ART REVIEWS : Hands, Words Don’t Share the Same Digs

In the aftermath of the victory of Proposition 187, an installation by Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez at the Saddleback College Gallery gains added irony, though it still suffers from problems of tone and presentation.

“Los Anthropolocos: New Digs at Mission Viejo--In Search of the Colorless Hands” (through Dec. 15) is a tongue-in-cheek archeological study--undertaken in the distant future--of an extinct people known as the Colorless.

Dozens of latex gloves stamped with numbers and strung up on nails on the walls are presented as the contents of each dig, along with various partially disemboweled household implements presumably used by the Colorless. At intervals, a buzzer sounds and a blue light flashes over a sandbox: the anthropological dig as blue-light special.

The conceptual glue of the piece consists of texts that turn anti-minority stereotypes on their heads. The Colorless, whose culture “did not value work (or) encourage ambition or initiative,” are blamed for social problems ranging from lower test scores and drug abuse to such “bland and inane music” as “Achy Breaky Hand.”

The texts soberly report a somewhat confusing array of scams ranging from self-mutilation (severed hands qualifying Colorless individuals for disability payments) to stolen Colorless body parts used by one Freddy “El Dahmer Prieto” Jiminez as sexual fetishes.

Lou and Sanchez will be remembered for their installation “Entrance Is Not Acceptance” at the Third Newport Biennial in 1991. Mass media images displayed within a jury-rigged labyrinth the viewer could walk through represented an attempt at re-creating visceral aspects of the undocumented worker’s plight in the United States.

“Suspended Text: A Border Matrix,” shown in San Diego the same year, also involved media imagery and a confining physical exercise (pushing oneself on a wheeled platform).

This time out, the “crazy anthropologists” already have done the physical work--the digging--and viewers need only apply their minds. But the artists seem not to have realized that a piece so dependent on texts required more attention to the nuances of language.

As the piece stands, the “theories” read more like unrehearsed stand-up comedy material--complete with a grammatical error or two--than parodies of genuine anthropological style.

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The other major problem is that the texts and the objects don’t support one another; each portion of the piece exists in its separate little universe of parodic style.

The orderly grid of numbered latex gloves soberly recalls the tidy certainties--the bloodlessness, you might say--of applied science. The dismembered household objects are (deliberately?) lame attempts to re-create aspects of civilization recognizably like our own but somehow weirdly different. The blue-light effect might be a pop-culture reference to the media-age marketing of dubious morsels of information. The texts go off on their own discombobulated trip. Somewhere in all this, there is the germ of a keen parody of racist shortsightedness, but it needs some rethinking and retooling.

* “Los Anthropolocos: New Digs at Mission Viejo--In Search of the Colorless Hands” continues through Dec. 15 at the Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Noon to 5 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. Monday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday. Free. (714) 582-4924. *

DEAD BOLTS: “Dia de los Muertos,” a juried show closing Friday at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, contains a wide variety of works celebrating life by remembering the dead. A few pieces seem especially promising.

In “Generations,” Anne Wolf establishes a stark scene of torture and death in prison with starkly minimal means. Anita Rodriguez’s painting “Ibrahim Medina” invokes the life and death of a loving couple out for a joy ride with a sweetly lyrical style incorporating equal parts of gossamer fantasy and down-to-earth detail. Rita Maria Amaya’s subtly lit silver prints of a dying lily (“Death of Grace”) embody simple truths about the short life of beauty.

* OCCCA, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana; Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; admission free. (714) 549-4989.

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PEACE MEAL: It’s hard to make compelling anti-war art in an era when the media are constantly exposing us to global atrocity. Although David Settino Scott--whose work is at the recently expanded Fullerton College Art Gallery through Friday--attempts to shock the viewer into pained awareness, his works are too cliched, derivative or prettified to be effective.

A massive, altar-like painting (“The Practice of Art”) is utterly dependent on the hell imagery of Hieronymous Bosch, weakly updated with modern implements of war. Scott’s brushy, blandly nostalgic painting style enfeebles individual works showing tranquil, suburban settings with tiny, anonymous-looking bodies that have been dismembered or hanged. Although his drawing style is much more vital and engaged, the images in a series called “Obscenities”--missiles as excrement and sexual appendages, and so forth--already have been done to death. * Fullerton College Art Gallery, 321 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton; through Friday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; admission free. (714) 992-7317.)