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ART : Photographers’ Works Are a Vocabulary Lesson

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“When your heart is as big as all outdoors, finding something in it could take a little time.”

“Tell the howling wilderness to shut up so we can listen to the swan song.”

“He swallowed it hook, line and sinker, even though it seemed pretty fishy to me.”

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Ellen T. Birrell is the author of those witty marriages of cliches, and she has lots more to show you in her half of “Personal Inventory: Ellen T. Birrell and Nick Vaughn,” on view through Oct. 25 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton.

Guest curated by Marilu Knode, former associate curator at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, the exhibition presents work by two artists who (as Knode writes in her catalogue essay) “use photography to investigate the mechanisms of cultural vocabularies.”

Birrell (who lives in Los Angeles) and Vaughn (who recently moved from Orange County to Albuquerque, N.M.) work in very different ways. But they do seem to share a fascination with the notion of the “norm”--the average, OK, acceptable standard with which we never tire of measuring ourselves--and what it means to deviate from that norm.

In a larger sense, the artists both explore ways our preconceptions about the world are revealed by such things as the expressions we use, the logical connections we fabricate between disparate visual images, and the point at which another person’s external “differentness” becomes a barrier to acceptance.

Birrell, who teaches at CalArts in Valencia, adds a complex twist to the familiar postmodern gambit of offering up “found” images as evidence of cultural behavior patterns. In her installation, “Naturally Speaking,” she combines alterations of cliches about nature (written directly on the gallery walls) with groups of black-and-white Polaroids of images drawn from pre-existing sources ranging from magazine ads to textbooks.

As Knode writes, each cliche-combination conjures up images in the viewer’s mind that are further influenced by the associations suggested by the adjacent groups of photos. These associations, in turn, are tweaked by the next cliche-mixture, and so on.

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It is, however, much easier and more inviting to read and interpret the written cliches than it is to relate the small photographs to one another. (As if in recognition of that, some of the photographs are hung so high that they are hard to see clearly.)

For example, “Tell the howling wilderness to shut up so we can listen to the swan song” contains two standard cliches (“howling wilderness” and “swan song”). Birrell uses the familiar phrases literally, which jolts readers into realizing how curious such expressions are.

Both cliches are based on aural images that are not strictly faithful to nature. A landscape doesn’t howl; swans don’t sing. Yet--mostly by force of habit--we easily can picture the grand desolation of a “howling wilderness” and we understand the finality of a “swan song” (a phrase that derives from an ancient legend that swans sing only once, when they are about to die).

“Translated” into cliche-speak, the phrase suggests an ironic reference to ecological concerns: Only when we have compelled nature to be silent will we be able to comprehend that it is dying everywhere.

In the same general vicinity of the installation, another phrase reads: “Find a place in the sun for a shot in the dark” (in other words, find the ideal, ultra-comfortable locale to attempt a risky maneuver).

Next to that phrase is a series of five Polaroids made from “found” photographs, wrenched from their original context. The first image is a classic Western movie scene of three horsemen on a hill encountering a glowing sun about to set (literally, a place in the sun). In the second, a bullet blasts through a banana.

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The third shows stars glowing in the blackness of outer space, the fourth is a postcard of a meteor crater, and the fifth is an aerial shot of a person in an isolation cell--either as punishment (presumably for ill-advised risky behavior) or as part of a psychological experiment (in which risk must be weighed against the possibility of drawing viable conclusions).

The point is that any meanings we assign to these images are as arbitrary as the ones they were supposed to carry in their original contexts. A corollary observation is that distinctions between “natural” and “unnatural” are largely arbitrary, as illustrated by Polaroids documenting various attempts--some harmless, others disturbing--to define one in terms of the other.

Dinnerware in the shapes and textures of cabbage and a giant jack rabbit rising above the flat Kansas landscape testify to the human urge to make objects replicating and exaggerating the natural world. An ad showing a field plowed in the shape of a bottle of vodka suggests that mass-produced goods are somehow the equivalent of nature’s bounty. The cutline under a newspaper photo of a victim of urban violence refers to his “bullet-parted hair,” as if a gunshot had transformed itself into a grooming aid.

Several images refer to “abnormal” development, ranging from a New Yorker cartoon of two Japanese men pondering a giant bonsai tree to old, blurry photographs of people labeled as mentally defective. Related themes in the installation include images of people undergoing medical experiments or treatments, diagrams of human evolution, and textbook illustrations of mutants that might be scientific frauds.

Although the images do have a cumulative effect as you work your way through the installation, there are a great many of them, and they demand extraordinarily protracted mental gymnastics without offering an equally impressive reward of wit or insight. Ultimately, the most memorable quality of the piece is its linguistic finesse.

While many contemporary artists are yanking photographs out of their intended contexts for one reason or another, none is playing with words in quite the same way. In Birrell’s deft reformulations, she reveals the underlying strangeness of modes of speech we take for granted. It begins to seem pretty amazing that we can communicate with each other at all.

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Vaughn’s recent life-size Cibachrome self-portraits are almost like fun-house mirrors, reflecting distorted versions of the artist’s image. Standing against a sagging backdrop of light cloth, his mild face scowling slightly as he stares back at the viewer, he wears men’s clothing that has undergone peculiar mutations and ganged up on him in weird ways.

It would be easy enough simply to enjoy the deadpan silliness of these images. But Vaughn encloses his body in eccentric clothing in order to expose the viewer’s own confusions between function and conformity, personal identity and behavioral norms.

In “thur. 23” (pieces are titled with calendar dates, emphasizing the mutability of Vaughn’s outer image), his shirt and pants each have been cut off and “interrupted” by other garments.

Midway down his chest, his gray printed shirt with a thin button placket merges with a gray flecked shirt with a wide placket. (This shirt also looks peculiar because the sleeves are both unusually short and tight for men’s apparel, and each sports a useless single button and “decorative” notch.) A huge pair of brown shorts--which give Vaughn’s normal-size body a bloated look--yields to slimmer, darker slacks. It’s as if the clothing were quietly battling over possession of Vaughn’s body.

In “Sunday 12th,” Vaughn wears a literally stuffed shirt (containing a patchwork of several plaid fabrics) with dangling sleeves that are attached to a central yoke. The “squirming” shirt pockets seem to be ill at ease, perhaps mirroring the state of mind of their owner. Two buttons attempt to anchor the shirt to a pair of patched jeans with a waist that hovers in an edgy planetary ellipse around Vaughn’s waist.

A blue dress shirt in “Feb. 3” sports one exaggeratedly wide, artificially stiffened sleeve that eats into space normally reserved for the shirt front. As if in a timid attempt to make up for the expansiveness of this sleeve, the collar on that side of the shirt is shorter than its neighbor. The button placket has widened unaccountably, while the buttons stagger down in a disorderly way. The shirt looks like a visual counterpart of a personality disorder, a flamboyant streak that erupts in unaccountable ways.

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In this piece, Vaughn’s expansive gray pants are equipped with a pair of gaping side pockets that wouldn’t be out of place on a pool table, as well as a smooth, useless triangle of cloth in front where the zipper ought to be. The exaggerations of this silhouette are at once highly formal, terribly restrictive and weirdly emasculating--not unlike the basic elements of a clown’s costume.

Another Vaughn outfit (in “N.A.V.”) imprisons him almost totally in a flatly non-revealing public facade, while his face registers a calm, slightly pleased expression. The sleeves, which tuck into the waist, seem to have grown onto the shirt front, and the pants appear to encase both legs in one tapering swatch of material. Oddest of all is the double appearance of Vaughn’s initials, embroidered upside down on the plaid shirt front and right side up on the pants. “Reflecting” initials suggest a narcissistic personality (in Greek myth, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool).

Vaughn’s other pieces in the show are small photographs mounted within pristine, handmade wooden stereoscopes. The viewer has to pull up a chair and peer through an eyepiece mounted on a pinked swatch of wool to see the images, which appear three-dimensional.

Once again, Vaughn is seen posing in his peculiar garments, the strangest of which (in “mon. 22”) is a cap-sleeved shirt with a tight collar that makes him look as though he has no neck. His foolish, trapped look recalls that of a Puritan sinner locked in the stocks.

The enforced intimacy of peering into stereoscopes is a device that quickly turn viewers into voyeurs. Beyond that, however, the viewing machines--each of which is accompanied by a small, enigmatic and totally useless plunger-like device made of fabric--seem superfluous to Vaughn’s theme.

Perhaps he is trying to find parallels between the viewer’s range of physical activity and the sharply reduced freedom of movement established by his bizarre clothing. Maybe the plunger device (whose shape vaguely recalls the bellows and curtains used by old-time photographers) is meant to be as foolishly vestigial as the sleeve buttons on men’s jackets. Still, if there is a larger point here, it remains elusive.

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Vaughn already has made several tactical shifts during the past decade. At first, he wore his garments in public. Then he showed them on mannequins accompanied by black-and-white pseudo-documentary photographs. The large-format photographs represent a great breakthrough in allowing both the conceptual and visceral, confrontational qualities of his work to come through clearly.

What he is attempting to do is nothing less than invent a brand new formal vocabulary, probably the most challenging job an artist can give himself. It’s a good sign that the recent work deepens in impact each time it is viewed with care.

“Personal Inventory,” which is accompanied by a well-documented--albeit rather over-designed--catalogue, is really a museum-quality show that happens to be at a community art gallery, thanks to the invitation extended by Muckenthaler exhibition administrator Robert Zingg. In these dry, dry days on the contemporary art scene in Orange County, Knode is helping to remind us what intelligent work is all about.

It seems inconceivable that Newport Harbor could have laid off such a vibrant and thoughtful curator during its staff cuts last February. If further staff cuts are being contemplated, it should be recalled how utterly reliant leading art institutions are on the insight and energy of the people who work there.

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