‘PROOF’ POSITIVE : Lying Photos Make Up One of Laguna Art Museum’s All-Time Juiciest Exhibits

Something funny started happening to photographs in Los Angeles around 1960. Sure, weird stuff was beginning to happen in lots of places back then. But the photo thing--documented in “Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980,” at the Laguna Art Museum through Jan. 17--was a most unusual transformation of the standard black-and-white or color print. All of a sudden photography, the “mirror of nature,” was shown up as a liar and a cheat, and an admirably artful one at that.

The spirit of this show is clear from the outset, as you step past a pile of curling autumn leaves on the lobby floor. Looking pretty much like the vestige of a Santa Ana flurry, these signs of fall by Lou Brown DiGiulio are actually made of photo- silk-screened fabric.

“Proof,” one of the Laguna Beach museum’s all-time juiciest exhibits, brings together witty work by 45 artists. They printed photographic images on unusual surfaces (concrete, canvas, metal, plastic) and stuck them in odd places (on a car door window, on a hill in a sculptural tableau, on a worm-eaten chunk of redwood).

More radically and significantly--in an age of increasing lack of trust in mainstream institutions--these artists used the unpretentious, blandly documentary quality of photog raphy to question assumptions about how we comprehend imagery.

Wallace Berman added images of a nude woman and another woman in a bikini to a famous photograph of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill relaxing during the Yalta Conference in 1945, and stamped the doctored photograph “Proof.” Of course, photographic “truth” is so easy to invent and tamper with--Stalin himself eliminated individuals from group shots when they fell from official favor--that it’s anyone’s guess as to whether a given shot depicts something that actually happened.

According to the accompanying text, the 13 photographs of clouds in Douglas Huebler’s “Location Piece No. 1” represent images of the air space over each of the 13 states between New York and Los Angeles. The photographs really could have been taken anywhere, of course. We have only Huebler’s word about what they are supposed to represent. Not only that, but--despite the rigmarole of methodical seriousness--the whole project seems utterly arbitrary and pointless. So much for the high and mighty status of documentary photography.

Robert Fichter mocks the notion of the photographic image as a source of information in “Photo-documentation.” On a sheet of undecipherable or blurry photo-fragments, Fichter studiously added handwritten labels identifying not only people (fellow photographers and strangers) but also ordinary objects and swatches of color (“camera,” “fried chicken,” “red”).

Other works from the period specifically examined the “hidden” content of photographs. In “Meditations on a Triptych,” Allan Sekula presents three color photographs of a couple and their children along with an absorbing essay (bound into a little book you can pull up a chair to read) speculating about the backgrounds and relationships of these people.

Fantasy also entered into the new look of photography. Eleanor Antin, better known as a performance artist, made 100 postcards of the all-too-human adventures of “100 Boots”--deadpan black-and-white images of the rubber boots boarding a ferry, relaxing on a porch, “out of a job” (standing on an empty field), “doing their best” (to cross a puddle) and so on.

The deadpan literalness of the photographic image inspired projects ranging from Ed Ruscha’s book “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” to William Wegman’s “nhoJ,” a portrait of a mechanic titled to reflect the way the name embroidered on his pocket appears backward in the print.

Robert Heinecken is one of a small number of artists whose work clearly reveals a socio-political agenda. In “Periodical No. 5,” he juxtaposed a magazine ad for U.S. savings bonds headlined “Where has all the money gone?” with another image from the same periodical: a female soldier, presumably in Vietnam, holding two severed heads.

Numerous works demonstrate the pervasive influence of Hollywood fakery, from John Baldessari’s “Norma’s Story” (a mock movie storyboard that satirizes numerous filmic conventions) to Robert Cummings’ “Fast and Slow Rain” (two photographs of frankly fake rain scenes, made with pieces of string).

In other works, the photographic image may be hard to find. On vintage photo-portraits, Llyn Foulkes obliterated all but the tiniest vestiges of the sitter’s face with thick swipes of paint, as if--in imitation of the corrosive forces of war, aging and neglect--wiping out every trace of human identity. Yet at the same time, the images affirm the secret, silent presence of the person underneath.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, humor also surfaces frequently in this work. Next to her untitled silk-screened image of an iron, Susan Haller added a range of pale-to-dark brown scorched silhouettes and a hole left by a real iron--a primitive “print” with a wry feminist agenda. Ilene Segalove’s brilliantly funny “Today’s Program: Jackson Pollock’s ‘Lavender Mist,’ 1950” shows a planeload of passengers absurdly “watching” the famous abstract painting on an in-flight movie screen--as if Action Painting were acceptable as a literal substitute for a popular “action-packed” movie.

There’s another pervasive theme in this show: sex. Although images of the nude bodies of prostitutes date back to the early days of photography, sexual imagery was at the frontier of art-photo experimentation during the ‘60s. Reflecting the joyous side of the sexual revolution, Ellen Brooks’ sculptural series “Flats, One through Eight” shows a nude couple shifting positions as they make love on the grass. Other imagery (by Heinecken and others) exposed the sexual come-ons of advertising imagery or frankly explored the voyeuristic potential of photographs (Jack Butler’s “Sex ‘70s” series).

In the ‘70s, the longstanding tradition of male photographers looking at nude women was challenged by the fresh vision of feminist-inspired women looking at themselves (and at men). In her “Stay Free Series” from 1976, Suda House printed richly sensual fragmentary images of nude women in daringly “bloody” red ink on sanitary napkins.

The catalogue essay by museum director Charles Desmarais--who curated this exhibit under the sponsorship of the Fellows of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles--offers a clear and thorough account of the crosscurrents of art and photography that produced the work in the show. Desmarais does tend to lean so heavily on the artists’ own views of the era, however, that he shies away from drawing larger conclusions or indulging in much theoretical speculation of his own.

A companion pocket-sized exhibit, “New Evidence” (also through Jan. 17), showcases works in the “Proof” tradition by a younger crowd of artists, including David Bunn, Robert Cavolina, Connie Hatch, Daniel Martinez and May Sun.