ART REVIEW : Posters Take a Look at Different Ideologies : Three Art Center shows offer the opportunity to compare the collective mentalities of ‘Mainland China,’ ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ and ‘America Today.’

In recent years a significant segment of the visual arts has come to act as mouthpiece for various politically correct ideological positions. Thus there is barely a perceptual bump when we run across three exhibitions of posters at Art Center’s Williamson Gallery. The sheets are, of course, mantled with the kind of design that says they speak for societies rather than individuals.

That just makes them more interesting as a study. They offer the opportunity to compare the collective mentalities of two massive cultures known mainly as enemies on these shores, China and the land known until recently as the Soviet Union. The third offering is an international affair that looks at the Americas five centuries after the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

“The Art of Propaganda: Smuggled Posters From Mainland China” offers a glimpse of the implacable visage of the last communist monolith on the planet. At about 25 examples, the show is about a third its intended size--four dozen sheets for the show were confiscated before they could leave China. Instructively, some dealt with the upheaval after the death of Mao Tse-tung, the brief sway of the Gang of Four, the return to power of Deng Xiaoping and the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

In China, posters are crucial because they act as the principal form of communication between officialdom and the general public. Luckily most images on view are original, handmade sketches. Otherwise one might be inclined to ascribe their authorship to a particularly clever machine. Despite considerable energy and skill there is a sameness about the work that goes beyond its taste for dramatic use of red, white and black.

ll of it exhorts. “Sweeping Away All Ghosts and Monsters” trumpets an image of a strapping young female comrade who brooms away a couple of vermin males. Printed images are in the typical embalmed academicism of Socialist Realism. “I Am Taking Care of the Horses for the Motherland” says one operatic composition full of stallions and more winsome peasant lasses. Nearby Mao himself stands avuncular, holding a homey straw hat.

Taken at face value, the posters suggest nothing human goes on in China. They even banished the charming and ingenious little “paper cut” pictures at one point as “unnecessary craft.”

If, however, one begins to read the symbols behind the images, the whole thing gets downright Freudian. Maidens and stallions indeed. Even more to the point are a series of comic-strip posters warning against the dangers of illicit sex, pornography, selling out to the running dogs of capitalism or most any other human activity that might provide private thrills.

Like most puritanical reformers, this bunch tip their hands by depicting all this naughtiness with a certain subliminal relish. They’re evangelists who do kinky stuff in motel rooms such as reading comic books under the covers.

If a decadent Westerner can find a certain amusement mixed with the oppression of all this, they certainly cannot accuse the Chinese of putting it there on purpose. The work is absolutely humorless.

Then there is “Art as Activist: Revolutionary Posters From Central and Eastern Europe.” It consists of posters done since Soviet Communism came unglued. Almost without exception they are graphically dramatic, hilarious, mordant and irreverent. Nothing like a sudden burst of pent-up freedom to get a person’s juices flowing.

Most are hindsight attacks on the old order. One of the best is “Power” by Alexander Chantsev. It depicts a huge red Ku Klux Klan-style hood topped with a star and not quite covering myriad legs representing the millions tortured and killed during decades of tyranny. Its very humor makes it the more creepy--as in images of Lenin and Stalin as the Madonna and Child or Stalin as the Mona Lisa.

Things get temporarily contemporary in a photocollage of Mikhail Gorbachev as an orchestra leader conducting from a text by Lenin. It’s a remarkably deft bit of dubious sarcasm by Svyetlana Faldina and Alexander Faldin. Events unfold so fast over there that nobody stays current for long.

What does seem to remain drearily the same is their miserable economy. It shows in Rashit Akmanov’s “The State Needs Hard Currency”--very directly expressed by a naked couple. Latvia’s Idulis Kalnins is even funnier and more poignant in “Our Daily Bread.” The loaf is not just half, it’s hollow.

Nobody wants to change places with these folks, but the show proves that hard times can provoke great posters.

But not, apparently, complicated times. “America Today: 500 Years Later” was organized as an international invitational in Mexico by an outfit called Trama Visual. Too many of its entries are either expressively timid or suffocated in cliche. It’s doubtful that this reflects badly on the talent of the designers involved. It’s more likely a case of a theme that demands dealing with more than one thing at a time. The northern and southern Americas are both beset with different sets of tangled problems. Posters just can’t deal with that. They have to be direct.

Phil Risbeck tries to use vintage prints to sum up 500 years under the title “1492 Great Cruelty Poverty Waste Destruction 1992.” Heartfelt sentiment but no image. Designers who are less accurate but more pointed do better. Antonio Perez--called “Nico”--shows us a lemon squeezer dripping blood. Per Arnoldi juxtaposes an enigmatic black Mickey Mouse above Juan Posada’s woodcut of death in a sombrero. Mieczyslaw Gorowski gives a handshake where the thumbnail of one hand gouges the back of the other. We guess who’s who. Not everybody likes us these days.

* Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, through March 14. Closed Mondays, (818) 584-5000.