Sekula’s ‘Story’ Mourns an Endangered Species

By now followers of contemporary art are accustomed to exhibitions that seem to want to be something else. There are installations that lean longingly to theater, serial works that attempt autobiography and mixed-media events with cinematic souls.

Allan Sekula’s “Fish Story” at the Santa Monica Museum of Art joins this long trend of pushing the artistic envelope. It shows that even a heroic effort that gets all the elements right can still run into problems.

Sekula is an accomplished L.A.-based photographic artist. “Fish Story” is a panoramic examination of the global maritime industry. The show consists of more than 100 large-scale color photographs taken during a five-year Odyssey that took the artist from San Pedro harbor to port cities as far-flung as Hong Kong, Rotterdam and Gdansk.

The pictures are a handsome combination of romance and realism, intimacy and detachment. They depict everything from Korean dock worker’s kids to sailor’s brothels being demolished to make way for seaside luxury condos. A supertanker named the Exxon Mediterranean turns out to be the newly renamed Exxon Valdez, source of a disastrous 1989 oil spill.

At the museum, these images are accompanied not only by a couple of slide shows but also by long wall texts drawn from Sekula’s catalog essay. They demonstrate literary gifts that sprawl from economic, philosophical and political theory to reportage and a knack for rhetoric that takes in everybody from Herman Melville to Joseph Conrad and Jules Verne.

One gleans that Sekula is out to dramatize a dreadful mess on the high seas. Commerce there is being drastically altered, like everything else, by changes in the world economy.

Maritime workers from developed counties, for example, are aced out by cheaper labor. What seems to bother Sekula most is that a rich, revealing, exciting worldwide folk culture has become an endangered species. He mourns the passing of a world where you could always tell, say, a Dutch ship because it was squeaky-clean from a Greek one because it was gritty. These days you can’t even tell from the flag. Ship flags are frequently changed for economic and political reasons.

Of all the various voices Sekula has at his command, it’s the romantic that stands out and that’s lovable. “Fish Story” offers a richly allusive revelation of the artist’s temperament. It’s a real aesthetic experience but at a level of clarity and Gestalt, it doesn’t quite work.

One is less inclined to criticize that circumstance as a shortcoming than to empathize with it as a problem with a potential solution. Clearly the whole thing would be more manageable as an independent documentary film. But that would be to say that gallery exhibitions of this kind are impossible and should be discarded.

There may be a way to bring off such presentations by simply giving greater thought, for instance, to the distribution of text in relation to image. One would hate to think that talent like Sekula’s is just too big for the art world.

The exhibition was organized by curator Chris Dercon for Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Before appearing in Southern California, the show toured venues that included Stockholm, Glasgow and Calais.

* Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., Santa Monica; through Aug. 25, closed Monday and Tuesday, (310) 399-0433.

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The current exhibition at the Japanese American Community Cultural Center’s Doizaki Gallery is “A Tribute to Taro Yashima.” Much of his work seems heavily influenced by Western art. It bears close resemblance to the realistic style taught at New York’s Art Student’s League in the late ‘30s, when the artist was a student there. One thinks of gentle Social Realists like the Soyer brothers.

That means, among other things, that Yashima was educated in the Western art tradition at time when a hard line had not yet been drawn between the pursuit of fine art and the practice of commercial illustration. Edward Hopper, for example, spent half a lifetime as an illustrator before gaining renown as a free-standing painter.

Being schooled in such an ambience must have made it easier for Yashima to later pursue an award-winning career as a writer and illustrator of children’s books. Images from books like his “Crow Boy” are among the most delightful on view. Charming as childhood itself, suave as the work of a man accomplished in two artistic traditions, they also reflect an artist who was, in significant ways, an outsider to both of them.

Born Jun Iwamatsu in Japan in 1908, he died 85 years later in Gardena. He adopted the pen name Yashima for his books. By the time he was 25, he was married and a member of the Japan Proletariat Artists Assn. in Tokyo. Membership in such a group in militaristic, right-wing Japan was considered so radical that both he and his pregnant wife were arrested and tortured. In 1939 they moved to New York.

Much of the character of Yashima’s art grew from his liberal stance, according to the cultural center’s gallery director, Robert Hori, who organized the exhibition.

During the war, Yashima worked for U.S. military intelligence doing propaganda aimed at Japanese soldiers. After the war, some of his widely distributed books mourned previous forced labor in Japanese war factories and supported the dawning democratic movement in occupied Japan. He was active in protest against the Vietnam War.

Hori speculates that Yashima’s early punishment for his spontaneous assertion of individuality in conformist Japan caused the artist to feel like an outcast. Maybe that fueled the vague wistfulness of his art.

All of this is not immediately apparent from a simple scan of the work. It emerges slowly, like the realization of quiet heroism.

* Japanese American Community Cultural Center, 244 S. San Pedro St., Los Angeles; through July 25, closed Mondays, (213) 628-2725.