A Poignant Intersection of Fantasy and Reality

One of the best things about being a child is that grown-ups don’t bug you when you play let’s-pretend. All this changes in adulthood, when you’re expected to know who you are and behave accordingly. Adolescence is the age at which this transition takes place, a turbulent time when kids begin to figure out who they are, often by acting as if they’re someone else.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an oddly poignant exhibition features three young artists whose works involve role-playing. Organized by curator Howard N. Fox, “Contemporary Projects 5: Legitimate Theater” outlines some of the ways fantasy and reality cross paths when ordinary Americans try to find themselves among the cliches and stereotypes served up by the mass media.

Professional wrestling provides the phenomenally popular backdrop against which Cameron Jamie’s cock-eyed art unfolds. Two color photographs from 1996 depict the L.A. artist wearing a fur-topped mask and long underwear as he wrestles a Michael Jackson impersonator in a hotel room. Displayed nearby and titled “Self-Portrait” (1992), the smiling mask resembles those worn by Mexican lucha libre (free-form) wrestlers.

Although these undeveloped works by Jamie have their finger on the pulse of the current weirdness coursing through American culture, they are far less engaging than “BB,” a Super 8 film he made last year. Transferred to video for the exhibition and accompanied by a dirge-like rock soundtrack by the Melvins, the 18-minute home movie presents the highlights of a few afternoons of backyard wrestling.

In scene after scene, gangly teenage boys mimic the muscular men they see on TV, walloping one another with fists, forearms and folding chairs. From the top of a stepladder and the roof of a house, they leap into a makeshift ring, landing on opponents who writhe in mostly fake pain.

The most disturbing aspect of Jamie’s twisted documentary is not that some of the boys hurt themselves doing incredibly stupid things, it’s that they act as if nothing is real unless it’s captured on camera. A group portrait of kids who are willing to go through the motions to get something like 15 seconds of fame, the mesmerizing film gives creepy form to the robotic quality of modern life.

In contrast, two short videos by Chloe Piene are too overproduced to get under your skin. In the first, a teenage girl dressed in panties and T-shirt acts like a feral animal, spitting, growling gutturally and staring into the camera with as much ferocity as she can muster. In the other one, a 9-year-old boy, wearing nothing but jockey shorts, struts around as if he’s a tough guy, challenging all comers.

Piene has electronically altered the voices of her amateur actors, presumably to make them more menacing. Unfortunately, her videos look like a film student’s homage to “Blair Witch Project” and “The Cell,” a mixture of rawness and slickness that isn’t auspicious. Likewise, the insights to be gleaned from a book of letters the artist and a convict exchanged over eight months in 1997 are too few and far between to compel you to keep reading, especially standing in a gallery, bending over the low shelf to which the book has been fastened.

Nine large photographs by Katy Grannan stand out for the subtlety and range of the emotions they elicit. Each of the anonymous persons in these profoundly awkward pictures answered a classified ad the artist placed in a small-town newspaper. After phone conversations, they invited her to their middle-class homes, where they posed, some fully clothed but most in various states of undress.

Shot from low angles in rooms from which the furniture has been removed or pushed into a corner, Grannan’s color prints transform the homes of her subjects into unexpectedly desolate settings. Many of the young people she portrays have the look of a deer caught in the headlights. While some appear to be warming up to the attention they’re paid by the New York artist, she has snapped the picture before they got comfortable, and long before they developed any confidence in their first-time performance as models.

A sense of sweetness thus suffuses these mildly adventuresome pictures, whose format mimics that of low-budget porno shoots. Embodying the adolescent feeling of not fitting in--when it comes to one’s family, hometown or even one’s skin--the best ones suggest that people are complicated creatures who discover themselves by pretending to be someone (or something) else.

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* “Contemporary Projects 5: Legitimate Theater,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-6000, through July 29. Closed Wednesdays. Adults $7; seniors and students, $5; children 6-17, $1.