Art Review : ‘Talking Pictures’ Offers Few Bright Spots in a Mixed Bag

“Talking Pictures” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is, among other things, a traveling exhibition about changing ways of looking at art. The activity was once a solitary pleasure. Unlike most other expressive forms, art at museums didn’t openly explain itself. The viewer was free to analyze and indulge in fantasies that endowed works with personal meaning. If you wanted to know the conventional wisdom, you read the catalog.

By the end of the ‘60s recorded audio tours gave art a soundtrack. Although such tours have an undeniable educational potential, using them turns viewing art from a free-wheeling search for creative insight into a canned experience. Most dedicated art aficionados hate Acoustiguides. “The next thing you know,” cracked one disgruntled L.A. artist, “everybody will be issued a little TV set and you won’t have to actually look at the damn art at all.”

The argument is moot because recorded tours are usually optional. “Talking Pictures,” however, takes the idea a step further. The show is subtitled, “People Speak About the Photographs That Speak to Them.” It consists of about 50 images, each selected by individuals ranging from movie stars as legendary as Ginger Rogers to noted politicians like the Rev. Jesse Jackson as well as athletes, social workers, artists and even a couple of prison inmates. Thus, the exhibition skirts close to the current slavish cultural fascination with anybody who, for any reason, might be regarded as a celebrity. They air their reasons for finding their selections meaningful on Acoustiguides that are issued free to visitors with the clear intention that they be used.

Those who like their art the old-fashioned way are, I think, justified in getting a little ticked at all this. Why should it be assumed that what is going on in the minds of these other people should be more interesting to me than what is going on in my own head? That, to put it mildly, is a little condescending to both art and viewer.

OK, no sense getting huffy until we check this out. In the end, “Talking Pictures” is an extremely mixed bag but not all on the downside.

Bright moments are provided by a few unfamiliar images so intrinsically eloquent as to mock the idea they might profit from explanation. Broadway producer-director William Prince chose a series of documentary identification mug-shots from the Nazi’s Auschwitz concentration camp. Knowing the fate of these Holocaust victims lends their young faces a poignancy that is hard to bear.

Photographer Mary Ellen Mark, like several others, chose one of her own pictures, “Young Turkish Girl.” It depicts a waif of about 12 standing in a pose that startlingly combines childish innocence and worldly seduction. Mark’s commentary is perfectly apt, but to her work’s credit, utterly unnecessary.

Most selections follow the law of human predictability by being obviously sentimental and touching. Ginger Rogers picked Joe Rosenthal’s World War II icon shot, “Marines Raising the American Flag on Mount Surabachi, 1945.” “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz chose a family photo of his grandmother. By contrast, the late curator and man-about-art Henry Geldzahler picked Consuelo Kanaga’s subtly resonant image of the hand of a white woman gently held in that of a black man.

Numerous selections are so immediately apt to what we know about the picker there’s no need to listen to the tape. The crusading defense attorney William Kunstler chose a Depression-era shot by Margaret Bourke-White. It depicts a line of black flood refugees lined up disconsolately in front of a billboard trumpeting the glories of “The American Way.” Trying to heal the disjuncture between the social myth and its reality is exactly what Kunstler was all about. Some selections, when you get in the spirit of the thing, actually do profit from their commentaries. Photojournalist Eddie Adams’ words about his “Dead Vietcong, Saigon, 1968” are revelatory of the tough, thoughtful guy behind the camera.

“Talking Pictures” is less a flawed exhibition than one simply not designed for purists. Interesting and informative at several levels, this is a show for, well, people who like Acoustiguides.

It was organized for New York’s International Center of Photography by curators Marvin Heiferman and Carol Kismaric.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. to June 9, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.