ART REVIEWS : Works of Protest, Serious and Absurd

You know how it is when someone tries to tell you about a supposedly startling and significant event that you didn’t witness. The bare facts may emerge, but the tingle of the adventure remains elusive.

Installed at Otis/Parsons Gallery, “Illegal America” documents conceptual and performance work made during the past 20-odd years by 36 artists who intentionally or unintentionally broke federal and local laws (or at least aroused institutional ire) in order to focus attention on political, sexual, racial, ecological and economic issues.

The works range from such headline-making stuff as Charlotte Moorman’s bare-breasted cello playing in the 1967 “Opera Sextronique” and “What Is the Proper Way to View a U.S. Flag?”--a 1989 installation by Dread Scott that included an American flag lying on the floor--to essentially private actions, like Papo Colo’s forged Latin diploma, symbol of unattainable privilege to an impoverished immigrant.

Big and small events, the serious and the absurd all jostle together in this exhibit. Conceptual art thunderbolts--like Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed” (a private yet public act of masturbation in an art gallery) and Chris Burden’s “Shoot” (a gunshot wound inflicted on the artist by a friend)--are joined by workaday street protest (David Hammon’s “Pissed Off,” a graphic demonstration of the lack of public urinals in Manhattan) and media-savvy outrage at the My Lai massacre (the Art Workers Coalition’s distribution of a poster featuring a frightful Life photograph of the carnage). There are earnest but pedestrian efforts (like Paulette Nenner’s animal rights-related “Crucified Coyote”) and various kinds of silliness (including Komar and Melamid’s letter to West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, in which they claim responsibility for a south German earthquake).

The timing of the show (a replay, with some additions, of a 1982 exhibit at Franklin Furnace in New York, organized by Colo and Jeanette Ingberman) needs little justification. When a couple of federally funded exhibits of photographs threaten to topple the National Endowment for the Arts, it’s time to get some perspective on the subject of deliberately provocative art.

But there are problems here. One is the daunting amount of reading material to plow through: a sober lineup of lengthy descriptions, detailed letters and blowups of newspaper articles, leavened only by a few grainy photographs. This is an odd way to come to terms with work conceived in highly visceral and passionate terms.

Weren’t any contemporary videotapes available to help put the life back in this show? How about Burden’s 1972 “TV Hijack” tape--one of the few pieces in the show from anywhere outside New York--in which Burden threatened the life of “captive” curator Phyllis Lutjeans if the station discontinued live TV transmission of his performance. Does this morsel of video verite still exist?

Also missing is a cogent, up-to-date analysis of the different varieties of “illegal” art and the way it actually operates, both in the art world and the “real” world. (How many of the artists actually believed themselves to be accountable to the law, whether or not they agreed with it? Are artists’ illegal actions somehow different from other forms of civil disobedience?)

In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, artists’ provocations were part of a larger picture that included the actions of media pranksters. Yet, while art was increasingly joining the “real” world, the world wasn’t paying that much attention to art. Numerous artists’ provocations occurred in galleries, away from the public gaze. Artists were still making work acknowledged mostly by a tiny, supportive coterie, broken only by a brief flurry of headlines resulting from an arrest or conviction.

But times change. A notion of art as a big-ticket industry has infiltrated public consciousness. In a conservative climate, some artists have been accused by members of actively poisoning our society. Widespread denunciations have made certain highly provocative works as famous as the “Mona Lisa,” yet gross misconceptions persist about even the basic content of the maligned work. With the addition of well-argued essays on such subjects, “Illegal America” would be much more valuable as a book.

Otis/Parsons Gallery: 2401 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 251-0555, to July 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Us and Them: Some of the most fruitfully provocative art today presents a very pristine and deadpan exterior. In recent work, Gary Simmons, a young New York artist, is prodding issues of race and power with an increasingly subtle sting. “Mr. Klan Man,” a statue of a white-robed Klansman with a metal hoop stuck in his fist, stands on a grass plot surrounded by a white picket fence.

The figure recalls garden statues of little black servant boys, which once served as routine quasi-functional ornaments--holding a house number, perhaps--on white middle-class “estates.” The hoop effectively debases an image of a person who sees himself as a member of a master race into a utilitarian object to be used at the owner’s pleasure: an inanimate slave.

A hanging pair of plush white terry-cloth robes embroidered in gold script have the look of slightly kitschy yuppie accouterments. But rather than the usual “His” and “Hers,” the designations are “Us” and “Them.” An intimate garment associated with sports clubs and luxury hotels, a robe is a prime vehicle to express the sort of casual racism that seeps out when people relax with members of their own social set.

Images of a pair of natty-looking crows in two of Simmons’ works seem to allude to both the oppressed and the oppressor: the twin histories of black and blackface vaudeville performers, the rueful expression to eat crow , meaning “to admit an error,” and “Jim Crow,” the negative term for discrimination and segregation, named after a black minstrel song.

In drawings from the “Erasure Series,” the twin crows seem to be vanishing off the page, rubbed out slowly by an unseen, all-powerful hand. An installation, whose title pairs an expletive with “Hollywood,” consists of a row of shoes on shoeshine stands (bootblacking being a “black” occupation in America, performed in a subservient, stooped position). The shoes are draped with cloths embroidered with the images of performers and others--Al Jolson, D.W. Griffith, Elvis, Heckle and Jeckle--who ripped off black culture or portrayed it falsely. The depth of rage in such work takes awhile to sink in, making it all the more effective as the product of a complex skein of thought.

Roy Boyd Gallery: 1547 10th St., Santa Monica, (213) 394-1210, to July 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.