Something to Smile About

“Composite Persona,” at the Fullerton Museum Center, is quite possibly the most creative and serious-minded contemporary art show the center has mounted. But the sprawling, dogmatic approach to the topic and a clutch of weak pieces make it less than a total success.

Co-curated by center exhibition administrator Lynn LaBate and Tina Yapelli, director of the University Art Gallery at San Diego State, the exhibition deals with the ways some artists are redefining the portrait.

Karen Levitov, a University of Wisconsin PhD candidate who wrote the show’s essay, emphasizes the artists’ interest in representing people from classes or racial groups or gender identities that aren’t normally found in portraits. But that description is too pat and moralistic. What makes the better art compelling is not some sort of plea for “equal time.”

Painted portraits traditionally were a perk of the moneyed, powerful classes. The people staring out from canvases by Holbein, Rembrandt or Sargent had the bucks to hire big talent. But the professional photographic portrait--most often made to commemorate births, graduations, marriages and business promotions--is a modern convention that cuts across the racial and social divide.

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What the more stimulating of the 14 established and little-known artists in the show do, in fact, is to subvert the conventions of portraiture that encourage conformity to a prettified, ennobled or blandly appealing ideal.

Sitters don’t smile in these artists’ portraits (except in Scott Lifshutz’s, and that’s because he’s examining what smiling does to a face). But they also lack the slack-jawed “attitude” of contemporary fashion photos. Instead, the artists present people in a deliberately intrusive, wary or ambiguous way, much the way we perceive strangers in real life.

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A less-exalted type of portrait from earlier eras--pseudo-scientific studies of members of diseased, criminal or ethnic groups--also comes into play in contemporary work. Artists invoke this documentary type of imagery to examine the notion of human “types” and how we recognize them, whether on a purely perceptual level or in terms of racial or ethnic characteristics.

Key to the success of this art is its refusal to simply replace a negative stereotype with a positive one; complexity and contradiction leave the door open to multiple interpretations.

Catherine Opie is known for her photographs of gays and lesbians. But it isn’t simply her gender interests that makes her work so compelling. Rather, it is the disjunction between the unconventional dress and deportment of her sitters--seemingly chosen deliberately to make a public statement--and their high seriousness and essential dignity.

Opie’s photograph of “Bo,” a heavy-set woman with a swashbuckling mustache who wears a thick black belt on her jeans and stands with thumbs in her pockets, reveals an extraordinary vulnerability around the eyes. A palpable tension between different facets of a personality animates the portrait.

The degree of artist determinism ranges from the near-transparency of Darwoud Bey’s large Polaroid images of young black people (neither angry nor heroic, his sitters look at most slightly wary) to the work of Lyle Ashton Harris, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, and the duo known as Clegg and Guttmann.

Harris and Gomez-Pena labor mightily in their photographs to unmoor stereotypes of gender and ethnicity (Harris as insouciant drag queen, with women awkwardly assuming men’s guises; Gomez-Pena and friends in flamboyantly exaggerated dress and poses). But they take a big risk in opting for the frankly fake and the over-the-top tableau. Shallowness edges out humor or even shock appeal.

Clegg and Guttmann also have an agenda. They specialize in portraits of well-dressed people awash in anomie. A disaffected, immaculately turned-out middle-age couple occupies a room with Giacometti sculptures and empty picture frames on the wall--both of which underline the aura of spiritual attenuation and emptiness. The artists keep our empathy at bay, promoting the idea that the rich are indeed different from you and me.

Gavin Lee’s approach in “Concerning George” is calculatedly neutral. He uses a variety of “found” photographs of his great-grandfather--imprisoned in San Quentin for the attempted assassination of a Chinese government official--to literally round out the portrait of the man whose mug shot appears in a book of Chinese criminals. In this piece, George Lim Fong’s identity remains a puzzle, caught between competing statements and images, each testifying to his “real” personality.

It was surprising not to see Mitchell Syrop’s grids of yearbook images in this show, dealing as they do with systematic overlaps of facial traits. Surely they would have been a better choice than several pieces that were included.

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Among the disappointments are Jin Lee’s banal silhouetted figures and Lordan Bunch’s bland attempts at dramatic portrayals, Keith Cottingham’s vacuous compositions of idealized, computer-created images of teenage boys and Lorraine O’Grady’s simplistic pairings of the faces of black female relatives and members of an ancient Egyptian royal family.

The same seamless technique that has made Nancy Burson’s computer-synthesized portraits useful for locating lost kids years after they’ve disappeared also effectively removes from her work here the ragged edge of uncertainty that produces compelling art.

The undercurrent that emerges from this show--composite portraits frequently viewed as a sort of moral corrective rather than simply as a tool for exploration--keeps it from being as groundbreaking as it could have been. Perhaps this is the price one pays for bringing a difficult concept to a “family” museum center.

* “Composite Persona,” Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona Ave.. Hours: Noon-4 p.m. Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday; noon-8 p.m. Thursday. Admission: $3 adults, $2 students, free for children under 12. Wednesdays only: $2 seniors. Thursdays, 6-8 p.m., free for all. Through May 25. (714) 738-6545.