Technical Difficulties : 2 Shows Stand By While Dull Imagery and Recycled Ideas Preempt Exploration of Mind or Spirit

In his catalog essay for “Digital Visions,” a weak group show at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana, curator James Utter celebrates the rise of computer-manipulated photographic imagery.

The “digital artist,” he writes, “has the incredible power of the desktop computer to enlarge, reduce, duplicate, clone, distort and manipulate image content. With this almost limitless resource and power comes the kind of expressive freedom seen in this exhibition.”

But the value of technology is only as good as the insight of the artists. Boundless freedom can be a curse, distracting from the central task of developing a fresh and meaningful visual language. And computers don’t magically endow artists with expressive gifts.

By championing computer users’ abilities to create “seamless juxtapositions” of imags, Utter ignores a crucial distinction between commercial and contemporary fine art.

Commercial artists need to create immediately persuasive imagery, whereas sophisticated fine artists enjoy playing with the gap between appearance and reality. The viewer is meant to be thrown off guard, to analyze, question and make connections.

For all the fascination with cutting-edge technology in this show, the imagery itself barely acknowledges the conceptual strategies of contemporary art. Whether strident or bland, the work lacks punch.

Even the inkjet-printed photo montages by Darryl Curran, the most prominent of the eight photographers, prove disappointing.

In “Tunneling,” Curran combines printed fabric, a peeling notice board, the threaded base of a lightbulb and a woman’s face glimpsed behind a welder’s mask to make a composition that strives in vain to achieve poetic resonance.

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Several of the Rancho Santiago artists have shown previously at BC Space, the Laguna Beach photography gallery celebrating its 23rd anniversary with a series of exhibitions by “alumni.” Indeed, similar problems bedevil the second installment of “BC XXIII: Committed to the Light.”

The 19 artists in this show were asked for selections representative of their early and mature styles. The recent pieces often betray a narrow and formulaic approach. Focus on technology too often leads to dull imagery and recycled ideas rather than genuine intellectual or emotional exploration.

Jerry McGrath is represented by a psychologically charged photograph from 1978. Squeezed into the far left edge of the print, as if willing himself to disappear, a young man in a robe pokes his elbow into the viewer’s space.

McGrath, chairman of the photography program at Irvine Valley College, also submitted a 1985 piece, “Colt Mark IV”: the image of a revolver printed on a split piece of board: a trite and ineffectual way of expressing the destructive power of firearms.

Ron Leighton, chairman of the photography department at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, has sent in a couple of untitled black-and-white photographs that look like student exercises. The most recent one is a blurry view of an object that looks suspiciously like a phone cord. Is this poverty of imagination or what?

It is possible that many of the artists simply didn’t choose their best work. Jack Butler, a member of the Cal State Los Angeles faculty who was one of the pioneers in using “found”’ photographs from the media back in the ‘70s, comes off disappointingly in this show.

His recent piece, “Ardor 4 A,” relies too hopefully on obscured contours and manipulated black-red coloring to give emotional content to a trio of images (a woman, a violinist and a man with his hands in his pockets).

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Even the more conceptual photographs in this group have a rote, dumbed-down feel. Chuck Nicholson’s “What I Watched on TV” ironically “documents” a month of viewing: no matter whether the program is “Nova” or “The Wonder Years,” it is illustrated with a photo of an attractive woman advertising a product.

If Nicholson’s intention was to dress up a cliche in the shrilly repetitive guise of a commercial, the sober design of the piece works against him.

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There are a few happy surprises. Technology becomes a tool and an accessory--rather than a crutch--in Vidie Lange’s luscious 1996 translation of the jeweled beauty of Indian miniature painting. “Kali in Ascension” is a digitized color transparency applied to the screen of a video monitor lit from inside with a fluorescent tube. The image presents the Indian goddess and her milieu as a hallucinatory vision of pink and orange pixels veering in and out of focus. Lange wittily translates the festive, public quality of traditional goddess worship into a contemporary mass-media format but slyly substitutes the blurry look of a private, visionary experience for the real action viewers expect from a video image.

“William,” a 1985 portrait by James R. Koch, offers the bizarre sight of a boy’s serene, apparently bodiless head resting on a desk, as if presenting himself as an apple for the teacher. This surreal touch gains its poignancy from our realization that it represents a genuine slice of life, captured by a quick eye at a serendipitous moment.

Ellen Land-Weber, who teaches at Humbolt State, seems to be the only photographer in the group who has gone back to black-and-white after shooting in color.

The soft blacks and grays in her recent shot of a street photographer’s equipment in Afyon, Turkey, conspire to evoke an era long vanished in the West. A wooden box camera, with sober portraits of four men attached, stands opposite two empty chairs resting against a wall covered with a black cloth. The image projects an aura of grave ceremony, of time stilled or trapped within a living museum.

* “Digital Visions,” through March 19 at Rancho Santiago College Art Gallery, 17th Street at Bristol Street, Santa Ana. Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday and Thursday; 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. Free. (714) 564-5615.

* “BC XXIII: Committed to the Light, Part II,” through March 23, BC Space, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach. Hours: 1 to 5:30 Tuesday through Friday. Free. (714) 497-1880.