Not-So-Fresh Take on the Old Masters

An exhibition of contemporary art based on famous paintings of the past? Even at a college gallery, the idea smacks of didactic overkill.

At Rancho Santiago Art Gallery, where “Re: Masters / New Images from Old Sources” remains through Wednesday, the art also proves overwhelmingly disappointing. The show contains mostly recent works (a few date back to the ‘70s) by 28 artists, most of whom treat famous works with a curious mixture of reverence and indifference.

It’s not that there is something bad about pointedly acknowledging the art of the past in contemporary work. But artists inclined to take what has now become a very well-trod path require a clear understanding of the works they are plundering, an airtight rationale and a fresh, distinctive approach.

Judging by his catalog essay, guest curator Jim Reed makes the mistake of viewing contemporary interpretations of famous works as the direct descendants of such historical borrowings as Manet’s use of elements from compositions by Raphael and Giorgione for “Luncheon on the Grass.”

But even aside from the issue of quality (the show is awash in mediocre pieces), the Old Masters were operating in a very different realm from today’s artists.

We live in an age of myriad approaches to making art (painting no longer occupies the prime niche it had for centuries). We must contend with an overload of inescapable still and moving images coming at us at virtually every moment of our waking lives. We also have acknowledged the splintering of centralized authority (religious, artistic) into myriad personal interpretations.

What this all means is that the authority of any specific image is easily challenged. Copying elements of a famous work of art has become something other than a straightforward homage; more often than not, it signifies the fallibility of role models and a sense of cultural unease.

Perhaps the most famous work in this vein is Marcel Duchamp’s “LHOOQ” of 1919. By painting a mustache on a copy of the “Mona Lisa,” he gave a cozy cultural icon of the middle class a taunting sexual ambiguity.

By now, though, this once-brilliant strategy has been pretty well exhausted, as have several others, including blatant copying of famous paintings as originals (a commentary on the ubiquity of representation and commodity culture).

Yet many artists in this show use famous works of art simply as compositions to be blandly and unrevealingly “updated” with contemporary figures and situations. Wes Christensen solemnly redoes Munch’s “The Scream” (which already has a pop-culture niche as the subject of a life-size plastic doll) as the image of a modern urban freak-out.

Similarly, Carolyn Cardenas pointlessly recasts a Venice, Calif., street dude as the nobleman of Titian’s “Portrait of a Venetian,” and Sandow Birk offers a rigidly programmatic “The Surrender of O.J. Simpson,” in which each detail of an 18th century American-history painting gets its latter-day equivalent.

But rather than proving the “eternal” values of the masters or offering a fruitful way of looking at contemporary life, these paintings offer only unsatisfactory attempts to put old wine in new bottles. A big part of the problem is the almost complete lack of wit, irony and open-ended meaning.

Other artists represented in the show essay myriad other approaches: slick opportunism (Mel Ramos’ mid-’70s pinup, “Manet’s ‘Olympia’ ’); vacuous parody (Michael Madzo’s cut-and-paste “Mona Lisa”); art historical piety (Harrison Storms’ frankly fake fresco, “The Wall”); academic homage (John Nava’s and John Swihart’s work); down-home cuteness (James Strombotne’s “Arnolfini Wedding With Cats”).

Of the other work on view, there is something to be said for the gesture of 1970s feminist reclamation embodied in Judy Chicago’s sculpture “Mother Goddess I” (a version of a tiny prehistoric fertility figure found in Willendorf, Austria).

The smartest piece in the show is Richard Pettibone’s long-windedly titled set of miniature paintings from 1978, “Thumb Print; Camera and Brush; Ingres, ‘The Princess de Broglie,’ 1853, detail; Scribbling, Vermeer, ‘Woman Standing at a Virginal,’ 1670s, detail; and Scribbling.”

Pettibone isolates the primary marker of a person’s individuality, the most basic form of written expression and two postcard-sized, painstakingly repainted fragments of famous paintings of women that are noteworthy for vastly different reasons. In so doing, he reminds us we tend to accept reproductions as equivalents of the real thing while offering his own handmade copies as a gently teasing alternate option.

* “Re: Masters / New Images from Old Sources,” through Wednesday at the Rancho Santiago College Art Gallery, Building C, 1530 W. 17th St., Santa Ana. Hours: 6:30-8:30 p.m. today and Wednesday. Free. (714) 564-5615.