ART REVIEW : ‘Spectacle’ Can’t Imitate Life at Simpson Trial

“The Courthouse Spectacle: Art, Politics and Commerce at the Simpson Trial” is a small exhibition with big ambitions. Unfortunately, its paintings, collages, photos and posters are not nearly as interesting as the real thing, which is a much more compelling work of art.

The trial is a collaborative, interactive performance with far-reaching moral implications. It’s also a dramatic, theatrical production loaded with narrative ambiguity and open to multiple interpretations. Every day, critical reviews and divergent analyses are published in newspapers and broadcast on radio and television. The social repercussions of the legal proceedings are only beginning to be felt.

In contrast, the images and texts in the exhibition at Cal State Northridge feel pre-processed and stale. Viewers are not presented with opportunities to respond to events as they unfold, but are offered interpretations that have been filtered through the visions of those who regularly gather on the steps of Los Angeles County’s Criminal Courts Building.

For “The Courthouse Spectacle,” Northridge art history Professor Kenon Breazeale has brought together some of the art that has sprung up on the street. Few of these often myopic works merit attention as anything more than sociological curiosities.

John Kilduff’s acrylic paintings of television dishes, rendered in the generic style of 19th-Century landscapes, are so out of sync with their surroundings that they’re almost funny. Ozell Roberson’s ham-fisted collages pairing O.J. and Nicole Simpson with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Pope attempt to make connections that cannot be sustained--rationally, emotionally or poetically.

There’s something pathetic about most of the work here, especially Rodney Vanworth’s crude, cartoonish canvases, which he sets outside the courthouse and invites passersby to write comments on. At the gallery, marking pens dangle from each piece so viewers can participate--as the wall labels proclaim--”in the dialogue.”

These pieces, like the show as a whole, are based on a simple-minded, outdated idea of what constitutes dialogue. At the end of the 20th Century, you don’t have to be physically present to be in touch or informed: Los Angeles isn’t ancient Greece and the trial isn’t some small county meeting.

The show’s commercial and activist pieces are more effective than its fine art component. T-shirts and caps by Chicago Wan provide an arts-and-crafts alternative to the giant companies that usually produce souvenirs for special events.

Posters designed by Liz Harvey for the Women’s Action Coalition and information about domestic violence by the Coalition Against Violence Against Women use the trial as a platform for their own urgent political messages. These works belong in the street; they lose their power in an art gallery.

Intended to deliver in-the-street authenticity, “The Courthouse Spectacle” actually serves up secondhand experience. Ironically, it presents art-about-art that is unaware of its mediated status, and much less captivating than the art of the trial.

* California State University, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge, (818) 885-2156, through April 7. Closed Saturdays and Sundays.