EXTENDED FAMILY : UCI Exhibit Offers Hours of Videotapes and Multiple Viewpoints on Blood Relations

“We must provide for our nation the way a family provides for its children,” Bill Clinton intoned in his inaugural address. Given the much-publicized breakdown of the traditional family, however, some listeners may have wished he were comparing government beneficence to the care and feeding of baby kangaroos.

In “Reframing the Family,” at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through Sunday, more than 3 1/2 hours of videotapes by 10 artists scrutinize family life and family distemper from various points of view.

Originally compiled by curator Micki McGee for Artists Space in New York (where it also encompassed photographs and installations unfortunately not included in the UCI showing), the exhibit is particularly concerned with examining the broader social context of family roles.

The tone of the tapes varies enormously, from elaborate fantasy to confessional narrative, polemical harangue and documentary. But for some reason, the most absorbing works deal with cruel, absent or emotionally unavailable fathers and husbands.

In “Always Love Your Man,” Cara Devito listens while her widowed Italian grandmother reminisces matter-of-factly about her marriage, bittersweet decades of meek compliance with her brutish husband, fierce devotion to her children and agonizing loneliness.

Being a housewife is “the most important job, the most important thing in life,” she says. “My husband trained me, Cara. Fix the table in the morning, so when people comes, you have nothing to do but greet the guests. Fifty years with the same man! Prepare! Wash! Cook!”

But life with her Benny was not just housewifely routine. Once, he hit her when she refused to pick up his used toilet paper. Jealous when she danced with another man while on vacation soon after their marriage, her husband beat her until she fainted. Six months into one of her pregnancies, he compelled her to have a hazardous abortion without anesthetic, then demanded she cook dinner directly afterward.

The father figure is also the heartless center of the fictional “Yoji, What’s Wrong With You,” by Mako Idemitsu. While Dad eats dinner in silence and leaves promptly to be with his mistress, mother and teen-age son forge a twisted alliance. Yoji uses his mother as a funding source for material objects and an influence peddler for his career goals; his mother privately lusts after him and derives her entire life’s happiness from anxious catering to his needs.

Presented in a series of tableaux, the piece incorporates today’s pervasive video culture with a giant living room TV “broadcasting” images of family members, the mistress and Yoji’s girlfriend, with whom he re-creates his parents’ loveless relationship. Tellingly, the tube also shows an anonymous wedding couple, with the bride protesting, “I’m so lost I can’t do a thing for myself, but I’ll do my best for you.”

Vanalyne Green remembers her father (“a Kentucky hillbilly turned lifer in the Army”) in an elliptical way in “A Spy in the House That Ruth Built,” an unusual meditation about lust, patriarchy, women’s bodies and male bonding. Baseball furnishes many metaphors in this piece, beginning with memories of a childhood game. (When she reached third base and was urged to run home, she naively ran to her own house.)

Green uses her photographer’s press pass to gain access to the Yankees’ batting practice, in secret hopes of seducing a ball player. She adores “the lullaby” of play-by-play sports coverage, and sees the players as “show animals on display” and “a city of men.” (“Ultimately they liked each other more than any women,” she says.)

Green ponders the strange violence of baseball lingo (“squeezing blood out of the bat”). She transfers the combination of hatred and dependence she feels toward her father to the ball players. Seeing “old male cronies” at a Red Sox spring training camp, she “worried a simple misspoken word would get me kicked off the field.”

Peeling a baseball like an orange, she muses on her sexual hunger and feelings of detachment from her body, the legacy of men’s impersonal view of her sexual attributes. Viewing baseball now as a sexual battlefield, she sees the catcher’s mitt as the female sexual orifice, and hears “balls pounded into the gloves like deep, resonant Ohh s.”

The father as predator is evoked in the chilling video “Belladonna” by Ida Applebroog and her daughter Beth B. The power of this piece comes from its rhythmic, understated presentation.

One by one, various intelligent-looking men and women (one is filmmaker Jonas Mekas) appear on screen to speak brief, repeated phrases: “I’m not a bad person.” “I loved her very much.” “He held his boot here.” “It was the injections.” “After the first 150 I stopped counting.” “He ordered me to whistle an aria from ‘Madame Butterfly’ until she was dead.” “My father loves only me. I’m being beaten by my father.”

At the end of the tape, we learn that these pitiful and horrifying remarks all come from the testimonies of convicted child abuser Joel Steinberg and Nazi Josef Mengele. Inherent in the piece and its presentation is the notion that depravity burrows deeply within society, where it exists not only in infamous criminals but also in the warped desires of seemingly upstanding citizens.

Other videos in the program include Richard Fung’s “The Way to My Father’s Village” and “Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of Baby $M.”

In the Fung tape, the Trinidad-born son of a Chinese man--who eventually emigrated to Toronto and deliberately severed ties with his culture--searches diligently, but inconclusively, for his roots.

Rosler offers an abrasive but compelling analysis of the cultural implications of working class women earning money by “being a self-storage unit for (the sperm of) middle-class men,” based on the landmark case involving surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead.

Incidentally, despite the painful nature of some of the subject matter on the tapes, the gallery set-up is unusually comfortable. With two monitors visible from two spacious back-to-back couches, video watching becomes almost as cozy as cocooning at home with the TV, minus the snacks.