Political--and Predictable--Pictures and Phrases

At Watts Towers Arts Center, Pat Ward Williams’ image-and-text pieces deal with the power of street gossip, the truculence of everyday stereotypes and the ubiquity of institutionalized racism. The show is modest in scale, including several smaller black-and-white photographs emblazoned with evocative words and phrases. There is also one large piece, which is more impressive but also emblematic of the problems this particular approach to political art consistently seems to generate.

A wall-scaled image of a group of young black men, blown up so that the surface resembles a black-and-white mosaic, is emblazoned with the phrase, “What you lookn at?” The phrase appears to have been scrawled across the surface with red spray paint.

The image is elsewhere studded with tiny snapshots of African American families, with pictures torn from magazines of gang youths, actor Will Smith and a bloodied Rodney King, and with unabashedly didactic texts, one of which reads, “Is this too aggressive? Am I typical? What’s your source of information? TV?”

The piece is competent, as are the others in the show, which make reference to everything from the Simpson trial and homelessness to Williams’ own experiences with academic tenure. But it is completely and utterly predictable.

The image-text idiom has been expedient for politicized artists at least since the days of Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield in the 1910s and ‘20s, and Williams dutifully mines their experiments with collage (to create her work’s sense of disjunction), not to mention their passion. But once this idiom was institutionalized in the 1980s--by everyone from Barbara Kruger to Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems--and became a codified style, it sacrificed its power of surprise.

Can you have an effective political art whose aesthetic is no longer shocking? That is, in fact, almost cozy? Despite its unwavering sense of commitment, Williams’ work suggests not.

* Watts Towers Arts Center, 1727 E. 107th St., (213) 847-4646, through Sunday.