Reworking the Movies Into Fine Art

Hollywood’s classic images are being retooled in the hands of artists and curators in the new exhibition “Recasting the Past: Beneath the Hollywood Tinsel” at Cal State Fullerton.

Twenty-one artists and a pair of graduate-student curators take a closer look at how the silver screen saturates American culture with scenes of glamour and fantasy.

“One of our major objectives is to address the cultural and global impact of Hollywood film imagery,” said co-curator Michele Cairella. “The artists in the show not only question social mores, injustices and cultural traditions, but many do so in a wide range of media.”

Paintings, photography, assemblage and collage will be displayed. But many of the artists also use new media, from computers to video and slide projections. Collectively, the artists dissect issues of sex, gender, violence, race and class as portrayed in Hollywood movies.

With famous faces such as Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Bette Davis and others in the gallery, artist Dalibor Martinis of Croatia understands that Hollywood’s star appeal is so pervasive that any reference to its icons are instantly recognizable around the world.

In his video installation, “Prism,” Martinis takes scenes of “Casablanca” and photographs of himself sleeping and projects them through a rotating glass prism. The images seem to chase one another around the walls of an enclosed room.

He said the work is an attempt to subvert the control movies have on the viewer’s gaze.

“With ‘Prism,’ it’s a game. There are two ways of reading the work. The double nature of an artwork is what is most interesting or provoking for me,” Martinis, 54, said. “With movies you are forced to accept certain metaphors or messages. It’s one-dimensional.”

With his work, viewers must move between the two images and layers of meaning to form their own conclusions about what they see.

Other artists add their perspectives on Hollywood films.

With his “A Bar in Anchorhead (Star Wars Cocktail Lounge),” Los Angeles’ Mark Bennett sketches architectural blueprints from his favorite TV shows and films.

Carole Caroompas of Los Angeles couples Zorro with Hester Prynne of “The Scarlet Letter” for a feminist commentary on sexual conflict and gender role-playing.

German artist Christoph Girardet edits scenes of women in bondage from campy horror films into his video work. Yasumasa Morimura, disguised in drag as one of his favorite divas, strikes a pose in his “self-portrait” photographs of Audrey Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich.

But not all of the works of art are star-studded.

Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Gustavo Vazquez employ the techniques of a documentary film to comment on racial stereotypes. In a 30-minute video installation titled “The Great Mojado Invasion (The Second U.S.-Mexico War),” the artists fictionalize a historical event.

In the pseudo-documentary, Mexico is victorious. “Spanglish” becomes the official language, and the “New Aztlan Regime” portrays Anglos as “aliens.”

Curated by graduate students Cairella and Juliet Rosati, “Recasting the Past” is a final thesis project two years in the making.

The two friends, who are enrolled in the college’s exhibition design and museum studies program, are movie buffs captivated by classic and contemporary Hollywood films. Realizing that real-life headline events often became story lines for fiction, they viewed film as a historical resource.

“We wanted to see how contemporary artists viewed the impact of films today,” said Cairella, 33. A Fullerton resident, she graduates next year.

But the marriage of Hollywood images and fine art is nothing new. As early as 1939, artist Joseph Cornell featured Greta Garbo in a shadow box construction he created. The heyday was in the 1960s with Pop artists such as Andy Warhol creating larger-than-life photographs of Marilyn Monroe and other idols.

The exhibition gallery includes theatrical touches. Small, intimate spaces are sectioned off by velvety red drapes. Some rooms have old-fashioned theater seats. An Art Deco marquee stands at the front entrance. The floors are accented with stars. Some sections in the back gallery have disclaimer signs, warning viewers about the violent and sexual content of the works.

The catalog was produced entirely on an interactive CD-ROM contained inside a metal film canister. The show was done on a budget of $15,000--shoestring by most standards but twice the typical budget for graduate exhibition projects.

With no travel budget and only a $12,000 art department grant, the curators used Internet resources and e-mail to contact about 140 artists before whittling down the number. They borrowed campus monitors and speakers, but the remaining expenditures, for more digital sound and video equipment, came from their own pockets. Some loans and grants helped fund the show.

Quitting their part-time jobs and working 12-hour days to complete the project, the full-time student curators say the sacrifices were worth it.

They met their own celebrities, though not the Hollywood kind.

“It was exciting to meet [New York artist] Robert Prada and Mark Bennett,” said Rosati, 26, of Anaheim. She graduates in December. “A lot of the artists showed up. They were our celebrity stars.”