Orange Ccounty Calendar : ART REVIEW : The Truth About ‘Sex’ Is It’s Often Routine

Mention sex in the title of just about anything and you’ve got a captive audience. But only for so long.

These days, sex in a visual art context tends to have little joy in it, partly because of the specter of AIDS and partly because sex is part of “gender politics,” a vessel for the rage that accompanies feelings of betrayal, dominance and marginalization.

As so often happens, the fresh and powerful early works in this vein have begat countless sophomoric or ponderously didactic variations. Unfortunately, the latter are amply in evidence in “Scientia Sexualis: The Truth of Sex,” a group show at the Saddleback College Art Gallery through Feb. 24.

On the positive side, an untitled installation by Cirilo Domine charmingly reflects the conventional prudery surrounding sex as well as its furtive pleasures. A display of fussy crocheted jockstraps and airy jockstrap outlines made of bent wood (lovely little pieces in themselves) is accompanied by a handwritten note.

It says that crocheted curtains were turned into useful objects (camisoles, shirts, socks) during the war and then used as rags when they wore out. Another note says the writer once tasted lace doilies that had been stiffened with a sugar syrup mixture “until the sweetness was gone.”

In another vein, an engaging rawness informs Vincente Golveo’s teen-age text-and-image memoir “Desire for Man.” The piece offers a glimpse of what it’s like to see members of your race literally marginalized--reduced to postage stamp-sized images in a book--while “Man” is presented as “a blond, buffed-out Anglo.” The narrator’s startling subsequent action suggests the degree of his feelings of worthlessness.

Yet, despite obviously serious intentions, other works come across mostly as flat-footed or jejune, offering only raw information, a familiar-sounding lecture or a visceral response that doesn’t seem to have been shaped by a larger vision.

John Breitweiser’s “Gay Gene” consists of two pairs of blue jeans arranged to form an X on the wall. They are inscribed with basic information about the widely publicized discovery of an X chromosome that may determine homosexual orientation.

Like most of Breitweiser’s other works, “Gay Gene” plays a commendable community activist role, alerting the dozing public to serious issues involving gays. But as a work of art about a discovery with disturbing ethical implications, it lacks metaphorical richness and analytical depth.

Had Danielle Michaelis made “Saddled, Bridled, and Horsed: The Husbandry of Women” 15 years ago, the installation might have been heralded as a breakthrough in feminist art. But this mock-up of a gynecologist’s examining room hung with the cruel writings of a posse of women-hating philosophers, doctors and others from the 13th to the 20th centuries unfortunately tells us little we haven’t heard before.

Cynde Miller’s “Hidden Obsessions”--a handwritten text, complete with circles over the i’s, about a young woman’s sexual self-discoveries while watching a porno video--presumably was intended as parody. The gender-bending nature of this little reverie is undermined by what the literary world would call an unreliable narrator. So what’s the point?

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The oddest bedfellows in the show are three videos, shown by request only. One is a 32-minute screed about the negative aspects of circumcision (Niklas Sven Vollmen’s “Roughly Cut”); another offers disease-prevention tips in a sexy format better suited to private perusal (“Safer Sex Shorts” by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis), and the third is a lame attempt at avant-garde obscurity that might refer to the after-effects of rape (Caroline Koebel’s “Knucklebones: Self-Sustaining Members of the Human Species”).

* “Scientia Sexualis: The Truth of Sex” continues through Feb. 24 at the Saddleback College Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Hours: noon to 5 p.m., 6 to 8 p.m. Mondays; noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays. Free. (714) 582-4929.