‘Que Es’ Defines Chicano Timidly

The art installed in an old Santa Ana house across the street from the Bowers Museum attempts to grapple with a complex and timely question: What does it mean to be a Mexican American?

After the passage of propositions 187 and 209, after years of casually racist remarks by people who call themselves liberals--how do individual Mexican American artists feel about themselves and their people?

Yet despite the obvious emotional investment, most of the 22 pieces by 13 artists in “Que es Chicano?,” at the Marie Elias Center for the Arts in Santa Ana, is deficient in subtlety and metaphorical richness.

While various levels of ability are in evidence (no one tops Emigdio Vasquez for skilled figurative realism), there is a lack of fresh imagery and conceptual rigor, and a stylistic timidity that hasn’t fully come to grips with the ‘90s.

The most arresting piece is Carlos Perez’s installation, “Peligro Raza (Peligro y Ternura)” (Racial Danger [Danger and Tenderness]), which takes the form of a shrine. The flowers, candles and photographs of children arranged on the floor have a generic look, but other items add mystery and texture. This is a piece about lives at risk, about the struggle to carry on in a culture of death.

The bandanna hanging from suspended barbed wire suggests both a fugitive existence and a noose; teakettles rigged to heating elements convey domesticity but also emit a piercing sound of warning. Bullets in sealed plastic bags marked “CIA approved” relate to stories last year in the San Jose Mercury News that linked the CIA to drug and gun dealers who supported the Contras in El Salvador.

In a different vein, Ricardo Duffy’s punchy, cartoon-like painting, “Curtain Raiser,” has the one-shot effect of a good political poster.

In Duffy’s vision, the shadow of a fleeing family--echoing the highway signs near the U.S.-Mexican border--falls across a yellow dog flattened by a car driven by Donald Duck. With Pete Wilson’s name visible on the vehicle’s side, a Spanish conquistador as a hood ornament, an Indian family as passengers and a piece of paper proclaiming some “indigenous” folks from 1492 as “resident aliens,” the satire is broad.

The exhibition also contains texts by Latino writers, who seem better able to incorporate notes of ambivalence and self-questioning--attitudes that enrich their points of view--than their artist colleagues.

Artist alert: The center--an alternative space run by Al Preciado, an art educator, and Kelly Griffin, a curator (“Marie” and “Elias” are their middle names), is a friendly place that opened in December. Slide submissions are welcome.

On Saturday at 7 p.m., the center will host a comedy and poetry evening with performers from the Chicano Poets Society. Suggested donation: $5.

* “Que es Chicano?,” through April 20, Marie Elias Center for the Arts, 120 W. 20th St., Santa Ana. Free. Hours: 3-6 p.m. Friday, noon-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. (714) 568-9901.

Photo Gimmicks Are a Snap With “Invented Truths: Myths and Manipulations in Contemporary Photography” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, the old battle for the artiness of photography is being fought again.

The work itself, by artists from California, Florida and New Mexico, is mostly . . . large. It’s as if sheer size were an idea in itself, as if amplitude could substitute for fresh metaphors or points of view. The other constant in this show is the gimmick.

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“Scenic Point” is an installation by Rudy Vega, a recent master of fine arts graduate of UC Irvine. He constructs the contents of a shop selling variously sized photographs--some are made into postcards, key rings and place mats--of tourists at U.S. national parks.

The ironic contemporary tourist-in-nature photograph was perfected by Roger Minick in the early ‘80s. His “Sightseer” series (not in this show) includes such images as a woman wearing a head scarf printed with views of Yosemite who is seen from the rear as she gazes at a mountain range. Minick memorably updated spiritual-minded 19th century paintings of figures contemplating the vastness of nature with this meditation on the sightseer’s role.

Vega’s piece emphasizes the role of photography in our experience of nature as well as the roles of photography as commodity and the national park as national shrine.

To be sure, certain photographs are widely believed to yield true experiences of natural wonders, and many people are more concerned with “capturing” nature in a photograph than simply looking at it. But this is old news.

The problem with Vega’s piece is that it fails to invigorate a well-explored topic with a persuasive new approach. The problem with gimmicks in general is that they’re great at getting your attention but poor at keeping it engaged in any meaningful way.

In diptychs and triptychs, Barbara Forshay juxtaposes large photographs of fragments of human and animal anatomy in ways that may momentarily cause confusion. She writes in a statement that while making the work, she was “thinking about the cosmetics industry, our culture’s overemphasis on physical appearance, animal magnetism, beauty and sensuality.”

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But just because she was thinking about these things doesn’t mean she has invested the work with specific ideas about any of them. Like many emerging artists, Forshay seems to credit her imagery with magic powers it does not possess. Many artists have made hay from photographing hard-to-decipher parts of the body, and Forshay adds nothing to the dialogue.

And so it goes.

Giannine Mustari’s “Myth Triptychs” substitute size and ersatz portentousness for a genuine sense of discovery. In a superfluous bid to “prove” that there are enduring human types, comparative photographs by Nancy Webber show living people who look more or less like figures in famous paintings.

Like her other work, Ann Marie Rousseau’s ghostly image in a warehouse (“The Substance of Shadow”) has a glossy, advertising-layout look, hardly an improvement on the small-scale, delicate imagery that Francesca Woodman was making as a college undergraduate in the ‘70s.

Adrienne Bolsega layers human faces from Old Master paintings over landscape imagery.

Sometimes the two have something to say to each other, as in “The Crone” (a seamed and grooved landfill creates the “skin” on the face of an elderly figure by Durer, evoking the environment of a hardscrabble life).

Other human-and-landscape pairings seem arbitrary, and the repetitiousness of the gimmick wears.

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The notion--that if one work in a given mode represents a stylistic breakthrough, a dozen of them is even more impressive--can backfire.

A viewer wants to feel that each piece develops the style further, that the artist isn’t simply cloning an idea.

If the “myths” are unconvincing in this show, the “manipulation” is simply . . . commonplace.

Contemporary photography has a lot more to offer.

* “Myths and Manipulations in Contemporary Photography,” through Thursday, Irvine Fine Art Center, 14321 Yale Ave. Free. Hours: 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday. (714) 724-6880.