Four ‘Diaries’ Are Opened for Public Viewing : Video: Four artists record their personal musings, and the result is a showcase of their work at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

As we tumble down the stairs of the ‘90s, one gets the feeling that when we abruptly land at the bottom in the year 2000, we’ll discover that technology has invaded every aspect of human experience. Evidence of that possible eventuality can be seen in “Diaries,” an exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art showcasing work by four artists who use video as a means of journal-keeping.

Conceived by the museum’s Media Arts Curator Carole Ann Klonarides and featuring work by Lynn Hershman, Sadie Benning, George Kuchar and Michael Auder, “Diaries,” which runs through Nov. 14, is above all else an odd conflation of the public and the private. Traditionally, the diary has been regarded as a hidden confessional where one gives free rein to the eccentricities that most clearly define us as individuals. The most important ground rule with a diary, and that which creates the psychological climate engendering such honesty, is that it’s kept under lock and key.

Nothing could be more public and uniform, however, than video. Easily understood and available to all, the televised image tends to homogenize and round the edges off all it depicts; this is why it unifies us as a culture, while estranging us from ourselves. It’s hard to imagine a less likely vehicle for diary writing, but this exhibition is a revelation in demonstrating how malleable video is. Operating from the same starting point, these artists strike out in wildly divergent directions, yet all emerge as fully fleshed-out characters.

Usually positioning himself as the star of his hilariously cheesy videos, George Kuchar takes a fantasy-inflected romp through the banalities of daily life; Lynn Hershman uses video as a therapeutic tool and speaks directly into the camera about disturbing episodes from her past; Michael Auder rarely appears on camera in his tapes, choosing instead to create a cinema verite chronicle of the people around him; and Sadie Benning, a 20-year-old Wunderkind whose work was featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial, introduces herself as a politically aware lesbian in tapes with a grunge look that’s emblematic of her generation.

Working with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, a plastic toy that sells for less than $200, Benning made her first tape, “A New Year,” in her bedroom in 1989. Combining handwritten text with close-ups of Benning’s face and body--elements central to most of her work--the tape was followed that same year by “Living Inside,” the first of several pieces dealing with Benning’s coming out as a lesbian. Before talking with friends and family about the fact that she was gay, Benning confided to the video camera because, as she says, “the camera didn’t judge me--it just listened, and I used it to get things out that I couldn’t tell anybody yet.”

As with Benning, Lynn Hershman’s art pivots on a feminist reading of issues of sexuality and identity, and she uses video to journey into her past and her subconscious. A battered child whose violent early life catapulted her into an adulthood plagued by destructive relationships and self-hatred, the 50-year-old artist examines these aspects of her life with harrowing candor in front of the video camera.

“When I’m alone speaking into a camera, aspects of my subconscious come out that don’t reveal themselves any other way,” says Hershman. “I don’t know why I relax into the camera the way I do, but I trust this machine in a way I find it hard to trust people. Maybe it’s the silence--there’s an element of acceptance in the silence of the camera.

“These tapes are difficult to watch, and I’m sure some people wonder why I’m making these issues public,” she continues, “but in revealing these parts of myself I’ve discovered that many people are dealing with similar things--so in a sense, the tapes are about more than just me. The response they’ve gotten has proven that. Several psychiatric institutions have acquired the tapes and use them in working with patients, so you know there’s more going on in them than just the story of my life.”

While Hershman’s work takes the viewer on an arduous journey through her past, George Kuchar’s tapes are rooted in a delirious silliness worthy of the Marx Brothers. Born in the Bronx in 1942, Kuchar, along with his twin brother Mike, created camp parodies of pop culture that were part of New York’s underground film scene of the ‘60s. In the early ‘70s, Kuchar relocated to the Bay Area, and in 1985 he acquired a video camera and began to exhaustively document the things that interest him; friends, family, food, sex, pets and weather are Kuchar’s central themes.

Employing voice-over narration, occasional props and costumes and snippets of “B” movies, Kuchar’s work is tethered to an undercurrent of hip humor, yet the amateurish quality of his tapes is so extreme that you can’t quite decide if he’s putting you on. Included in the program at Long Beach, for instance, is a tape of Kuchar giving catnip to his cat; the tape is hysterically funny, but it wouldn’t be out of place on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

Asked why he thinks his tapes are on view in a museum, he replies: “I have no idea. When I was in art school I thought you had to be dead to be in a museum, but suddenly the doors are open and museums seem like regular places. Some of them are strange places that don’t always work, sort of like dingbat outfits, but otherwise, it’s just something that happened.”

Like Kuchar, Michel Auder leaves the events depicted in his tapes largely unsorted and unexplained. Centering for the most part on the semi-celebrities of the Manhattan art world, Auder’s work owes a considerable debt to Andy Warhol; like Warhol, Auder is fascinated by the daily lives of creative people and strikes the pose of the mute observer in his depiction of them. Traipsing through Auder’s tapes at various points are Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Larry Rivers, Alice Neel, Eric Bogosian and Cindy Sherman (who’s married to Auder), among many others.

Intensely evocative period pieces focusing for the most part on groovy people sitting around for hours at a stretch, getting stoned, talking nonsense and giggling, Auder’s early tapes bring back the late ‘60s in all their lethargic glory. These tapes are so uneventful that one wonders why he chose to turn the camera on at one moment as opposed to another.

“Something has to be happening for me to turn the camera on, and just turning the camera on doesn’t automatically make something happen,” he explains.

“Whenever I’m in a show that forces me to go back through this old material, I always find it horrible to see myself over a period of 25 years,” he adds. “I’m such an idiot! I don’t want to make a point of that because everyone’s an idiot, too--I’m not the only one, but it’s my idiocy I see in the tapes. Even though you rarely see my face in them, they tell my secrets.”

* The Long Beach Museum of Art; 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. (310) 439-2119. Wednesdays--Sundays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.