O.C. Art Reviews : A Not-So-Golden State of ‘California’

The macho-industrial and downtrodden human sides of California of the 1930s and ‘40s both get an airing in “Industrial California: Early Twentieth-Century Photographs From the Stephen White Collection (II).”

At the Laguna Art Museum through Oct. 8, the small but potent show offers a panorama of vintage images: spectacular bridge building, gleaming aircraft parts, smoky freight yards, powerful dockworkers, totemic oil derricks, stooping farm workers, slouching squatters.

While several of the prints are by famous photographers, some are by artists known mostly to connoisseurs of the period. Still others were taken by commercial photographers or other uncredited shutter hounds who unintentionally froze a slice of social history.

White is a noted collector and former Los Angeles photography dealer who specializes in images documenting the impact of industry on society. (The Roman numeral in the show’s title demarcates these prints from the 15,000-piece collection of 19th- and early-20th-Century photography that he sold in 1990 to the Photographic Center of the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum in Japan.)

In her useful accompanying essay, Susan Anderson, the museum’s curator of exhibitions, places the diverse images in this sampler within the context of a darkly dystopian view of California.

Some of the photographs are heroic images of progress, generally commissioned by industrialists (or the magazines they read). Others were made by artists--working on their own or under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration--who personally identified with the workers, the unemployed and (sometimes) the fate of the landscape.

Horace Bristol was a young Life magazine photographer in 1938 when he visited California’s migrant labor camps with novelist John Steinbeck. He proposed a collaborative project, but his editors passed, citing--as Bristol once wryly told an interviewer--the remoteness of the locale and lack of importance of the theme.

Fortune magazine was interested, but Steinbeck refused to work for what he called a tool of capitalism. Instead, he used the material in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Grapes of Wrath.” Bristol’s images, reportedly used by 20th Century Fox to cast the John Ford movie, are extraordinary in their telling detail and cinematic sweep.

In “Living in Box Cars,” a motley group of people lounge disconsolately by the side of a body of water. The wintry afternoon sun gives everyone a drooping shadow. “Pea Pickers in the Field” is an aerial shot of laborers bringing baskets of peas to be weighed. Looking over the foreman’s shoulder, we see both the dial on the scale and the sheet on which each picker’s yield is toted up: a hard-won pound of flesh.

A sensitively detailed, untitled view of a lone Red River Logging Co. worker in Eureka, Calif., supervising a flotilla of logs offers an entirely different picture of outdoor labor. Documentary photographer Berenice Abbott, apparently working on a commercial contract, seems to be celebrating the union of abundant natural resources and American individualism. It’s hard to imagine viewers in 1943 reading the four tall chimneys belching dark smoke in the background as anything but proud components of a landscape serving industrial needs.

Conversely, a sci-fi spookiness colors Will Connell’s shadowy view of airplane wings lined up at Douglas Aircraft Co. in the mid-1930s. No doubt intended as a paean to the bright new look of American technology, the image of gleaming metal hulks now seems to evoke the dark side of progress.

Ansel Adams was more outspoken in “Cemetery Statue and Oil Derricks, Long Beach, California, 1939,” an early ecological dirge in which the pale marble statue of a grieving young woman becomes a commentary on the dark forest of machinery in the distance.

For the most part, the fabled aspects of Southern California--lush nature and movie lore--emerge in fits and starts in this show, usually undercut or overshadowed by industrial or workaday images.

In Roi Partridge’s “Pepper Tree Pattern, Santa Barbara,” from about 1941, the fern-like branches of the trees create an intricate pattern reminiscent of a Japanese print, screening a view of oil derricks. Even the blimp advertisement for Greta Garbo in the 1939 movie “Ninotchka”--snapped by an unknown photographer--flies over an utterly nondescript Los Angeles street.

An appealing contemporary quirkiness or metaphorical candor often adheres to such no-nonsense commercial images by hacks or unknowns: A shot of row upon row of virtually identical automobiles filling up every inch of turf between two gentle hills at the KHJ Caravan and Barbecue in 1924--credited to the Aerograph Co.--unintentionally sums up the automobile’s invasion of paradise.

* “Industrial California: Early Twentieth-Century Photographs From the Stephen White Collection (II),” through Oct. 8 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Sunday. Adults $5, students and senior citizens $4, children under 12 free. (714) 494-6531. *

THE MISFITS: A big-eyed babe with platinum hair and a giraffe’s body; a pale, sexless nude in a fake-fur ruff; a long-lashed gal with a lemon torso and wings--these are a few of the helpless mutants of Deborah Brown’s “Vanity Fair,” a slyly bewitching show at the Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite through July 16.

Using bits and pieces of dolls, plastic animals and vegetables, beads and trimmings, Brown fashions creatures who seem caught between pitiful attempts at glamour and cringing self-awareness.

The most fully realized piece is a kinetic “Carousel,” which substitutes mutant dolls and clowns for animals. Impaled on their poles as the piece turns--as if literally dying over and over of sheer mortification--these tortured creatures are always on public view.

On the roof of the carousel, tiers of glitter-dazzled women’s faces and sleekly coiffed women’s heads alternating with mirrors present the remote and rigidly standardized realm of beauty. At the very top are the three doll faces of Eve who cry, smile or sleep: a brutally abbreviated range of female behavior.

The real beauty part is that Brown does not force any viewpoint, feminist or otherwise. The work is compelling purely on a visual level, and it seems to encourage all manner of conflicting thoughts about the bravado, self-delusion and terror involved in presenting oneself in public.

* “Deborah Brown: Vanity Fair,” through July 16 at the Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite, near the Carousel Court entrance, 3333 Bristol St., Costa Mesa. Hours: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Sunday. Free. (714) 662-3366.