Identity Key to ‘Public Image/Private Focus’

The current exhibition at Cal State L.A.’s Fine Arts Gallery poses the old question of whether artists can serve two masters. Titled “Public Image/Private Focus,” it was organized by CSULA photography professor Jack Butler. He purposefully included six local camera workers who are also deeply immersed in themes of ethnic, racial or gender identity. They consciously take time from their own work to do community service, teaching, volunteering and so forth.

When their genre of subject matter first appeared, questions were raised about its artistic appropriateness. Now it’s clear that such preoccupations are as much an artist’s business as any other. So clear, in fact, that a great many creative workers are in the game. That circumstance refocuses the issue on the old question of how well are they doing their thing.

A very high standard, for example, was set recently by an exhibition at Pomona College’s Montgomery Gallery through March 26. “Becoming Visible/Forjando Presencia: Faces of Africa in Latin America, Photographs by Tony Gleaton” presents that artist’s view of people of African ancestry living south of the border. That show offers a welcome quality of surprise to Americans who don’t often think about the issue. The pictures avoid the edge of polemic. They focus on individual humanity and are formally gorgeous.

At CSULA, the artist who comes closest to Gleaton’s mark is Irene Fertik. Her series, called “Ethiopian Jews in Israel,” coincidentally echoes Gleaton’s but has a decidedly different twist. An accompanying brochure explains how dark-skinned Jews living in Ethiopia were scorned with the derogatory term “Falasha.” In 1973, Israel’s chief rabbi confirmed their legitimacy in the Judaic panoply. Today, evidently, they have become an integrated part of Israeli culture.

Fertik’s photographs get well beyond the competence implied by her status as a photojournalist. She shows smiling teenage girls in military uniform doing their gig in the army, dark-skinned boys standing before a hut-style synagogue constructed in the Ethiopian manner, a couple getting married in an Orthodox ceremony.

Deftly, Fertik reminds us that all of us feel at home somewhere, but somewhere else we are all outcasts, and everybody shares in the foolishness of being unable to resist jumping to conclusion about others based on the way they look.

Carol Nye’s “Chinese American Women of Los Angeles” depicts about a dozen senior-citizen subjects who distinguished themselves in ways ranging from Katherine Cheung’s accomplishment as a pioneer aviator to Lily Lee Chen’s attainment of the status of the first Chinese American woman to be mayor of a city (Monterey Park, elected in 1983). It’s a touching piece but--like the whole exhibition--it has some stagecraft problems. Posted biographies are too long, the type too small. The whole seems to yearn to be a documentary film.

Joe Smoke’s installation concentrates on erotic images of gay men. Two kitsch-ornate tea trays are engraved with the mottoes “Mind Your Manners” and “Make a Nice Display.” A color photo of a nude on a garden lounge has the double-entendre title “Trick of the Trade.” It’s a potentially powerful piece that fails to gel, I think, because it’s too scattered.

The remaining three artists’ work is clearly the “Private Focus” part. Somehow the combination doesn’t work very well. Clearly that’s a curatorial and installation problem.

Jackie Alexander shows one set of images based on African sculpture, villages and some candlesticks. Their origin in photography is unclear. Then there’s another set--unmistakably photos--concentrating on African American women’s coiffure. It appears unrelated to any of the above.

Willie Middlebrook is represented by a single photo-triptych consisting of manipulated prints showing single black infants or toddlers underlined with the biblical, “In the Beginning Was the Word.” It falls short of providing enough information to get a handle on his art.

Christina Fernandez’s photo installation shows people’s clothing floating underwater, suggesting a shipwreck and drowning. But the locale is a swimming pool. A second piece recounts a dream using a real fishbowl, goldfish and little architectural-model style pedestrians calmly walking on the bottom. All this might appear charmingly dreamy and innocently humorous in another context. Surrounded by earnest sociological art, its lyricism is, itself, drowned.

* Cal State Los Angeles, Fine Arts Gallery, through March 3, closed Friday and Sunday, (213) 343-4040.