Art Review : Unexpected Images Make ‘Anxiety’ Worthwhile

Four years into the downsizing, recessionary ‘90s, it’s about time somebody organized an art show about anxiety. True, nearly all the images in “Anxiety: Views of Contemporary Life” at the BankAmerica Gallery (through Oct. 14) were made in the go-go ‘80s. But artists tend to be prescient about shifts in the emotional climate of a culture (and of course, even in the midst of plenty, life doles out sudden shocks and nagging worries).

A number of big names are represented, from Andy Warhol to Georg Baselitz and Robert Longo. Much of the imagery shares a one-shot appeal. “Get it?” it calls out. Yep, we get it. Hardly takes any effort at all. It’s not just that we recognize a queasy feeling when we see one. Rather, for the most part, the artists are capitalizing on familiar imagery instead of locating fresh metaphors.

Two men dangle from a window. Someone balances on a mysterious concatenation of ladders strung in midair. Tongues of fire and falling furniture threaten an uninhabited bedroom. A vacationing couple embrace at twilight, upside-down, in midair. A faceless man sits in a small boat, adrift in an indifferent gray universe of sea and sky. And so on.

Some of the images offer something more: irony, or a sense of battling impulses, or least an unexpected (and not too literal) image of instability. You look, and then you look again, with a feeling of growing recognition that invades the spirit as well as the eye.

In Richard Bosman’s woodcut “Adieu,” a man runs through a landscape. It’s the kind of running you do in dreams, where you are any size you need to be, and the man’s giant step sails effortlessly over rooftops and trees. He is leaving, he is cutting his traces, he has said his goodbys. But his hand seals off his face, as if he is willing himself not to see the familiar things that might hold him back. And he has a third foot that remains stuck on the ground, the part of himself that cannot quite pull away.

Bosman’s incisive line sculpts the bulky body in a beguiling, quasi-folkloric style, emphasizing the dreaminess of the image and the mood. (In “Falling Man,” on the other hand, he opts for a telegraphic abbreviation of the body, as if the act of falling has neutralized it into sheer planes of force.)

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Leo Rubinfien’s Ektacolor print “London” seems quite nondescript at first. A young woman in Hyde Park sits at the water’s edge in one of the canvas chairs provided for summer visitors. She clutches a slim paper bag to her chest and looks out at the photographer with panicked eyes and an open mouth. The scene is uncrowded, non-threatening. It’s impossible to tell what private demons provoke the woman’s response. If free-floating anxiety has a face, this is it.

Borrowing stylistic quirks from vintage boys’ book illustrations, Glen Baxter takes a completely different tack, monumentalizing trivial events in a way that archly zeros in on a society absorbed in narcissistic pursuits (in “How He Hated Saturday Morning Shopping,” a young man of means sobs at the wheel of a small boat) and redefinitions of familial roles, as well as an art world constantly rummaging through past styles.

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Baxter’s “It Was the Fourth Time That Daddy Had Fallen for the Exploding Fork Routine” revisits the traditional upper-class family dinner table, which has been invaded by the entrepreneurial, imaginative kiddie realm of “A Boy’s Book of Magic Tricks.” Poor Daddy has a mess on his hands, but we postmoderns realize it’s probably apt punishment for his patriarchal attitude.

Warhol rarely disappoints, and in this show his silk-screen “The Shadow” is the perfect self-portrait of his tensely inscrutable persona. A flat, frontal view of Warhol’s face merges with a silver-edged rock star-style profile pointed backward toward the twinkling surface of the mica-dazzled background--the image of someone constantly monitoring the effect of his actions on the chimerical world of gossip and hype.

Yet the show’s main--and unwitting--revelation has to do with Longo’s iconic big-scale black-and-white lithographs from his “Men in the Cities” series. At a decade’s remove, these images of nattily dressed young people reeling, grimacing and twitching have lost their sleekly choreographed allure (Longo derived the intense postures by asking friends of his to assume disco poses).

Images that once seemed to be brilliant billboards for the Angst of an entire generation now hold about as much psychological content as a double-page spread for the Gap. Longo’s skill at co-opting the values of media culture has boomeranged on him, draining the message out of the medium.

* “Anxiety: Views of Contemporary Life” continues through Oct. 14 at the BankAmerica Gallery, 555 Anton Blvd., Costa Mesa. 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Free. (714) 433-6000.