O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Full Frontal Assault on the Subject of Sex

Transgressive art--which confronts the tensions between prevailing social attitudes and the darkly ambivalent world of sexual power plays, fantasies, prejudices and dirty secrets--has come at last to Orange County, after its more blatant manifestations have already inundated the big-city art world.

Some artists have found freshly metaphorical ways of conveying the pain and rage inherent in these subjects. Others have approached them with a gross-out anti-aesthetic that flaunts crudely rendered, shock-value imagery--a rather exhausting activity, since it depends on dreaming up a steady stream of new strategies for looking dumb.

Both approaches coexist edgily in “Different Strokes” (at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University in Orange, through Oct. 8). As curated by Maggi Owens, the exhibition bundles together 15 well-known and emerging artists who are mostly in their 20s and 30s and live in Los Angeles or New York.

Despite its good--even brave--intentions, the exhibition is too diffuse, with inept work undercutting the good, and without a clear point of view about the topic. Some artists are represented by witty, visually sophisticated work (Nayland Blake, Millie Wilson, Keith Boadwee), while others are not seen at their best (Sue Williams, Judie Bamber).

Still others are represented by work that varies markedly in quality (Kerrie Peterson, Nicole Eisenman, Anne Walsh) or are shown in ways that give an incomplete picture of what they’re about (Bob Flanagan, Zoe Leonard).

A few artists seem locked into superficially schematic ways of working, whereas others produce truly witless stuff (paintings by Cary S. Leibowitz and Attila Richard Lukacs, a sculpture by Pat Lasch).

Although the press release for the show stresses its humorous qualities (perhaps as a ploy to ward off outraged public comments?), some of the art is too single-mindedly enraged or dumbly self-absorbed to qualify even as black humor. Other works are thoughtfully provocative but hardly amusing.

There’s not much point in looking to the accompanying brochure for clarification, since the essay--written by Cal State Northridge instructor Betty Ann Brown--is irritatingly chatty and superficial, and inappropriately self-referential.

She drags coy references to her own boyfriend and sexual experiences into her text,while implicitly suggesting that she--and her readers--view sex between women as a remote curiosity, a departure from the lusty norm Brown herself presumably embodies.

Missing altogether is an overview of the tensions in contemporary culture that provoke such work, or its relationship to sexual outspokenness in the culture at large (movies, advertising, rap music).

Blake’s compact installation, “Action Remembered,” is a campy Never Land, a Christmas department store window rendition of Farmer MacGregor’s garden, complete with daisies, dogwood, toadstools, cabbages, glitter-sparkled tree branches--and two copulating bunnies.

Drenched in wry nostalgia, the piece casts a fairy-tale aura over the pre-AIDS era. Two Garden of Eden apples on a tree hint at the Fall to come; the scribbled notes on an ornately framed chalkboard remain a puzzle.

Wilson’s elegantly stylized sculptures deal complexly with issues of gender and the way it is objectified by the onlooker. “Hood” is a red velvet and silk garment that resembles--in silhouette, textures and color--hugely enlarged female genitalia.

An ecclesiastical aura hovers around this piece, displayed with the immaculate formality of a vestment--which suggests the ritual qualities of sex as well as the adoration of the body of the beloved. “Hood” implicitly offers itself (like any garment on display) to the viewer--a gesture that could be read as ownership or penetration, self-protection or evasion.

In Boadwee’s color photographs--among the few really funny works in the show--he puts his intimate body parts to work as the “bodies” of toy figures. In “Puppy in Hell,” a winsome pooch head balanced on Boadwee’s scrotum peers out from an abstractly rendered inferno painted on the artist’s lower torso.

Although it looks like a silly party trick for intimates, this work is really a spoof of the serious-minded infantilism of “body art” (as practiced by Robert Morris, Vito Acconci and others). The piece also winks at the macho power of the Abstract Expressionists by transferring the much-vaunted battleground of the canvas to an indisputably “male” arena.

Williams, whose savagely on-target painting of child abuse was one of the highlights of an exhibition of female artists at UC Irvine last year, is represented by some cretinous doodles on calendar pages (“Three Days in July,” which reduces men and women to a set of bad attitudes and bodily functions), and a piece called “Indonesian Honeymoon,” in which Williams seems more fascinated than the average 6-year-old with passing wind and other uses of the posterior.

In a somewhat similar vein, Bamber--who once embedded her zingers about male-female relations into deceptively exquisite still-life paintings--is represented by newer works incorporating a battery of suggestive or downright evil-looking objects (whips, dildos, garters, a plastic Halloween bat). Whereas the paintings sucked unsuspecting viewers into their lair, the objects keep them at a chilly remove.

Some artists simply seem more forceful in certain moods or styles. Eisenman’s sketches seem best when they’re messy and peevish--as in the variously grimacing, toothy, wattled and absurdly costumed creatures that parade around a sheet of paper entitled, “Pretty Princesses”--rather than drop-dead cool (“Eisenman’s Art Staff”).

Walsh’s abstract pillows-having-sex piece (“Blue Boys Daisy Chain”) has an immediate presence that eludes “In, On, Over, Under,” which incorporates hair combs, plastic hair accessories, massive key chains and photographs of female bodybuilders, and flatly assumes viewer familiarity with lesbian culture.

Peterson’s sculptures are critical companion pieces to certain famous male artists’ distorted visions of women. A long, impossibly slender tube of black organza, with a label that reads “Giacometti Slimline,” is a proposed costume for one of the Swiss artist’s attenuated sculptures; “Lingerie for Lachaise”--a bra that metamorphoses into a pair of panties--was designed for a piece by the French-American sculptor that consists in its entirely of breasts separated by a vagina.

The problem with such imagery, however, is that it lumps all male artists together even when their agendas were very different. Both male and female figures in Alberto Giacometti’s oeuvre are emaciated because they represent the vulnerability of 20th-Century human beings, and Gaston Lachaise’s massive female nudes--the only sort he made--fetishize women as symbols of fertility.

Flanagan’s two works in the show were part of the installation he made for the Santa Monica Museum of Art last winter (“Visiting Hours”), in which he explored the links between his lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis and his masochistic sexual life.

Seen in isolation, “Alphabet Wall” is baffling, with its repeated sequences of “SM” and “CF” blocks. But “Toy Chest”--which contains such items as a masked toy bear in a black lace outfit, a troll doll, a Tinkertoy set and plastic handcuffs--slyly suggests that there is a thin line between childhood amusements and adult taboos.

Dani Tull’s illustrations also dwell on childish things--kids and farm animals, drawn in the wide-eyed style of a child’s primer. Implied beneath the innocent surfaces of these works are bestial encounters that are about to happen (“Cowlick”) or have already occurred (“Black Sheep,” in which the little boy aptly sports a feather in his cap). The problem with this work is that it’s all about cleverly contrived style and has little to say about its supposed subject.

The grainy, off-center quality of Leonard’s photographs of objects relating to off-kilter sexual attitudes has been described as voyeuristic by some critics. But the two images on view--a chastity belt apparently displayed in a Spanish castle or museum, and a supine wax figure of a woman with exposed reproductive organs--seem insufficient to convey the artist’s train of thought.

And then there’s the stuff that drags the show down. Leibowitz shot to a dubious notoriety a few years ago on the basis of shrewdly packaged banalities (sample: “There are two things I need to watch the rest of my life: my weight and my racism”).

The texts in the show, painted in oh-so-guileless combinations of capital and lower-case letters on pieces of wood, refer with sub-banal braggadocio to portions of the male anatomy and sexual predilections.

“Love in Union: Stretching the Body” is Lukacs’ massively scaled fantasy of pale-skinned booted skinheads sharing their bodies in a paradise of leafy plants, nuzzling rabbits, cats piled on a pastel mountain and stylized clouds. The painting mingles conventions lifted from Persian miniatures and Eastern European folk art with two levels of “transgression”--a men-only orgy and the racist connotations of the skinhead style.

The world view that informs this and other works by the artist is just unclear enough to avoid being rejected as fascist propaganda, but Lukacs’ attempt to seek refuge behind the sweet facade of folkoric styles seems devious at best.

At the other end of the sexual spectrum, Lasch’s wall-mounted sculpture, “How to Share Your Husband with the Other Woman”--a disembodied hand cutting a nude man in half--is a feeble, one-dimensional yelp of feminist righteousness.

What a huge gap separates this work from Wilson’s, and what a curious show that could present both as equally valid expressions of the infinitely nuanced realm of sexual behavior.

* “Different Strokes” remains through Oct. 8 at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Gallery hours: noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Free. (714) 997-6729.