Exposing ‘Pervert’ : UCI Show Reveals Fresh Views of Homosexuality That Are No Threat to the Open-Minded

If you title an art exhibition “Pervert,” are you asking for trouble? Well, some kinds of trouble come with the territory. Artists who celebrate their sexual differences in a society amply supplied with double--or triple--standards for sexual behavior are now quietly repossessing and remaking epithets historically brandished by the heterosexual majority.

But at UC Irvine--where “Pervert” is at the Fine Arts Gallery through Saturday--the overwhelming reaction has been “support and curiosity,” according to gallery curator Pamela Bailey. About 100 people a day are visiting the gallery--more than four times the usual number--and the “regulars” at a recent panel discussion by the artists were far outnumbered by new faces.

Protest has been minimal. The gallery reported receiving one angry phone message from an Irvine resident, and a photograph from the show published in a campus employees’ newspaper elicited a few negative letters.

Open-minded viewers will find that virtually all 17 of the artists in “Pervert,” curated by UCI studio art chairwoman Catherine Lord, deal with homosexuality in frank, thoughtful and sometimes surprising ways. As Lord writes in her wry introduction to the show, for the gay and lesbian artist, “nothing is sacred--neither the windows of a cathedral . . . nor the heroes and heroines of . . . broadcast television . . . neither the family photo album nor the fallen leaders of the international left; neither the most ladylike and feminine of painting genres nor the most weighty of monuments to American virility and patriotism . . . “

The tall, rose-hued cathedral windows in the show (Paul Pfeiffer’s laser print piece “Cathedral”) are made from ingenuous permutations of skin and kissing lips belonging to female or male couples. In a real cathedral, the rose window (so called because of its shape) is symbolic of the Virgin Mary’s charity; the rose was originally the flower of Venus, goddess of love. By invoking both meanings, Pfeiffer’s blushing windows call into question the Christian notion of shame attached to same-sex love.

Robert Blanchon slyly takes on a different sort of icon: 19th-Century patriotic sculpture in parks and on government building facades in Boston. By isolating sexual body parts on statues of statesmen and heroes--Alexander Hamilton’s breeches-covered crotch, an unidentified figure’s muscular buttocks on the Federal Reserve Building frieze--Blanchon’s photographs mock the traditional distinction between lives dedicated to the rough-and-tumble of public service and the private physical urges that may underlie such “he-man” behavior.

In a related approach, Glenn Ligon fills three sets of photo album pages with typical family images--young men hanging out, middle-aged people dressed in their Sunday best, a baby in various outfits--alongside X-rated snapshots of young men (one is labeled “the baby’s father”).

By juxtaposing examples of the societal norms publicly celebrated by a family album with the private tastes and habits generally celebrated only by pornography, Ligon seems to be asking what it means to be fragmented into “private” and “super-private” selves, when sexual behavior and fantasy are in fact so much a part of everyday life. The fact that everyone in the albums is black adds another layer of provocation, given a tendency of white culture to view black males as super-sexed.

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Nicole Eisenman’s “bad girl” art is well known; it is included in this year’s Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Her portrayals of the dark, sexually fraught side of children’s play and adult behavior are informed by the quick, incisive pen of a comic-strip artist and the wide-ranging visual repertoire of someone steeped in high and low culture, from Old Master painting to “The Flintstones.”

An entire wall of this show is given over to Eisenman’s small images about curiosity, terror, confusion and stereotyping related to sexual identity and bodily functions. Most of these images resist full description in a family newspaper.

Eisenman’s atypically restrained “Breughel Halloween” (a reference to the 16th-Century Flemish painter of peasant life) shows a trick-or-treater wearing a headdress made of frozen waffles with a legless child in a cart and an unclassifiable upside-down creature.

Other artists make portraits of themselves or other gay or lesbian couples, which inevitably exude a mixture of vulnerability and bravado. The role-playing seems more overt than in most heterosexual portraits, and the play between pose and reality tantalizes without being resolved.

Body language in these portraits seems either deliberately neutralized or exaggerated. In Laura Aguilar’s triple portraits of “Luis,” the man appears in a shirt and pants (thumbs in pockets), nude (hands on hips) and in a strapless dress (fingers demurely interlaced).

Some bodies wear conventional attire; others sport leather and piercings. But none of the images is as powerful as Catherine Opie’s self-portrait. Fully masked in leather, with her ample torso bared to reveal her mortified body--she wears a nipple ring and an excruciatingly precise series of piercings running up both arms--she seems powerful, mysterious and almost inhuman.

Doug Ischar’s allusive installation “Wake” is disturbing in a different way. In a darkened alcove, very brief moving images play on a variety of surfaces as large as a movie screen and as small as a belt buckle.

Peering at these fleeting images (which include snippets of furtive sexual behavior, the face of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and a swimming scene at the end of a vintage boys’ film), viewers are sucked into an edgy intimacy with undercover behavior and an ever-present threat of death. The Cuban references recall the harsh treatment of gays under Castro’s rule.

The biggest surprise in the exhibition is the set of watercolors by Patricia Cronin. She uses “the most ladylike and feminine of painting genres” to portray voluptuous scenes of women pleasuring each other.

Faces elude these delicate lovers’ close-ups, but the bump on a shoulder or the angle of a jaw are seen as beloved geographical features on a well-known map; seen from above, breasts flatten into star shapes. This is work that tenderly invokes the most sensual side of sexual intimacy.

* “Pervert” is at the Fine Arts Gallery, off Bridge Road, UC Irvine. Gallery hours: noon to 5 p.m. today through Saturday. Ends Saturday. Free. (714) 824-6610.