ART REVIEW : Jarring Family Album of Domesticity : Photography: An exhibition at the County Museum of Art looks at ‘Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort.’

The County Museum of Art’s latest exhibition may mark the end of an epoch. It was the past just passed, the era when we heard a lot about couch potatoes and cocooning, about the abuse of wives and children within the supposedly safe haven of home. It was a time when conservatives felt empowered to dictate private morality and encourage private greed.

Those who subscribed to the program liked to loll in their Architectural Digest digs, count their money and stare raptly into their yuppie navels. Those who did not hid out at home to avoid the others.

What more fitting end to that season than an exhibition of photographs titled “Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort”? On the other hand, if a lousy economy continues to keep people close to hearth and telly, what more fitting introduction to more of the same?

It’s an important show consisting of 100-plus works made by some 63 American artists since around 1980. Organized by Museum of Modern Art curator Peter Galassi as a traveling revelation, it appeared at MOMA last year and will move on to Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center after closing here Jan. 24. Galassi’s catalogue essay is particularly clear, literate and hip.

Locally, LACMA photography curator Robert A. Sobieszek has arranged the compendium in subject matter categories. This goes some distance in sorting out the meanings of an exhibition with more subtext than a Henry James novel.

Images of dwellings range from Gregory Crewdson’s artificial lyric to spring to William Eggleston’s funny shot of shoes under a bed.

One group of work includes nostalgic images that were re-photographed. One unsettling example by San Diego’s Albert Chong shows two lovely, young, black girls in Sunday finery. At a distance it appears to have been mutilated with staccato slashes. Up close the slashes reveal themselves as flower petals. It’s a clue to the ambiguities that lace the whole exhibition.

Individual portraits include one of a black woman in a sparsely furnished room that shows her both defiant and kind. It’s by Carrie Mae Weems, who manages to be consistently outstanding in this crowded show.

So is the work of Philip-Lorca diCorcia. His “Mary and Babe” seems to wittily address the upwardly mobile aspirations of minorities, picturing a stylish, beautiful Latino girl watching her boyfriend take off his pants. Or put them on.

Shots of children threaten to steal the show as they always do. Nicholas Nixon’s kids look as fresh and normal as white bread with dirty fingerprints. Sally Mann and Jock Sturges both present images of pubescent girls in bathing togs. Hers is as pensive and profound as the ages. His subject is preeningly self-confident in her assurance she will be young and sleek long after her parents have withered.

On one hand the ensemble looks like a sitcom out to expose the vulgarity and vulnerability of family life. Who is that bedizened old blond Larry Sultan snapped trying to hang onto youth and demonstrate good taste in surroundings that evoke plastic crystal chandeliers and spray-can velvet wall coverings? The merciless light and souped up color of the shot invites us to have a good laugh at the old lady’s expense. Ha, ha, ha.

Wait a minute. The wall label informs us she is the photographer’s mother. Does Sultan hold his mother in contempt? We look again. The picture is suddenly about forgivable human frailty, the desire to remain attractive and surround oneself with trappings that lend status and express who we are.

In his catalogue essay, Galassi insists that these pictures are works of art, not a sociological tract. Nothing can stop us from reading them like Thorstein Veblen if we want to, but the longer we look the less inclined we are. Knowing many of these are intimate pictures of the artists’ family and friends makes the viewer intensely aware of them as real human beings.

Viewed with the vague cruelty that always goes with what we call objectivity, Tina Barney’s “Sunday New York Times” looks like a photographic version of a George Price cartoon. When we see it as the record of a reality, it demands tolerance, sensitivity and a willingness to accept people as they are. Like when you visit your in-laws.

Doug Dubois’ “My Sister Lise, Christmas Eve, 1984” looks like an updated version of Norman Rockwell’s awkward girl staring in a mirror wondering if she is pretty. Sort of charming and dumb. Then we learn the shot is part of a series done by Dubois when the family was passing through a wrenching crisis. Suddenly, Sis looks less light-minded and more like a object lesson in survival and forbearance.

Underlying all of this is an important lesson. Our perceptions of a photograph--or most anything else--are profoundly altered by what we know about it. It might be argued that providing the kind of mind-altering information we get with these pictures turns them into species of word-oriented Conceptual art, diminishing their value as visual expression and making them into oblique illustrations.

Part of the point of the show is to demonstrate a recent trend to insist that--reputation notwithstanding--photographs do lie. This may be important but it is also about as obvious as saying that a novel, play, film, painting or any other artwork is not real life but an interpretation thereof.

In its zeal to make a point, “Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort” goes out of its way to tell us something we already knew. It accomplishes this by abutting photography verite with normally interpretive camera art and then mixing that all up with photos that are frankly artificial and Conceptual, such as Ken Botto’s “Fort Winnebago.” It shows a tank parked next to a suburban tract house. It is funny, apocalyptic black humor, but the whole image is made up of toys.

Its effect is very different than if the artist had put himself to the trouble of staging the scene full-scale. It causes a perceptual dissonance almost as unsettling as the first time we encounter Cindy Sherman’s work in the show.

Sherman is famous for her staged, dress-up impersonations of female stereotypes. Including her in this survey is as disruptive as having Madonna walk into the middle of the Sunday afternoon family funny paper ritual.

It’s a failing not uncommon to smart people to be seduced by their own enthusiasms. Galassi tries to make so many new distinctions, he ignores others that are more important, if less fresh.

This strains the fabric of the show but does not tear it. What remains is the exposure of photography’s venture into the domestic realm. At its deepest the show is about the compromises humankind makes to maintain middle-class society. It touches the profundities of Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents.” It evokes the brilliant British animated film “Creature Comforts,” where all the animals in the zoo--save one--stand around rationalizing why they are better off caged than free.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Jan. 24, (213) 464-6846. Closed Mondays.