Our values and ideals enshrined

“Monuments for the USA” is an exhibition that was partly motivated out of sincere -- and perhaps even severe -- distress.

In the Logan Galleries at California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute, 61 proposals are on view for monuments to important aspects of American society today. Curator Ralph Rugoff invited an international roster of artists -- young and old, established and emerging, predictable and unexpected -- to ponder the complex values and ideals they associate with the United States.

The artists were invited to design the type of monument that they believe the American people need, or deserve, at this particular moment in history.

Why now? Because, the curator writes in the catalog, he harbors “a nagging suspicion that the United States has metamorphosed in profound and inadequately acknowledged ways.” Since these monuments are just propositions, which won’t be going through any public or committee review, the artists were not burdened by budgetary, technical or ideological considerations.

Not surprisingly, the results are all over the map. Some are ironic, others sincere. Bristling anger is not uncommon. Neither is the passion one associates with an authentic sense of civic concern. Humor turns up; so does sorrow and even paranoia.

Whatever the emotional tenor, though, the best proposals offer unexpected insights into the fog of social norms that describe human experience on any given day. Often they resonate precisely because a viewer knows the work could (or would) never be built.

Take the razor-sharp pencil drawing by Los Angeles artist Jeffrey Vallance. It shows a hybrid structure, part Greek temple and part cenotaph, built of pristine white marble and bronze. A cenotaph is an empty tomb -- a monument constructed in honor of a person whose body lies elsewhere. Inside, Vallance’s quasi-cenotaph holds an empty sculpture pedestal and empty picture frames. The sketch is titled across the top in big, bold letters, “Monument to the Unrecognized Artist.”

As always, Vallance draws with an adolescent earnestness, pressing down hard on the pencil, conscientiously filling in shadows, labeling component parts for the sake of clarity and paying attention to details with an evident sense of quiet determination. You imagine him hunched over the table as he draws, his brow furrowed and his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth.

Careful penmanship flanks the cenotaph drawn in the center of the sheet, spelling out some simple truths. Few artists receive recognition, even when deserved, and most art school students stop working after gradu- ation.

What makes this monument proposal so compelling, however, is not its lament for an almost inevitable lack of individual success -- that is, for the elusiveness of stardom in our celebrity-mad culture. Vallance is not yearning here for an American Art Idol.

Instead, what’s riveting is the way it commemorates a deeper, more disturbing and revealing truth: In American society at large, artists as a class go unrecognized. Essentially absent from daily consciousness, they find their collective memorial in this cenotaph.

Vallance’s incisive proposal is unexpectedly moving, not least because of its deliberately juvenile drawing style. It betrays an inescapable solidarity between disaffected teenagers and living artists, who both contend with establishment disregard.

Also powerful is “US,” an animated video loop by Yoshua Okon, who divides his time between L.A. and Mexico City. A schematic aerial view of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., all cheerful forest green and liquid blue, sports a pair of colossal, shiny, translucent golden letters, erected on a plot of otherwise empty land that corre- sponds with the location of the White House. The letters are at least 10 times taller than the Washington and Lincoln memorials, over which they loom.

Accompanied by a faint, ominous soundtrack of a helicopter’s chopping rotor blades, the video image swoops around these monumental golden letters, which look like corporate headquarters the late Philip Johnson might have designed for the Dallas skyline. (Or think of the infamous, turning Enron sign repeated endlessly on the evening news.) The initials of the United States are bluntly conflated with a vulgar declaration that this monstrosity is us.

Okon’s video pictures the power ratio between a contemporary presidency driven by mammon and historical visions of the citizen-leader (Washington) and the savior of the union (Lincoln), which are dwarfed off in the distance. And it doesn’t let “us” off the hook for the grotesque sight, out there on our nation’s front lawn.

Okon uses video animation to hypnotic effect. The work is at once luscious and repulsive, like too much banana split for dessert.

As with Vallance’s drawing, it is also a complete work of art, rather than a mere description of one that would never be built. A model by Do-Ho Suh for a gigantic mirror to be hauled around by an 18-wheeler, reflecting America’s passing scene, is compelling; so is one by the team of Chris Johanson and Kal Spelletich that pairs a friendly neighborhood store with a Big Brother surveillance system.

But few stand on their own as works of art. As proposals the gallery displays are usually ideas for art objects, more than actual art objects. Many are diagrams, descriptive plans or other schematic presentations. There is a lot of necessary explanatory text on the walls. As anyone who has ever been involved in commissioning art knows well, the distance between a terrific art idea and a terrific art object is vast.

“It looked good on paper....”

For example, New Yorker Hans Haacke’s “Times Square Star Gazing” looks very good on paper. A color photograph mounted on a vertical aluminum panel shows the big LCD sign in Manhattan at what used to be called the Crossroads of the World. Among brash, colorful ads for beer, credit cards and TV looms a brash, colorful image of a seated white man, wearing a red T-shirt and a star-spangled blue sack over his head.

Haacke’s photographic allusion to the notorious torture pictures from Abu Ghraib prison is blunt. The implication is also apt: Inevitably even such horrifying images get submerged within the ever-churning miasma of modern mass entertainment.

However, what it might actually be like to see Haacke’s hooded image projected “for ten seconds every three minutes” in Times Square, as the label explains the plan, cannot be known. The work seems diminished because of it.

Similarly, the Pop monuments by Berlin-based Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset work very well as digital fabrications. Borrowing established styles from sculptures by Robert Indiana, Jenny Holzer and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the team proposes an inherent contradiction: a monument, meant for the ages, that enshrines the phrase “short term memory.”

Their digitized examples carry a wry Conceptual punch. But they also recall the way Claes Oldenburg’s monumental Pop sculptures often resonate as imaginative drawings, then shrink in power when fabricated as actual objects in the landscape.

The curator had several good reasons for organizing this ambitious show. In the copiously illustrated catalog, Rugoff notes the proliferation of monuments lately. He also laments the banality of so many of them -- especially important ones like the National World War II Memorial and the planned 9/11 Memorial for Lower Manhattan, which do not seem remotely up to their vital tasks.

I don’t necessarily buy his claim that monuments naturally contradict American democracy, because they “speak with absolute authority” to a type of society that cannot exist without the free exchange of speech and opinion. Monuments are never static. Societies confer meanings on them, almost as much as their designers do, and as societies change those meanings change too.

One tragedy of the WWII Memorial, for example, is that it colors the adjacent monuments to Washington and Lincoln. They’re changed into memorials to the Revolutionary and Civil wars, which they were never meant to be, conforming to our more militaristic times.

But the third and most important curatorial motivation is inarguable. Something about the United States has indeed changed in deep and “inadequately acknowledged” ways. Rugoff aptly notes those changes have been underway for at least a quarter-century, merely accelerating after 9/11.

Signs are everywhere. We have invaded a foreign country that did not attack us. The disparity between rich and poor is larger today than a century ago. Seventy million people worldwide are infected with the fatal AIDS virus. The list goes on and on.

Artists deal in signs, and monuments are their collective social expression. When the mightiest nation in human history is guided by reactionary impulses, citizens weaned on the progressive spirit that guided them out of the Great Depression and on to the defeat of fascism are not the only ones bound to be disconcerted.

Artists are especially threatened. Philistinism is the cultural corollary to reactionary politics. Whatever weaknesses “Monuments for the USA” might display in individual proposals, it is certainly welcome for remembering that politics matters to art.

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‘Monuments for the USA’

Where: Logan Galleries,

CCA Wattis Institute,

1111 8th St., San Francisco

When: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays

and Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays

Ends: May 14

Price: Free

Contact: (415) 551-9210, www.wattis.org