Dressing the Flesh

Beauty? The gold standard used to be a famous actress or a fabled princess. Today, any teenager can measure her all-too-human self against the icy perfection of airbrushed photographs of supermodels.

Truth? There was a time when--unless you lived in the Soviet Union, where political nonpersons were famously excised from official photographs--you could reasonably assume that photos were an accurate form of documentation. Today, what with sophisticated computer techniques for fabricating and altering photos, it’s anyone’s guess what’s real and what’s wholly imaginary.

A new show at the Huntington Beach Art Center, guest-curated by former Los Angeles gallery director Irit Krygier, takes a look at how 16 contemporary artists morph facial and body imagery for their own, extremely varied reasons.

Much of the work raises questions about such social issues as human evolution and the quest for bodily perfection. Yet--and this is weirdly apropos for a display of “unreal” imagery--the questions tend to be more involving than the physical appearance of the art.

Meg Cranston’s “The Average American, 1996” is a life-size nude photo of a white woman, 32.9 years old, standing 5 foot 4 and weighing 135 pounds. As sturdily, fleshily real as she appears, she is wholly imaginary. (The image is likely a blend of several bodies.)

“Average,” after all, is not even “typical”; it is a purely statistical concept derived from adding up each measurement and dividing by the number in the sample. And yet we blindly insist on measuring ourselves against this nonexistent goal. Cranston helps us in this case by making a figure designed to be hung with her feet on the floor, face-to-face with the viewer.

Daniel Lee’s four digitally produced “Self Portraits,” three heavily tweaked, are amusingly exaggerated--and redolent with implications about race and human perfectibility. Lee transforms himself from a short-browed caveman with an ape-like jaw to a suspiciously “alien”-type creature with a huge forehead and narrow, laser-like eyes.

Where did we get the idea that this facial type was somehow more evolved? Lee seems to be teasing with the notion that his Asian features require relatively subtle changes to become the man of the future.

Keith Cottingham reinterprets the self-absorbed perfection of the ubiquitous pretty faces hawking consumer goods with his chilly image of a slender, blemish-free young white male (“Single”) who lacks any trace of human emotion. Cloned, with slight variations in hairstyling, the figure constitutes the unnervingly vapid tableaux “Twins” and “Triplets.”

Narcissism becomes a theme in several pieces, including Ken Gonzalez-Day’s self-portrait incarnations (including one as a saintly martyr with blue upturned eyes and peculiar, Gay Nineties-themed tattoos), Richard Hawkins’ frankly fake “zombie” ink-jet images of pretty young men’s “severed” and “bloody” heads and John Boskovich’s silly series of self-portrait cups in which he appears to pose in Las Vegas showgirl costumes.

*

Pae White stands out in this motley group for her interest in the fluid aesthetic possibilities of computerized images. She captured an image from a pornographic Web site devoted to bondage and reworked it into a graceful, frozen vision--like an ancient Greek frieze dipped in gold--in which two women and a man cavort with a length of chain that might as well be a laurel garland.

Working in 1972, years before computers had the capacity to transform visual imagery, William Wegman layered negatives of himself and his parents to produce photographs in which the family’s shared physical traits subtly merge and diverge. Surely the warmest and most, well, human, piece in the show, “Family Combinations” throws the mechanistic aspect of the digital pieces into sharp relief.

In a brave new world, computer-derived works probably wouldn’t even exist in the “old-fashioned” guise of printed images on paper. They’d be floating in cyberspace, ready to be called up or dismissed at the whim of a keystroke. Indeed, easy disposability may be the saving grace of a culture so easily seduced by sterility.

* “The Unreal Person: Portraiture in the Digital Age,” through June 14 at the Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St. Hours: Noon-6 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday; noon-8 p.m. Thursday; noon-6 p.m. Friday and Saturday; noon-4 p.m. Sunday. Admission: $3 general; $2 students and seniors. (714) 374-1650.