O.C. ART : Teasing Viewers With the Typical

Just before the opening of his 1992 retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, artist Lewis Baltz--who grew up in Newport Beach but now lives mostly in Europe--hinted that a famous local murder trial had given him new material.

That material is the basis of Baltz’s “The Deaths in Newport,” first shown last year in France and now on view through May 20 at Gallery RAM, USA in Santa Monica. The photo-and-text piece, made expressly for CD-ROM, invokes a subtle constellation of ideas beneath its straightforward veneer.

The text--which Baltz narrates in a voice as seductive as Joseph Cotten’s in “Citizen Kane”--weaves shards of personal reminiscence into a description of the 1947 trial. While listening and/or reading, the viewer can access a selection of period news photos.

The deaths in question were those of financier Walter E. Overell and his wife, Beulah, who were bludgeoned to death on their 47-foot yacht before it was dynamited in Newport Harbor. The suspects were the couple’s 17-year-old daughter, Beulah Louise, and her 21-year-old fiance, George (Bud) Gollum, who had both left the boat half an hour before the blast. Both were acquitted after a sensational 19-week trial, at that time the longest criminal trial in U.S. history.

Baltz’s father was the local mortician. He had embalmed the Overells’ bodies and--his moment of glory--was the first prosecution witness to testify. Like the O.J. Simpson trial today, the Overell trial was splashed across the front pages of this and other newspapers. It was also covered in Life magazine and detailed in the numerous detective magazines popular at the time.

In “The Deaths in Newport,” the trial becomes the basis of a meditation on several themes, among them: the seductive lies involved in telling any story, true or not; the peculiar evasiveness of photographs; and the pervasive mix of crime, sensationalism and becalmed aspirations in the would-be paradise of Southern California.

Nowhere in the piece does Baltz specifically discuss these topics. Rather, in common with many other sophisticated contemporary artists, he allows the viewer to tease out the meanings of his works. But his work is well worth the effort; Baltz is the consummate chronicler of a deceptively bland world where nothing is as it seems.

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Baltz first portrayed his home turf in “The Tract Houses” and “The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine California,” starkly neutral documents of expansionist Orange County of the early 1970s. “You experience nature in my photographs as an industrial product,” he once told an interviewer.

Since then, he has photographed blasted desert sites in Nevada, landfills in Park City, Utah, and bleakly sterile “clean rooms” in high-tech manufacturing businesses around the world.

A generic suburban image by Baltz from 1992, “11777 Foothill Boulevard, Los Angeles,” showed the site where the Rodney G. King beating had taken place earlier that year; the banality of the scene was precisely the point.

“The typical, the familiar, the so-called obvious--those are things that interest me because there’s much to them that does not meet the eye,” Baltz has said.

Often misunderstood as an environmental crusader, he actually is attempting a more complex enterprise: to reveal unresolved contradictions in contemporary life, as well as in photography itself. By wrenching moments out of the flux of life for close-up examination, photographs make the familiar look strange--a paradox that is key to Baltz’s approach.

In the first few moments of “The Deaths in Newport,” he alludes to his early work with a shadowy black-and-white photograph of a nondescript Newport Beach house, possibly the one in which he grew up. Illuminated “windows” on the screen highlight the telephone wires outside.

Flawed communication--created by personal bias, flagrant careerism, the media circus and the essential disjunction between private behavior and public appearance--figures prominently in this account of the trial. (Ironically, the official transcripts were lost, leaving only media accounts to constitute the historical record.)

Most of the vintage photographs--formal portraits and old-fashioned, didactic views of men in square-cut suits pointing at exhibits from the trial--look unnatural and convey little or no useful information. Part of the mythology surrounding any major trial, these unrevealing images also embody the buttoned-up decorum of the day, so frightfully transgressed by the murder.

At the heart of the piece is a news photo of a curmudgeonly bailiff barring a beach-going tourist from attending the trial in her bathing suit--an image the text compares to artists’ renderings of the Expulsion from Eden.

Baltz couches the trial within the context of his own life. While visiting Orange County in 1988--the year he and his wife moved from Milan to Los Angeles--he discovered that the Newport Harbor Art Museum was planning to build a new home, designed by world-famous Milanese architect Renzo Piano, just eight blocks from his old house.

“I remembered Corona del Mar as bleak and empty as a Hopper painting, but far more malign,” he said. But the area had become “simply a more affluent version of what it had always been, a small, snobbish California beach town.”

He offered to document the new site for the museum, hinging his work on “something worth memorializing . . . a defining narrative.”

The murder trial offered all the right ingredients: horrific crime, the Overell family’s great wealth and a story of youthful love behind bars. (Love letters exchanged by the couple in prison were smuggled out and leaked to the Los Angeles Examiner, allegedly in repayment of a political debt owed to publisher William Randolph Hearst.)

But Newport Harbor rejected Baltz’s proposal, “for the surprising reason that, after 43 years, it would still be a sensitive issue,” he said, and the museum’s building project ultimately was abandoned, due to the recession.

In fact, even the outcome of the trial reflected a state of doubt, loss and lack of closure. Former Newport Beach police Capt. Harry Lace, who handled the investigation, told Baltz that he believed the prosecution bungled the case--particularly the handling of physical evidence--and that the couple “deserved to go free.” Baltz also cited the defense’s allegation that political machinations influenced prosecution of the case.

The key players in this account don’t fare well, either. Baltz’s father, a heavy drinker, died in 1955 at 46. Beulah Louise--who had become estranged from her fiance in prison--died of acute alcoholism at 36 in 1965. She was married twice, to a former policeman (shades of Patty Hearst) and to an airline radio operator. Gollum, after two subsequent brushes with the law, eventually dropped out of sight.

The dark side of the trial and its aftermath established the “defining narrative” Baltz had sought. He describes the current status of Orange County as “the dystopic nightmare that its heredity and environment had destined it to be,” with “almost all of its old lower-middle-class vices and . . . the added infirmities of wealth.”

Baltz’s approach to the story intriguingly highlights the apparent contradiction between the linear aspect of narrative and the CD-ROM, which lets the user freely reorganize information. After all, every story, even a “news” story, involves ascribing logical order to certain events whose meaning and causality may be interpreted in different ways by each participant or onlooker.

At the end of the piece, Baltz invokes another mythical realm--that of the Argentine fabulist Jorge Luis Borges--by proposing that the story of the trial is still occurring in an indefinable present--which, of course, in one sense, it is. Just turn on your TV or open your paper.

* Through May 20 at Gallery RAM, USA, 2525 Michigan Ave. (Bergamot Station, Space A-2), Santa Monica. 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. (310) 264-4888.