ART REVIEW : A Show Beyond Pictures

Upstairs at the California Museum of Photography, projected on the curving rear walls outside a little auditorium, computer-generated video imagery by artist Jennifer Steinkamp and recorded sound by composer James Johnson together transform the space into a weird and witty spectacle. Colorful images pulse, electronic sound seems to breathe and solid walls appear to dissolve, as if allowing a temporary, Superman-like glimpse inside their hidden innards.

Imagine a flat, chunky grid-pattern that starts to boil, then thins out into a tangled web of wires floating through deep space. (It looks like a snarled freeway map for the information superhighway.) Then, reverse the sequence; the inner glimpse reverts to a jaunty surface decoration.

Flat-out hypnotic, the latent, Barnum-esque trickery of modern photographic imagery is wryly pumped up. Steinkamp’s and Johnson’s eccentrically engaging collaboration is part sci-fi seduction, part meditation on electronic phantoms. It also inquires into our habit of dividing the world into binaries, such as body and soul.

The piece is among the more compelling of nine installations in “Photography and the Photographic: Theories, Practices and Histories,” a profitable exhibition of work commissioned from 12 artists in Southern California. The show was organized by Amelia Jones, guest curator and UC Riverside art history professor, as an adjunct to an international symposium of the same name, held at the school two weekends ago.

The show covers a wide territory of artistic formats--with one notable exception: Single photographs, independently hung on the wall, are absent. “Photography and the Photographic” is cheerfully biased in favor of anything but traditional camera pictures; apparently, it means to avoid any sense of photography as an independent discipline.

Instead, artists were invited to make new works addressing current photographic issues. The risk in that procedure, encountered in Daniel J. Martinez’s bright, white room filled with video monitors and projectors, is in coming too close to simple illustration of familiar theory. The influential critique of modern institutional surveillance and social control found in Michel Foucault’s incisive book “Discipline and Punish” is the obvious source for Martinez’s installation, which doesn’t add much to Foucault’s text.

By contrast, Jorge Daniel Veneciano’s “On the Trail of the Immigrant by the Signposts of History” starts with the commonplace that camera images inherently lie, and opens it up to resonant use. Veneciano pairs written texts about immigration, often conflicting in viewpoint and from different eras, with black-and-white images shot in the manner of documentary photographs.

Independently, the pictures seem to record such things as day laborers looking for work; together, they reveal that they are not what they seem. A man wearing a T-shirt celebrating the 150th anniversary of photography (a self-portrait of the artist?) turns up casually posed in one picture after another.

Suddenly the comparative texts and pictures explode into a dizzying array of blind assertions, false assumptions, likely miscommunications and more. Given the politically charged subject, the resulting fireworks effortlessly cross conventional boundaries of thought.

Michael Barton Miller’s “Curiosity, Amusement and Terror” hinges on the historical expansion of European and American colonialism and the contemporaneous popularity of camera images. Using an enclosing row of vintage stereoscopic pictures taken in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Indian subcontinent (they’re part of the museum’s collection), he frames an enclosed room, or camera .

Inside the room, a phantom image of human ears seems to come into focus in a developing bath, while tiny portrait photographs suspended overhead flutter in the breeze of a tropical fan. The titular “curiosity, amusement and terror,” borrowed from a notation scrawled on the back of one stereoscopic picture, is subtly evoked inside the camera in which you stand.

Like Miller, Nancy Buchanan uses the photographic process itself as a resonant structural metaphor. The steps a photographer uses to develop pictures provide the clever scaffolding for an engaging, interactive computer program about real estate, especially in Riverside. Photo development meets real estate development.

Interactive computer programs can give a false impression that the user is freely moving around through boundless cyber space, gathering up pure information, when in fact the options are constrained by the program’s limits. Frankly using photographic structure, which requires selecting fragmentary points of view, Buchanan neatly avoids this trap.

Laura Howe, Jody Zellen and the team of Nancy Barton and Michael Cohen offer more conventional installations. They incorporate different kinds of photographic reproduction to refer to role models, to the spooky chaos of information overload and to the ghosts of memory. Howe constructs a barren family tree of fallen blueprint-images of women (from Emma Goldman to Barbie), Zellen a chamber-within-a-chamber occluded with vaguely threatening media images, Barton and Cohen a rumination on childhood trauma and loss.

(The ninth work, a collaboration between Robert Millar and Mark Zolun that, like Martinez’s work, is located on the nearby UC Riverside campus, was not completely installed on the day I visited.)

Restricting the show to photographic installation art is a well-taken rhetorical gesture against considering photography as an independent medium with a discrete history--although, by now, that’s a rather established view. Given the prominence of installation art of all kinds today, an inescapable shadow of institutional fashion is cast.

There are photographers who don’t do installations but whose work would be at home here. To see some within the otherwise engaging company of Steinkamp and Johnson, Buchanan, Miller and Veneciano would have been illuminating.

* California Museum of Photography, 3824 Main St., Riverside, (909) 784-3686, through June 19. Closed Mon. and Tue.

* Daniel J. Martinez’s installation remains at the University Art Gallery, UC Riverside, (909) 787-3987, through Sunday.