Entering ‘Paradise,’ where pleasure rules

If Dante could have set “The Divine Comedy” in today’s Southern California, the epic poem’s third song might have looked something like Kutlug Ataman’s newly commissioned installation at the Orange County Museum of Art. Rather than verse, video is the vehicle. Television is the dialect we speak now, and the electronic ether is inseparable from our cosmology.

Titled “Paradise,” Ataman’s installation is a strangely affecting meditation on pleasure. By turns funny, tragic, weird, intellectually stimulating and pitiable, it conjures an unexpected array of roles the notion of paradise plays in shaping human destiny.

The artist is uniquely suited to the task. Ataman was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, and neighboring Persia was the ancient source of many of our enduring visual conceptions of a blissful Arcadian garden. As an unhappy child, he was given a small plot within his parents’ backyard to cultivate on his own. Solace, if not eternal bliss, was forthcoming from the endeavor.

Ataman also spent his 20s and early 30s in Los Angeles, America’s homegrown modern fabrication of Elysian fields, graduating from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree and, in 1988, a master’s in filmmaking. (He now lives in Istanbul and Buenos Aires.) The outlook represented in “Paradise” is personal and cross-cultural.

It is deeply humanistic too, affirming people’s dignity and worth. The installation unfolds on 24 flat-screen televisions raised on stands and arranged in circles -- 14 screens on the outer ring, nine on the inner ring and one screen in the center. Each features a video portrait, its subject discussing his or her life’s obsession. (One is a double-portrait of two boys, both of whom are fixated on cars.) Since every heaven must have its hell, the concentric rings bring to mind the circles of Dante’s “Inferno.” Paradise represents a second chance created after an irretrievable loss -- which is one reason the concept is so generally American, and specifically Californian.

Yet Ataman’s piece detours from traditional humanism’s more exclusive elevation of rational thought. It finds profound value in the tangled underbrush of creative imagination and irrational passion. Art, one could say, is its own little paradise.

This has emerged as a hallmark of Ataman’s art. It’s there in his magnificent documentary profile of Britain’s eccentric keeper of the national collection of amaryllis bulbs, “The 4 Seasons of Veronica Read,” which becomes a surprising reflection on beauty, exoticism and the unexpected consequences of colonialism, and was a standout at Germany’s Documenta 11 exhibition in 2002. It is inscribed in “Kuba,” the 40-monitor installation of interviews with poor residents of an Istanbul shantytown, which took the top prize at the last Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

In the OCMA video-profiles, the young pair of car-crazy suburban kids is as noble as the famous Protestant minister. All three are just as splendid as a hospice caretaker with enormous capacity for empathy (and discomfiting fascination with death); a brain-teasing academic futurist; an astral-planing hippie (whose hair is munched by a pet goat while she talks of an unexpected visit from Archangel Michael); an acclaimed writer specializing in sociocultural dystopia; a gourmet chef; or a male sex-worker with the status of an underground legend. All of them -- and more -- turn up in “Paradise.”

The installation makes a nice complement to OCMA’s concurrent exhibition of prints by Chuck Close, American art’s most distinctive portrait painter. Ataman’s are talking heads, however, and the artist’s hand is more concealed.

Although he conducted the interviews, neither Ataman nor his voice (except an occasional snippet) is featured on the videos. The straightforward camera work is likewise unadorned, shifting position less for any self-evident expressionistic purpose than to thoughtfully avert viewers’ visual fatigue.

The interviews are up close and personal -- and made even more so by the installation layout. A small white stool is placed directly in front of each wide screen, so that a viewer sits about 18 inches from the subject’s face. With headphones on, their spoken words are like thoughts projected directly inside your head. Black-and-yellow caution tape protecting the audio-video cables on the floor is an unfortunate distraction, but otherwise the composition’s effect is to heighten the illusion of penetrating a fellow human being’s inner life. Depending on who is speaking and what is being said, the intimacy can be exhilarating, deeply disturbing and various things in between.

One disconcerting feature of “Paradise” is that its inhabitants are mostly white and male. No black faces appear, and no Asian speaks. There are fewer women than men. Given my experience of Ataman’s prior work, this apparent imbalance would seem to have been a conscious choice -- a visualization invoking Southern California’s empyrean establishment rather than a blinkered slight. (As an Israeli-born teacher of sign-language communication skills to deaf children puts it, people are always asking her whether she’s Latina.) The effect is unnerving, which tosses a helpful monkey wrench into any sanguine assumption that Ataman is proposing some old-fashioned modernist vision of Utopia lost-and-found.

The 25 sitters’ positions in Ataman’s cosmology are not fixed, changing at random from day to day. At the center of “Paradise” when I visited was its oldest inhabitant -- an 88-year-old private-party clown whose jowly facial wrinkles further animate the painted-on smile and button-nose that separate his fluorescent red wig from a neck-ruff of crimson tulle. As he performs a simple magic trick for an elderly onlooker, the harlequin explains his bliss as the simple satisfaction that comes from making children happy.

Clowns are always vaguely creepy, of course, which gives one pause. And they’re also the classic surrogate for the artist in society, jester at the court enjoined to speak a coded truth to the king -- who might well laugh uproariously as he commands, “Off with that joker’s head!”

“Paradise” was a joint commission by four art museums -- OCMA, plus institutions in the Netherlands, England and Canada, where the installation will travel during the next 13 months. Given the currently hellish reputation of the United States in the world, exactly how its specifically American imagery will be received abroad is something to wonder about. “Paradise” just might become more vivid.

christopher.knight@ latimes.com

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‘Kutlug Ataman: Paradise’

Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 5 Wednesdays through Sundays, extended to 8 p.m. on Thursdays

Ends: June 3

Price: $8 to $10

Contact: (949) 759-1122; www.ocma.org