war. A trio of yellow ribbons floats over this text and two accompanying photographs--of a young boy injured by shrapnel and two women survivors of a Baghdad bomb attack.

“I think we should just nuke them,” the man says. “All those Iraqis have been terrorizing us long enough. . . . They’re all brainwashed. They have no respect for women. They draft 14-year-old boys. One good bomb and we’d be rid of them for good. . . . I was in the military and I would stand behind our President no matter what. I would do anything for my country.”

Pat Gomez’s deadpan, baldly informational text in “War Stories” is written on top of a pattern of roses and burning hearts (adaptations of traditional Latin American religious imagery) which turn from red-and-pink to blue-and-purple in a TV screen-shaped area at the heart of the piece.

Gomez’s uncle, who grew up in the Los Angeles barrio in the ‘40s and ‘50s, joined a gang, was implicated in a shooting, was offered the choice of going to jail or joining the armed forces, opted for the military and was killed in Vietnam. A generation later, Gomez’s cousin also joined up, lured by the job training and financing for his college education. The handwriting disappears off the TV screen with the remark that the Gulf War is on and he is stationed in the Middle East.

Sheila Pinkel’s piece, “Winning Weapons,” simply consists of reproductions of two pieces of war-related reporting (unfortunately, minus publication dates). One is a business story in The Times, in which employees of Hughes Aircraft praise the accuracy of the military hardware they develop and produce. The other is a piece in the alternative L.A. Weekly, analyzing the actual success rates--less than terrific, if the data is to be believed--of each type of bomb used in the war.

A group of small-scale, on-target pieces are gathered in a loose leaf binder resting on a shelf at the beginning of the exhibit. They include fake classified advertisements by Diane Calder (“ ‘Letters from the Sand’ . . . Suitable for children. Contains no visual record of the horrific reality of suffering or death . . . “) and “Dispatches in Lieu of News” by David Levi Strauss, an acerbic medley of references to TV remote-control zappers, bullish Dow Jones reports, TV anchorman-as-sportscaster inanities (“Boom! Down goes a Scud!”) and other war-related madness.

Some works in the show do make themselves perfectly clear without words, however. Al Edwards offers the blunt symbolism of “Black TV Screen,” a piece of sandblasted plexiglass on a gray background; Leslie Ernst’s visual one-liner, “Foreign Policy/Domestic Disaster,” is an apron-like dress fashioned from desert camouflage cloth.

Angie Bray’s “They Say if You Put Salt and Water on Ashes Something Will Grow”--shown in a slightly different form at another anti-war exhibit at BC Space in Laguna Beach last year--consists of a group of tall, skinny wooden boxes standing on end.

Each box holds a row of crushed, black-dyed eggs filled with ashes. Vagaries in the way each shell breaks give each one an individual appearance, yet en masse they suggest rows of human skulls. Egg shells, normally associated with birth, become conveyances for the final remnants of life. What is growing out of the salt (tears) and ashes (bombed waste) of the war? Just hollow cradles for death.

John Schroeder’s collage, “Moon/January,” is a simple but affecting image of a man (made from a small piece of wood wrapped with patterned fabrics and thread) who sleeps on the ground directly in the path of destruction (tiny white dots splashed with blood) ignited by the twisted white fuselage of a bomb.

One piece--Beverly Naidus’ “Now What?”--is less important for its painted imagery (amateurish) or media commentary (nonexistent) than for its request that viewers register their opinions on a pad. The results are provocative, proof that this show doesn’t preach only to the choir.

From a Vietnam veteran: “I honestly thought it couldn’t happen again.” A wondering comment from a 15-year-old girl: “I thought the war was necessary to prevent further death?” Another writer comments, “In my youthful age I’m afraid I don’t understand. We didn’t kill their kids. We fought to save many people’s lives.” Below it, a notation in different handwriting replies tersely, “You’ll learn I hope.”