ART REVIEW : Coloring-Book Critique of ‘America, the Perfect Country’

As a child in an all-white classroom in the mid-’50s, I watched my teacher pour containers filled with white, black and yellow paint into a large glass pot.

“This is the melting pot,” she said gaily. “All these different races live happily together in America.” Inside the pot the colors had blended into an ugly gray color, but the teacher didn’t seem to notice.

No era, of course, has a monopoly on bland optimism and blinkered thinking. In “America, the Perfect Country”--at Newport Harbor Art Museum (to Sept. 24)--Los Angeles artist Erika Rothenberg invokes the muddled, unquestioning state of public opinion in the age of 10-second spot TV commercials and focus-group marketing.

Using techniques perfected in advertising--excited slogans, typecast images of sex and race, socio-babbling statistics--she weds perky texts and colorful images. All the images have the flat, simplified look of cartoons or coloring books, the better to convey the cocoon of happy talk and comforting stereotype that enables the average person to tune out negative aspects of life.

“Make the World Perfect” reads the label on the cutout image of an aerosol can tilting over another of Rothenberg’s story boards. “At last! A way to end war, hunger and disease!” trumpets the first panel, awash in aerosol-sprayed smoke.

The next panel shows what life was like “before”: a sad-looking black child with the swollen belly of malnutrition, a Latina with a black eye comforting a morose-looking man, dark-skinned guerrilla fighters, houses billowing with smoke, a missile launching. In the “after” panel, a smiling white Mets player greets his biracial fans, a white couple gets married, white ballet dancers pose and a blond girl with a teddy bear eats an apple.

Obviously, nothing has changed except a point of view: Don’t think about the bad stuff and-- voila!-- it goes away. Rather than simply offering a sweeping indictment of fundamentalist right-wing beliefs, however, Rothenberg locates the ambivalence in even the most ardent liberal heart. Who has not wished the world’s problems would quietly solve themselves, so that the pleasant aspects of middle-class existence could be pursued without guilt?

The installation, part of the museum’s New California Artist series, also includes a full-sized, viewer-interactive miniature golf game, “Which Country Is the Best Country?,” garnished with an eye-catching spinning globe. But, although there are six traps, each labeled with the name of a different country, all but one (“U.S.A.”) have been walled up in various clumsy ways to keep balls out.

The artist’s point, of course, is that an American’s seemingly boundless freedom of choice--in art and other matters--is contingent upon policies that are subject to change. Someone in charge can mess with the game (by censoring a potentially controversial exhibition, for example) and thereby circumscribe the range of viable choices.

By wrapping her message in such superficially unthreatening visual packages, Rothenberg shrewdly gains a lot of ground, co-opting the seductiveness of the very media Establishment whose quick fixes and intellectual pabulum she is out to discount.

Also part of Newport Harbor’s New California Artist series, Fred Fehlau’s “Blinder Paintings” (to Oct. 1) is an invitation to enter a rigorous dialogue about the nature of a work of art. Anyone expecting a dreamy, cosmic experience is advised to look elsewhere.

Although just as dependent on the viewer’s perceptual awareness as “light and space” art, Fehlau’s work is far more autocratic and unrelentingly intellectualized. Each painting offers the viewer a group of sometimes conflicting and often hard-to-process visual information that must somehow be assimilated and assembled in the mind.

On the panels are various configurations of identical greenish-black painted bars that line up perfectly at one point but subsequently fall out of sync. There are just enough bars that you can’t easily account for them all without sending your eyes through dizzying calisthenics.

And that’s just for starters. Each surface is composed of two layers, the panel and its sailcloth covering, curving (imperceptibly to the eye) in such a way that the bars on the sides of the panel read more sharply than those in the center. The nylon sailcloth works like a theatrical scrim: veiling the shadowy, insubstantial bars painted underneath it on the panel and serving as a backdrop to the sharp, textured black bars painted on its outer surface.

But wait--there’s more. Aluminum “blinders” attached at either side of each wood panel--most project from the wall at a 90-degree angle or are free-standing--firmly delimit the viewer’s gaze at the work. So you are thrust, willy-nilly, into the midst of a shifting play of surfaces and marks that refuse to stand still. In addition, each work contains a back-to-back two double-surfaced painted panels. Which means that the piece is like a hall of mirrors (the light-reflecting aluminum plays its part here too), which continually shunt the viewer back and forth in a vain attempt to find a central perceptual experience.

And that’s the central riddle of this work: It has no center, no inside or outside in the conventional senses of those terms. Fehlau’s paintings are demon constructs of a mind that revels in the play of ideas and shows no mercy for the impatient, the merely sensual or the philistine viewer.