ART REVIEW : ‘Narcissistic’: Art for Artist’s Sake

“Narcissistic Disturbance” is a small show of mostly recent work by 14 artists who, it is said, choose to celebrate the libidinal pleasures of the self rather than to cast tsk-tsking judgments upon them. Call the curatorial proposition the School of Melanie Klein, after the pioneering psychoanalytic theorist who sought to revise Freud.

That’s an awful lot of freight to ask a small show to carry, although the idea itself is not an uninteresting one. Here’s a simplified version of what’s being proposed: If subjectivity in Modern art has tended to value an idealized purity of expression, this exhibition argues instead for the unsung virtues of subjectivity that’s untidy and impure.

At Otis Art Gallery, the poster child could be Victor Estrada’s ecstatically messy totem “Happiness” (1994-95), which happily walks off with the show. Made from garishly painted plaster and Styrofoam, “Happiness” is an engorged, bug-eyed, mutant creature shown erupting like a phallic mushroom cloud from a head that’s splitting open.

Certainly we aren’t talking about the exquisite, formal simplifications of a Brancusi here. Rather, Estrada’s engaging brand of wiggy, mystic symbolism derives from the mass-cult language of Chuck Jones-style cartoons, dragster decals and B-horror movies of the 1950s.

If narcissism concerns the first and, therefore, a very youthful stage of libidinal development, “Happiness” smartly finds its indulgent imagery in adolescent pleasures born of the first blush of postwar American expansiveness.

Guest curator Michael Cohen has located his show’s thematic ancestry in the eccentric, phallus-encrusted mirrored environments created by Japanese expatriate Yayoi Kusama in the 1960s. (A 1984 replica, at quarter-scale, of a 1964 Kusama box stands at the entry to the show.) Peer through a slot into the lighted chamber and you see your own eyes reflected as if hovering above a sea of stuffed, polka-dot-covered little pillows stretching off into infinity.

Work by two artists is slightly more recent. From 1987, six wonderful, well-known Ektachrome prints by Larry Johnson feature computer-manipulated texts about death stolen from media sources (pop music lyrics, the black box salvaged from an airplane crash, etc.). Through photographic processes, the memorializing medium par excellence, deadness is paradoxically born again.

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From 1988-89, Jeff Koons’ four art-magazine advertisements extolling the exquisite New Age virtues of--what else?--Jeff Koons do not constitute this important artist’s most compelling work. And the single example from Koons’ series of pornographic paintings of himself and his bride, Ilona Staller, is just dull.

Therein lies a principal weakness of the show, whose remaining work dates from the 1990s. It relies heavily on less-than-captivating examples.

You get the feeling Cohen is trying to seize a new and potentially provocative artistic attitude, still in the works, while speculating on a few early examples of the tendency. But the artistic goods don’t often deliver.

Janine Antoni’s photographs of her costumed and made-up parents, posing as themselves and as each other, make you think wistfully of William Wegman’s similar familial portraits from more than a decade ago.

Likewise, the projected video and self-worshiping magazine covers produced by Lyle Ashton Harris and Ike Ude are merely post-hip-hop versions of Andy Warhol’s pop scene during the Factory and Interview magazine days.

Other works bear strained relationships to the exhibition’s theme. Bob Flanagan’s torturous performances can be devastating, but his “Video Coffin” collaboration with partner Sheree Rose, in which a video self-portrait is laid out for burial, feels out of place. Mortality, as the show’s poorly written catalogue maintains, might be narcissism’s greatest enemy; but offering death as a celebratory subject, whether in “Video Coffin” or in Nancy Barton’s seancelike installation conjuring her dead young brother, is simply too vague a link to narcissistic indulgence.

The show also seems almost entirely driven by text. In fact, there’s some sense that art is once again being curatorially approached as illustration--this time, to explain established psychoanalytic principles articulated elsewhere by Melanie Klein and others. Art, held hostage by academic method, feels hemmed in.

Yasumasa Morimura’s “Mother (Judith II)” builds on the precedent of Cindy Sherman, for example, but the elaborate, large-scale photograph seems to have been put into a curatorial box a couple of sizes too small. You’re asked to read the image narrowly for its hybridizing features.

The picture shows the artist masquerading in the guise of a classic European painting of an aristocratic Judith proudly displaying the severed head of her attacker, Holofernes, general in Nebuchadnezzar’s army. Morimura has merged the portrait with the Mannerist amusements of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the 16th-Century court painter who assembled fantasy portrait heads from fruits and vegetables.

In this garish, well-made photograph Holofernes is a sort of Mr. Potato Head, while Judith is a head of cabbage. A pastiche of several Western styles has been used to render a famous biblical subject of vengeance for rape, which was a favorite of Renaissance and Baroque painters and sculptors.

For a Japanese artist, one point of “Mother” would seem quite plain, since Western images and aesthetics have colonized the globe, impinging on traditional national cultures to create hybrid identities. Morimura’s playful indulgence in subjective impurity would seem right in line with the thematic interests of the show.

At least, on the surface it does. Judith’s story appealed to so many Western artists because, finally, the abused maiden’s victory over her heathen assailant was about slaughtering the destructive arrogance of pride. It extols redemption--which is to say, the triumphant restoration of purity. The nostalgic tale just doesn’t sit easily in a show that means to propose the liberating virtues of narcissistic disturbance.

* Otis Art Gallery, 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0555, through April 1. Closed Sundays and Mondays.