ART /CATHY CURTIS : Millennium’s End Through a Lens, Darkly : 25 Photo-Artists Chronicle Society’s Ills as They See Them in Contemporary Art Center Exhibit

During the next few Decembers, we’ll be contending not only with the end of a year but the final months of the final years of a millennium. The full blast of Grand Summations and Apocalyptic Laments probably won’t be felt until we get closer to 2000.

But Orange County already has a small entry in the fin-de-siecle sweepstakes, a juried photo exhibition called “At the End of the 20th Century: VALUES?” at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (through Dec. 24) in Santa Ana.

The 25 artists selected by photographer Jerry Burchfield have isolated the usual culprits as value deficiencies: racism, sexism, violence, greed, environmental carelessness. What really counts, of course, is the way the photographers interpret these themes, or (from a more cynical point of view) which major contemporary artist appears to have provided the stylistic inspiration.

One unacknowledged theme of the show is the extent to which even the most violent or outre imagery has become commonplace, thanks to the ubiquity of still photography and video in daily life. It takes major strategizing to give work presence and impact, particularly when the subjects already are overexposed.

In this show, the photographers who best grapple with this challenge are Terri Garland and Glenn Cannon (both of whom received honorable mentions), Kathleen Ashworth, Nancy Floyd (two of the award winners), and Peggy Ann Jones.

Avoiding the whining and gnashing of teeth that afflicts many artists out to make a social point, Garland makes hers--the banality of evil, the unholy alliance of hate-mongering and religion--through understatement. Cannon straddles the worlds of elegantly stylized shock motifs, a la Robert Mapplethorpe and Catholic imagery, to deal with issues of gender and sex.

Ashworth uses shadow and the abrupt intimacy of large-format photography to good advantage, Floyd sticks with matter-of-fact reportage, and Jones concocts a gimmick reflecting the contemporary status of religion.

Garland’s “San Pedro, CA” is the portrait of a happy family posing against the blue clapboard siding of their home: a smiling little girl in a flowered romper, a pleasant-faced woman holding a baby and a guy you wouldn’t look at twice if you bumped into him at Home Depot--unless you noticed his “White Power” T-shirt, complete with swastika and iron cross.

In “Texas Klanspersons,” Garland composed the shot so that a white church steeple in the middle distance pokes up between the pointed hoods worn by a row of Klansmen--a visual echo with an ironic twist.

Cannon’s “Death by Lethal Injection” is a one-shot image with a text (the title phrase) that would be terrific on a poster--except that the image of two men engaging in anal sex is too explicit for a public venue.

Mapplethorpe would have let the black-and-white photo speak for itself--as an elegantly presented image of a form of sexual enjoyment that many people find repellent. But Cannon painted the top figure red and added a red trickle of blood to the private parts of the lower figure--histrionic flourishes that scream message art , and seem more appropriate for a poster exhorting the masses than a small-format photograph shown in an art venue.

In “Psalm of St. Sextus,” a parody of an illustrated manuscript that canonizes a gay man as a martyr to his sexual identity, Cannon’s over-the-top emotionalism and in-your-face approach seem better matched to his theme.

The photographic image shows a man in purple shorts (a color denoting secular or sacred high rank) with his member poking boldly through the open fly, gold rays emerging from his head and gay-bashing slurs written around the perimeter of his body. The handwritten text (“ . . . they spat upon his member, and still he could not be made into a lover of women”) imitates biblical writings about Jesus’ suffering on the cross.

A young woman in a button-front print dress is the subject of Ashworth’s untitled pair of shadowy color Polaroids whose style recalls that of Lorna Simpson.

In the first photo, the woman stands looking out, in a veiled way, at the viewer. In the second, light falls on the midriff portion of her dress, pushed open by her curled hands. This oddly unsettling action suggests ambivalent feelings about self-image as well as the difficulty of defining your own sexuality rather than letting others define it for you.

*

Floyd’s women calmly take self-defense into their own hands. Sitting outdoors on a lawn chair, a gray-haired woman offers a handful of bullets to a young girl who is holding a gun, as naturally as if they were chocolates.

A middle-aged woman answers her front door with a gun in one hand. In photographs of women whose heads are cropped out, a pistol becomes a potent accessory against a pointelle sweater or a midriff-tied shirt. Floyd discreetly leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions about the new wave of self-proclaimed empowerment through firearms.

Jones, who teaches photography at Orange Coast College, is represented by “Pope on a Plate,” which combines elements of piety, superstition, humanitarianism and marketing, pretty much the way religion frequently is disseminated in the ‘90s.

The piece consists of a photo of the Pope superimposed on a photo of a solar eclipse (long viewed as a frightening and inexplicable phenomenon) and mounted in a shallow metal dish (evoking rations doled out to starving populations). The whole thing is shrink-wrapped like a mass-produced object: cold, airless and impersonal.

* “At the End of the 20th Century: VALUES?” remains through Dec. 24 at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd. (Harbor Business Park, Space 111) in Santa Ana. Free. Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. (714) 549-4989. *

A HOT TAMALE: A broadly inclusive, non-juried exhibition of AIDS-related works (by students, faculty, artists and other members of the community) at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through Dec. 11 contains a variety of angry texts, provocative photos, vague painted imagery and heartfelt memorials. But one piece stands out for the humorous and zestful way it promotes the health benefits of condom use.

Ken Gonzales Day’s sculptural wall piece is based on Mexican restaurant fare: On a piece of brightly colored woven cloth, five plates each hold helpings of beans, rice, chili peppers, a folded tortilla and a tamale. On closer inspection, those tamales increasingly mutate into the shape of the male sex organ. The title? “A Safe Tamale Is a Hot Tamale.”

* “The AIDS Show: Community Responses to a Crisis” continues through Dec. 11 at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery (off Bridge Road on campus). Free. Hours: Noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. (714) 856-8251. *

THE O.C. CONNECTION: While top Los Angeles dealers stayed away in droves, Orange County galleries had a larger-than usual presence among the 100 galleries at Art L.A. ‘93, the eighth annual incarnation of the Southern California art fair, held last weekend at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Booth renters included Stuart Katz’s Loft and Sherwood Gallery from Laguna Beach, Sarah Bain from Fullerton, Breeden from Orange, and Chemers Gallery from Tustin (which sent out a fax erroneously proclaiming itself the first O.C. gallery at the fair; last year, at least two O.C. galleries participated).

Orange County-related special events included Laguna Art Museum curator Bolton Colburn’s interview with collector Diana Zlotnick, and interviews with two artists--Russell Crotty and Paul Tzanetopoulos--who are represented in the “Fourth Newport Biennial: Southern California 1993” at Newport Harbor Art Museum through Jan. 30.

Tzanetopoulos’s extensive recent series of images of Scottish tartans is based on ideas about the way the brain processes information. One work in the show is a huge (10-by-20-foot) painting of plaid fabric made up of pixel-like individual brush strokes. Another piece (“Smith Gow Corona”) consists of a sheet of paper stuck in a typewriter; the plaid pattern on the paper was “woven” in red and black ink by repeatedly pressing the typewriter keys.

Since the artist didn’t give a public lecture at the museum (Crotty will speak there Dec. 14), it seemed worth the drive to Los Angeles to hear what he had to say.

Alas, the fates seemed to conspire against his talk. The audience could be numbered on the fingers of one hand, and for some reason the interviewer (Julia Doran, a graduate student at USC) posed bureaucratic questions about the art fair, rather than the artist’s own work. The few engaging tidbits emerged almost by accident.

Asked by audience members to comment on any links between his dyslexia and his art, and to discuss his interest in computers, Tzanetopoulos said: “I live in a world where I never read a book and I can’t even read cartoons. . . . I’m an investigative person in real time. Computers (help me) do things I couldn’t do in other ways: quantify, store and interact with (information.).”

The UC Irvine master of arts graduate said both his bilingual abilities (his first language was Greek) and his inability to visualize words seem to have encouraged wide-ranging free associations.

“Rotoplaid,” the painting at Newport Harbor, “was done to illustrate the architecture of math--how a computer functions,” he said. “It has no illusionistic component, except at a distance. The closer you get, the internal architecture is revealed more and more. . . .

“Computer systems are not mystical (despite what many people think), just large. We’re either on the edge of a system or inside a system. It’s like the weather: You only experience it relative to your position (on the Earth).”

Embracing technology, Tzanetopoulos also honors tradition.

“I value painting so much because of its historical context, illustrating something on a two-dimensional plane,” he said. “It was meant to speak of things we can’t write about and can’t articulate very well.”

* “Fourth Newport Biennial: Southern California 1993” closes Jan. 30 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. $4 general, $2 seniors and students, free on Tuesdays. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. (714) 759-1122.