ART REVIEW : Mouths Taped Open : Two Video Exhibits Portray Women’s Issues in Their Own Words and Images

For some artists who feel strongly about social issues, making a video is the sane equivalent to standing on a street corner and using a portable megaphone to harangue passersby.

As an exercise of free speech, that’s fine. But too many tapes lack evocative imagery and language or an awareness that precious few things in life are really all black or all white.

These problems surface in several of the tapes in two video exhibits dealing with women’s issues, “The Body Female: A Video Exhibition,” at Saddleback College Art Gallery through Friday, and “Girl to Woman: Stories for the New Feminism,” opening Tuesday at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery.

Happily, some of the tapes go beyond gut-level expressions of rage, pain and oppression--or doctrinaire exhortations to feminist pride--to explore the ambivalence, doubt, pleasure and humor that are equally part of women’s experience.

A few tapes also contain some striking images, though the overall visual poverty of this work (too many talking heads and banal, real-time activities) made me wonder whether the artists shouldn’t be making making audiocassettes instead.

“The Body Female” is an hourlong video compilation, originally curated by Michelle Hirshhorn for the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies.

It includes Meena Nanji’s 15-minute “Voices of the Morning,” a particularly fine narrative--poetic and personal yet open-ended--of a contemporary woman’s circumscribed life in the Middle East.

In her British-accented voice-over, Nanji relates that at the moment she was born, the sound of men at their morning prayers drowned out her cries. The moment--recreated visually and aurally on the tape--was a sadly perfect symbol of her stifled existence.

She has been raised in a Moslem family to speak only when spoken to, to avoid occupying the same room with her brother and father during her menstrual period, to be passed from father to husband with no interval of living on her own.

Although she has been given food, clothing, shelter, an education and familial love, she says, her life is “a shroud of silence and mystery.”

The video shows her swathed in her chador, walking in the city; her tactile interaction with the surfaces of buildings is one of the few private occupations in which she can indulge.

Images of the “lines of fate” on her hand are superimposed with statements about the closed circle of women’s history in her country. Repeated views of her face, covered with what appears to be beauty cream, give way to the sight of her hands rubbing dirt on her body.

The source of this imagery is unclear, but perhaps it has to do with her ruminations on the imperfect freedom of Western women, whom she considers “slaves” to their bodies. Although her family regards her independent views as disloyally pro-Western, she is critical of Westerners who condemn her people as “dirty, greedy, primitive fanatics.”

The other work on the program is less rewarding. Dullest of all is Lula Triggs’ “Abortion: Freedom of Choice,” in which a series of teen-agers deliver pat, repetitive remarks in favor of abortion rights. Why aren’t we hearing and perhaps seeing some of their personal experiences instead?

In Cyrille Phipps’ “Respect Is Due,” which deals with the timely theme of sexist portrayals of women in music videos, at least the talking heads (interspersed with flashes of video T & A) represent different points of view.

We hear the double-talk of a male producer: “We try to present a positive outlook on women--unfortunately, there are situations where that just can’t happen.” We also get a mixture of sweeping polemic and warm, street-wise observation from rapper Sister Souljah: “Rappers are regular people--their problems are capitalism, racism . . . and just a lack of guidance and direction.”

But a steady diet of videotape-as-talk-show gets dreary, no matter how incendiary or fascinating the topics.

Unfortunately, the all-too-common alternative is to tape mediocre performance art (such as Mia Lor Houlberg’s “TV and Me”) or to make amateurish documentaries such as “Interstate Solicitation Tour” by Carol Leigh (a.k.a. Scarlot Harlot), about her mindless, pro-legalized-prostitution demonstration in downtown New York.

The UCI compilation, curated by video artist Valerie Soe, is twice as long, notably more artful and includes a broader slice of female experience. It includes the onset of puberty, relations with men and what it’s like to be a victim of racism or incest.

Liz Canning’s “Hand Mirror/Brush Set Included” (which I saw in a rough cut) gets top marks for her skillful use of clips from a variety of sources. She incorporates cosmetics commercials, early-’60s cartoons, heterosexual and gay sex movies, vintage films of women playing sports, a clinical record of a baby being delivered and a Barbie aerobics video.

Canning combines these snippets with fast-paced, animated imagery and tongue-in-cheek role-playing (she is a Barbie doll who eventually casts off her boy-toy identity; her “boyfriend” is a giant Jack LaLanne doll head).

Filled with sexual double-entendres and fun to watch, “Hand Mirror” doesn’t wear its politics on its sleeve. Rather, it plays with women’s attitudes toward men as they reflect the stereotypes that permeate media culture.

The use of “found” imagery from the past also helps Julia McCamy Tell gain some aesthetic distance on a painful personal story. She uses clips from a cheery late-’50s or early-’60s educational film about the sexual and psychological adjustment of teen-agers as counterpoint to her month-by-month account of the swirl of anxiety, depression, anger and erratic behavior that engulfed her after she realized her father had abused her for years.

Cauleen Smith’s “Daily Rains” is striking because of the articulate candor of the several black women who recall particular moments from their childhoods when they suddenly understood the meaning of racism.

For one woman, moments of shocked awareness occurred when a white teen-ager from another school told her, “My grandfather owned your grandfather,” and when her white English teacher gave the all-black class the word “niggardly” in a vocabulary lesson. (“It spoke to me and said, nigger ,” she says.)

Another woman talks about being bused to an all-white school when she was 9. Stoically enduring a daily barrage of racial slurs, she sat woodenly in her classroom seat without reading, writing or raising her hand. When she received all Cs in academics and all A’s in conduct on her report card, “I felt sick,” she says. “I knew I was being cheated out of my education.”

In “ASSIMILATION: a simulation,” Windy Chien deals in a rather meandering, unfocused way with the attempts of her and her mother to imitate Caucasian women’s round eyes and the stigma of being labeled “exotic” by whites. A white man tells his black buddy, “I like Oriental dolls,” and a blonde woman tells Chien, “You try so hard to fit in (but) you are exotic without even trying.”

Oddest of all, and quite mysterious, are Stephanie Heyl’s two brief tapes, “The Car Stories” and “Wanna Dance.” The artist faces the camera while relating stories, ostensibly about her life, and “illustrating” them with messy lipstick doodles on her chest.

In these stories, a level of violence between men and women seems to be happening just below the surface, in a realm that exists--as do so many turning points in women’s lives--apart from the public, social level of speech.

“The Body Female: A Video Exhibition,” at Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo, through Friday. Gallery hours are 12:30 to 5 p.m. Tuesday; 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Wednesday; 12:30 to 5 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, and 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Friday. Admission is free. (714) 582-4924.

“Girl to Woman: Stories for the New Feminism” opens Tuesday and runs through March 7 at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery, in Fine Arts Village off Bridge Road. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. (714) 856-6610.