O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Freeing Words From Their Life Sentence

Now, why would someone organize an exhibition of rather mysterious work by a group of mostly little-known artists--and then write an introduction larded with obscure words, difficult locutions and puzzling, fragmentary images? Why try to compete with the wayward eccentricity of the artists’ own works?

The nine artists in question are the focus of “Grammarians” at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery (through March 11).

According to exhibition notes by curator Michael Anderson, himself an artist and a critic for Art issues magazine, “Liberating writing from an everyday instrumentality, these artists purchase a brief sovereignty, and their work is a placard, as it were, of unalienated labor and personal digression.”

Translation: Unconstrained by everyday uses of language, the artists use words however they choose, either as the central or peripheral aspect of their work.

Once you climb over Anderson’s wall of words, however, you can appreciate his taste for his highly unusual approaches to language and imagery. Most of the works have to do with the involvement of belief, imagination, authority or famous precedents in our comprehension of a text. These are meaty themes, and the artists clearly assume an audience willing to dig for and evaluate different types of information. The effort is well worth it.

The wittiest works in the show are by Raymond Pettibon, one of the most gifted younger artists in Los Angeles, and Kenneth Goldsmith, the lone New Yorker in the group.

Pettibon pairs spare, laconic drawings based on popular imagery with texts that combine turns of speech from various sources into a crafty polyphony suggesting diverse patterns of thought.

In one of Pettibon’s untitled works, we read the self-conscious thoughts of a callow male writer observing a woman in a short strapless dress (“I felt so much that I just had to take notes”). In another drawing--an archetypal baseball pitcher winding up--the verbal counterpoint includes a punning platitude (“Life at its highest pitch”) and a comically dimwitted reflection (“What a beautiful moral to be drawn.”)

Goldsmith’s piece is an epic nonsense poem based on similarities between the sounds and rhythms of words and phrases drawn from high and low culture (“Rocky Horror Roto-Rooter Salmonilla Sandinista! . . . Simon Boccanegra smells like Magic Marker . . .”). Like a hip, updated Vachel Lindsay (the incantatory early 20th-Century American poet), Goldsmith plays back the sounds of America, the commercial jingles and news headlines that rattle around in our heads.

Frances Stark also employs lists of words in her art, but she focuses on their arbitrary, exclusionary quality. “Through the Magic Door” consists of mimeographed sheets of paper with hand-lettered lists (imitating an antiquated typeface) of the “100 Great Books.” One list dates from 1887; the other, which includes John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” from 1939 or later. The blue ink recalls vintage high school course handouts, yet the hand-lettering bizarrely undercuts the text’s supposed authority.

A grudging acknowledgment of women’s roles in society and American isolationism of the ‘30s may account for the fact that the newer list includes five female authors (in 1887, only George Eliot made the grade), but eliminates such non-Western entries as the Koran and the Ramayana in favor of the likes of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.”

And then there is Guy de Cointet, a French-born performance artist who died in 1983 and was known for such surreal pieces as “My Father’s Diary,” in which the book in question, a memento read by the man’s daughter, turns out to be written entirely in code. Influenced by French post-structuralist Roland Barthes, de Cointet was intrigued by the notion of language without meaning.

Hence, “Sophie Rummel”--de Cointet’s piece in this show--in which a numerical sequence like “700. 12. 663. 10. 8903. 27.” might stand for an infinite number of facts about the fictional or real woman in the title. Can this code be cracked? Does it matter? Isn’t speculation often more interesting than knowledge?

Other artists in the show combine visual and written material to conjure small, weird universes that are at least fitfully absorbing, while a couple of pieces seem baffling or oddly vacuous.

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Benjamin Weissman’s stumbling, crumpled-looking figures look like grim relations of the baffled folk immortalized by cartoonist William Steig. Combat between the sexes and generalized bleakness are the order of the day.

Several of these drawings have texts banged out on a typewriter that seems to have a permanently stuck shift key--a dated, amateurish presentation that somehow matches the figures’ hopelessly cliched predicaments. A woman asks her avenging mate, “Why must you always dent the head of another man?” He replies, “My head is big. His head is little and also quite soft.”

Tyler Stallings’ sprawling fantasy piece, “Castrato-Astronauta,” mingles an ode to ‘50s-style science fiction with a wistfully outrageous post-AIDS view of sex. (The title evokes the bizarre image of a castrated boy singer who has become a female astronaut).

A large birthday cake made of pink felt (and inscribed, “Happy birthday cyberspace sad farewell outer space”) dangles over a fallen parachute and the castrato’s lost member, which has become the body of a mutant spider. A photocopied “news story” complete with bogus documentation, matter-of-factly relates the castrato’s hallucinatory out-of-body experience, in which he becomes a male Virgin Mary, agrees to donate sperm for artificial insemination and contemplates guiltless sex with his grandmother.

Alexis Hall’s piece, “Bora Bora,” appears to be an archly self-conscious narrative about an art school photography student who moonlights as a Los Angeles Police Department secretary and is whisked away to a crime scene by a man “who assumes his identity through Marlboro ads and pulp novels.”

Printed on 10 large photographs (ads for expensive accouterments and exotic travel, romance novel jackets), Hall’s narrative reads like a clumsy pastiche of B-movie plots, pulp fiction and advertising. In fact, it is the “fabulous(ly) successful” art project the student says she made about her experience. By making her own slickly packaged form of “art” from a stew of gender stereotypes, she reinvents the same sort of hucksterism she appears to be critiquing.

The most puzzling piece in the show might be Lisa Auerbach’s set of color photographs, “In Color . . . and in Black and White.” Most of Auerbach’s suburban images are of foodstuffs: pumpkins growing in a field, shown chopped up in a photograph in an open cookbook, and stewing in a pot on a kitchen stove.

It is tempting to retitle the images, “The Raw and the Cooked,” the title of one of the books by French structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss that investigated formal relationships between different aspects of culture. But what spin Auerbach is putting on this material is unclear.

The one work that seems distinctly out of place in this company, however, is Gabrielle Jennings’ video, “To Whom It May Concern”). In the tradition of the rambling, tell-all adolescent diary, it details various out-of-control experiences (a drinking binge, a drug trip) of a young woman--supposedly herself--whose mother was a hippie and who knows her father only from a photograph.

Despite the visceral conceit that opens and closes the piece (she has decided to cut out her tongue and wants to leave a record of her life), “To Whom It May Concern” seems formless and lacking in critical and self-awareness. You wonder if she even realizes that she is invoking a sensation of nausea or vertigo to describe her reaction to virtually every event in her life.

* “Grammarians” remains through March 11 at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Hours: Noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Free. (714) 997-6812.