O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Women’s Work: Rich, Shocking

You’ve heard of the bad boys of contemporary art--David Salle, Jeff Koons, Robert Longo and the gang. Well, here come the bad girls: Deborah Kass, Sue Williams, Julia Wachtel and their ilk. What? You’ve never heard of them? Hmm. They’d say that’s part of the problem.

“Painting Culture,” at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through Nov. 8, is a richly absorbing exhibit of work by 10 women artists. Kass assembled a smaller-scale version of the show last year, at a downtown gallery in New York, in order to confront a number of issues.

One is the common assumption that in-your-face painting is a specifically male province. Another is widespread art-world doubt in the ability of representational painting (as opposed to the neutral medium of photography) to deal with social dysfunction in our time. The mind-set seems to be that socially relevant painting is an oxymoron, or at best, something dead white males used to do before people got hip to the zip. And what about the very notion of meaning in art? Who controls it? Who sets the rules?

The artists (mostly from, or now living in, New York) represented in this exhibit have very different styles; in fact, three of them don’t even work in a recognizable representational mode. The one thing they have in common is the need to use paint (often in combination with other media) to express some wry and bitter points of view about women’s place in society. For the most part, these artists are as indifferent to traditional aesthetic standards as they are alive to the possibilities of using the devices and images of popular culture to get a rise from viewers.

The most shocking image in the show is Sue Williams’ “Girl With Kitten.” A pale, teary-eyed little girl holds a kitten with a tear in its eye as she peers out from under the private parts of a nude man crouching with his back to the viewer. Williams uses techniques borrowed from sentimental schlock art (the girl’s fake-looking single tear, the anthropomorphic animal, even the childlike rendering of the two innocents) to milk the viewer’s repulsion for a scene of child abuse and to engender sympathy for the child.

Initially, this tactic begs the question of whether, if the cause is “correct,” such blatant manipulation is appropriate. But on a bigger level, all art really is about viewer-manipulation. Why not turn an approach used in popular art to engender adoring sympathy for no good reason (the big-eyed crying child) into a way of dramatizing a genuine social problem?

By adding the shock value of an up-close view of male genitalia--almost as off-putting for the polite viewer as they would be for the girl--Williams is insisting that viewers can’t get off scot-free. You want to see a sad little innocent? OK, but you’ll also have to see exactly what makes her so sad.

Kathe Burkhart mines popular culture in a different way. Her “Liz Taylor Series” paintings--which look like pages from coloring books--were made by tracing projected images of stills and publicity photos from Taylor’s films. In “Pussy (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?),” a scene from the movie about a combative couple whose marriage is unraveling, Taylor emotes on a zebra-patterned couch. She has a cigarette in one red-nailed hand and an 8-ball pendant hanging on her neck while her husband aims a rifle at her back.

Emphasizing the mythical quality of Liz the Tabloid Heroine, Burkhart has given Liz dead-white skin and exaggerated makeup; her husband (played by Liz’s real-life husband at the time, Richard Burton) and the younger male visitor in the film both have gold hair. But Burkhart’s specific attitude toward Liz or Liz-worship is harder to fathom.

Why does she inscribe a slang word for the female sex organ in hot-pink paint on top of the scene? Because she’s disgusted at the way the media create and destroy its sex symbols? Because her off-camera relationship with Burton also put Taylor--and by extension, any woman pursued by men specifically as a sex symbol--”under the 8-ball”?

Or is Taylor simply a convenient target for the artist’s rage at a society in which men still think of women primarily as sexual objects? Burkhart herself has admitted ambivalent feelings about Taylor: admiration for her status as a “public rebel” and repulsion for her sex-goddess role.

Julia Wachtel mines both high and low ends of popular culture (soberly “factual” journalistic photographs and dopey cartoon characters from greeting cards) seemingly to show how interrelated the most unlikely aspects of contemporary culture really are.

Using a silk-screen process popularized by Andy Warhol--and working in a kindred vein--Wachtel juxtaposes two equally fanatic images of worship in “Landscape No. 1.” A huge image of dozens of Muslim men praying on a street is spliced into differently tinted segments, as if the spectrum of public opinion about a given set of circumstances amounts to no more than a set of cosmetic overlays.

The photograph is interrupted by the image of a stringy-haired male cartoon character in a garish bathrobe-like outfit (mocking Arab dress?) with his hands clasped in an attitude of prayer. Perhaps the work is partly a commentary on the male-dominated world of religion, whatever the cultural context.

Maybe the point is that both the Muslims and the dopey cartoon character are perceived (by Western viewers) as somehow off the scale of rational behavior. If the Muslims are frightening fanatics, the cartoon figure is a benign fanatic. But both tend to be perceived as members of an unreal world--part of the confusion between truth and fantasy increasingly typical of contemporary life.

Kass (whose earlier work was shown in the mid-’80s at former Costa Mesa gallery TLK) delivers a one-two punch to the hegemony of the male superstar artist in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” a send-up of Salle’s well-known multilayered paintings. In Kass’s painting, a copy of a self-portrait by super-macho artist Pablo Picasso rests on top of a “manly” spurt of paint a la Jackson Pollock and the image of an open-legged male nude sporting a full-on erection.

Fingers pulling out viscera from crayfish, a knife blade teasing out the bones from a fish, sausage squeezed through a casing--in Marilyn Minter’s “Food Porn” series, ordinary kitchen activities take on a weirdly smarmy new look. Minter’s lush, painterly approach to her subject (she’s a whiz at viscous textures) provides the double-take come-on.

Both men’s and women’s hands (distinguished by nail polish) get into the act with equal gusto. But Minter keeps viewers at a critical remove from her subjects, either with various superimposed markings (such as an overlay of dots reminiscent of the Benday dots of photo reproductive processes--made famous by Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop paintings) or by draining the image of color, as in the gray human and animal flesh of “No. 101 (Deboned Fish).”

Both Susan Silas and Kay Rosen make paintings in which letters or words work overtime to replace images.

In Silas’s “his calling,” a single sentence (“Every woman I go out with turns out to be my mother in the end”) is repeated 15 times; in each repetition, a different word is highlighted in pink. The repetition recalls the old-fashioned schoolroom punishment of having to write your “crime” on the blackboard over and over. The shifting emphases suggest the speaker might examine the inflections of his cliched behavior as carefully as those of his speech.

Rosen’s diminutive enamel sign paintings are made up only of decorative patterns of individual letters that do little mental tricks, if you let them. For example, “Out of Order” consists of three letter Os, each followed by a period: O.O.O.

Besides serving as abbreviations for the phrase, the Os might be onomatopoeic: the sounds of disappointed people encountering a gizmo that has broken down or an event deemed “out of order” in the sense of “inappropriate.” The zeros also could be place-markers for objects that were removed from their rightful order and put somewhere else.

Gradually, a seemingly obvious phrase begins to accumulate all sorts of extracurricular meanings--a tactic Rosen uses in a feminist way, to demonstrate the inherent malleability of language (so often used by those in power to mean what they want it to mean).

The most puzzling and private works in the show are by Kay Miller, Jane Hammond and Mary Weatherford.

In Miller’s disarmingly enigmatic “Daily Double,” a bridge and an elaborately costumed and masked figure reminiscent of a character in Chinese opera share the free-floating textured yellow dream-space of the canvas.

Hammond’s paintings also suggest enactments of private dramas (one work actually takes place on a stage), but her subject matter clearly deals with sexual issues. In “Untitled (194, 235, 62, 158, 171),”--the numbers are part of the artist’s self-imposed system for combining a specific group of objects in her work--a woman wearing a blue mask holds up a rug on which a blue octopus is sexually attacking a nude woman.

The woman is rendered in a way reminiscent of a 19th-Century prints; in fact, the whole scene looks oddly picturesque, giving its repulsive aspect the feel of a dark fairy tale in which the blue mask and the blue octopus are signs of the same evil, anti-feminist force.

Weatherford’s “Hellgate-Her-Desire” is a large two-panel painting in which an amorphous abstract pattern resembling blood stains supports the silk-screened images of thorny stems and a rose. These motifs suggest the twinned pleasure and pain that accompanies a woman’s sexual maturity--a subject that could serve as the leitmotif of the entire exhibit.

“Painting Culture” runs through Nov. 8 at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery, Fine Arts Complex (off Bridge Road). Gallery hours: noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Free. (714) 856-6610.