O.C. Art Review : The Figures Are Hooded, but the Message Is Clear

Research into art can take many forms. The most obvious topics are artists’ careers and artistic movements. But sometimes a visual motif sparks a line of inquiry.

For her exhibition design project at Cal State Fullerton, Meg Linton chose the theme of the pointed hood, which, as she writes in a catalogue essay, variously signifies “death, humility, shame, racism, fear and oppression.”

“Vested Power: Icons of Domination and Transcendence,” at the Main Art Gallery (through May 14), is a survey of contemporary artists’ depictions of pointed headgear, which had a long history before its association with the Ku Klux Klan. In societies as diverse as ancient Egypt and 15th-Century Spain, Linton writes, pointed hoods were believed to endow their wearers with “the power to transcend social class, personal responsibility, humanity or sin.”

In medieval Europe, members of Roman Catholic lay brotherhoods wore hoods to maintain pious anonymity while they performed good works (such as burial ceremonies for the poor) and scourged themselves in penitential processions.

During the Spanish Inquisition, the hoods (worn by tormentors) were symbols of power and death, while the pointed cap (worn by those accused of heresy) connoted shame. Such caps also were worn by medieval Jews, who were required by the church to dress in a way that set them apart.

Unfortunately, the history of the symbol is more interesting than some of the art in the exhibition.

Although a similar piece by David Best was one of the inspirations for the exhibition, Best’s “Magdalene”--a life-size sculpture of a horse ridden by a white-draped figure in a pointed hood--offers only ersatz “mystery” in the guise of theatrical bombast.

William Christenberry’s carefully crafted Klan dolls suggest little more than some obsessive form of personal catharsis. Even Andres Serrano’s large Cibachrome images of hooded Klansmen neutralize their subjects in a splashy but vacuous way.

Yet the show contains several works that bring interpretive strengths to the long-lived motif. The linchpins of the show are a small painting and drawing, both from 1971, by Philip Guston, whose painterly fascination with the hood dates to his 1930 painting of a trio of Klansmen (“Conspirators”). When he abandoned his elegant and lyrical Abstract Expressionist style for crudely rendered, cartoon-like imagery in the late 1960s, the motif resurfaced.

In the untitled painting on view, two pink, cigarette-smoking hoods hang out on a brick wall. (Did Guston intend the pun on hood lums?) The subject of the drawing is a pointed hood that looms over urban architecture. Guston’s late work also includes a hooded self-portrait as a chain-smoking artist and a scene of giant liquor bottles and hooded figures, one of whom uses his rope as a back-scratcher (“Bad Habits”).

Such images invoke the banality of evil as well as a question of definition (how can the “evils” of drinking and smoking compare with intolerance?). By depicting himself as an evildoer--just a few steps shy of the self-lacerating public behavior of the penitent--Guston recasts himself as both sinner and would-be saint. In his bluntly quizzical way, the artist, who was Jewish, invokes a central question of post-Holocaust ethics: Who is responsible for evil?

Other artists place pointed hoods on the heads of anonymous instruments of power, a religious icon or, most chillingly, on no one’s head.

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Manuel Ocampo’s paintings are meditations on the 333-year-long Spanish Catholic domination of the Philippines. His style evokes both the European derivations and the folkloric aspects of Spanish colonial art. In his work, the pointed hood evokes the cruelly anonymous power of evil, shrouded in the image of Holy mysteries.

In the two framing panels of a triptych, “Anti-Catholic Painting,” Ocampo puts a rifle into the hand of a hooded horseman whose mount rears skyward in the fashion of Baroque art, and situates his whip-brandishing double at the edge of a precipice under a black sky.

The abraded center panel offers an array of religious symbols that seem to have withered into disuse: tablets bearing the Ten Commandments; an empty beaker recalling the Eucharist; and an angel trio whose purity has been defiled with pointed hoods.

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In Joel-Peter Witkin’s anachronistic fantasy, “Jesus and His Mother Mary Photographed by an Anonymous Galilean Photographer,” the pointed hood--worn by Mary--becomes a symbol of reverential mystery and power.

She poses in the nude with her naked son, who wears a mask painted with an image of the mature Jesus. The combination of masks and nudity creates a striking duality: This is at once an unusually intimate family portrait and an aloof, impersonal icon.

Dominique Blain’s “Sanctum” may appear to be a one-liner (a white hood tucked into a box is revealed when a closet door is opened), but its power lies in its simplicity. Reduced to the level of a forgotten item of clothing that pops up to haunt you in an odd moment, the hood embodies the stray racist remark that seems to come from nowhere.

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The show has been installed with care (although the small-type labels are almost unreadable under the lights) on red and purple-painted walls with dramatic, architectural cutouts.

But in opting for an innovative, CD-ROM catalogue format--which allows the reader to click from text to image and back again in a mouse’s whisker--Linton tweaks the information junkie’s bottomless demands.

At least one user would have liked more detailed discussions of the artists’ approaches, in the context of their other work, as well as comparative imagery by artists working in different times and places. Perhaps someone else will pick up the thread.

* “Vested Power: Icons of Domination and Transcendence,” through May 14 at the Main Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Noon to 4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday; 3 to 7 p.m. Wednesday; 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday. $3. (714) 773-3263.