Power Failure : Display of Cuban American Photos, Videos Has an Interesting Premise but a Weak Delivery

An exhibition with an intriguing premise, “Once Removed: The Photograph in Contemporary Cuban-American Art,” proves strangely elusive.

Only a few of the 12 artists showing at Cal State Fullerton’s West Gallery seem to have found ways of translating their feelings of deracination into persuasive visual terms, and even their work tends to be rather unassertive.

The premise of graduate student co-curators Tom Callas and Linda Centell is that photography, which easily lends itself to both documentary reality and poetic fantasy, is particularly well-suited to the needs of Cuban artists estranged from their homeland. A photograph preserves memories and pretends to some degree of immediacy, but it is always one step removed from its subject.

Yet the most powerful artist in the exhibition was not a photographer. Sculptor and performance artist Ana Mendieta is the subject of a video (screened at noon and 2 p.m. daily) by Nereida Garcia-Ferraz. Evocative and informative, “Ana Mendieta: Fuego de Tierra” is nonetheless a straightforward documentary. Its strength comes entirely from its subject.

Mendieta burned, carved and painted the outlines of female bodies into sand, earth, rock and tree trunks. In her hands, a fierce passion for land carried with it traces of ancient rites and contemporary ideas of female empowerment. By devising a set of ultra-simplified forms she used over and over, Mendieta managed to bridge the often chilly world of contemporary art and the emotionality of primal belief.

Referring only obliquely to Mendieta’s shocking and never satisfactorily explained death in 1984--she fell or was pushed from a 34th-story window--the video concentrates on the values that shaped her art. Old photos, videos and interviews with family members and art world people sketch a vivid picture of her personality.

During Mendieta’s happy Cuban childhood, a cousin recalls, the children would bury each other in the sand while Ana drew shapes on top of the bodies.

“Cuba for me is a personal relationship I have,” the young Mendieta says in a videotape. She had, as someone else remarks, “a very special idea about the Earth as the concrete conception of homeland.”

By then, she had weathered many difficult years. Her parents, believing the revolution would soon blow over but anxious to shield their children from communism, sent 12-year-old Ana and her sister to the United States, where she was shunted from orphanages to foster homes in cold and utterly foreign Iowa.

Her father was a political prisoner by the time she entered the University of Iowa, where art became the focus of her life. Blood was a prominent feature of her student performance pieces, seen in vintage videos. In “Blood Writing,” a recording of Cuban drumming played as she dipped her hands and forearms in blood and rubbed them on a wall, in a single downward motion that left the abstract image of a human torso.

In 1981, by then an established artist in New York, she was finally able to visit Cuba under the auspices of El Dialogo, a cultural exchange group. The video illustrates this visit with images of listless streets lined with large white houses and motionless men with seemingly no place to go.

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A similar, vaguely eerie emptiness infuses the work of another artist in the Cal State Fullerton exhibition. In the black-and-white photographs of photojournalist Mario Algaze, images of street life are crossed by long shadows and softly punctuated by anonymous figures and small signs of decay.

Eduardo Munoz Ordoqui invokes a sense of displacement and unreality in his “Exile” series by juxtaposing black-and-white TV images with peculiarly startling colored items in a room. A woman on the TV screen who holds her hand over a young boy’s mouth is juxtaposed with a jacket sleeve covered in yellowing plastic. The conjunction of these images conveys an unsettling mood of meaningless caution and protectiveness.

Two disparate worlds collide in Silvia Lizama’s color photograph, “I-95 Construction II, Fort Lauderdale,” a view of a freeway project that evokes ancient ruins.

By focusing on the idle hands of people riding mass transit in a series of sober silver gelatin prints, Luis Mallo reaches for a poetic vision of individuality within a normative social setting that doesn’t quite avoid photographic cliche.

While other works are unsatisfying for one reason or another--vagueness or predictability or too much stress on process rather than visual presence--the biggest disappointments in the show are the pieces by Andres Serrano and Tony Labat.

Serrano, who vaulted to fame in the late ‘80s with his much-misunderstood photograph, “Piss Christ,” is represented by a portrait of a young Hasidic Jew standing in a Budapest interior painted with an old-fashioned bucolic scene that includes a longhaired, bare-breasted woman. Incongruous, yes, but what exactly is the point?

Labat, a notable conceptual artist in the Bay Area, taxes the patience of his viewers with the confusing, fragmentary imagery in some of his 1980s videos shown on a continuous, 53-minute tape in the gallery. In contrast, “Babalu” and “Room Service” are easy to follow, but they are little more than quick, unfunny sketches about Cuban stereotypes and a foreigner’s attempts at adjusting to American culture.

* “Once Removed: The Photograph in Contemporary Cuban-American Art,” through March 13, Cal State Fullerton West Gallery. 800 N. State College Blvd. Free. Hours: Noon-4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday; 3-7 p.m. Wednesday; 2-5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Feb. 17. (714) 773-3262.