ROOMS WITH MANY VIEWS : Third Newport Biennial Exhibits Wildly Diverse Ways of Questioning the System

When most of us were kids, life was neatly organized by rules hardly anybody questioned. Father knew best, America was the land of freedom and opportunity for everyone, Wonder Bread built bodies 12 ways. As adults, the world began to seem infinitely more complex. And yet some of the same old patterns of narrow thinking are still with us. It’s only natural, after all, to insist on seeing the world from a familiar and comfortable perspective.

The link uniting the wildly diverse California artists whose seven installations compose “Third Newport Biennial: Mapping Histories” at Newport Harbor Art Museum is the urge to demonstrate that any one set of rules is bound to be a fallible instrument by which to measure the world. Ultimately, most of these artists are concerned with the connection between making rules and wielding power.

Artists Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez (who work together) and May Sun are particularly concerned with the different (often conflicting) images and beliefs of people in the mainstream (primarily white Americans) and people historically deprived of power (Mexican and Chinese immigrants). Deborah Small and Nayland Blake use literary references to examine historical and contemporary views of sexual mores.

In “Of Color,” David Bunn superimposes two systems on top of each other--a color spectrum and a world map--in a lighthearted demonstration of the way a consumer society colors the world with its own convenient point of view. An American marketing group gave geographical names (“African Brown,” “China Green”) to its new batch of colors, so Bunn plotted each color on the gallery walls according to the position and relative size of each location on a world map.

Standing in a little wooden lookout perch in the middle of the gallery, viewers match up an array of color chips with the patterns of color on the wall--an activity that effectively transforms them into dry-land navigators, charting a course through a decorator’s blandly idealized world.

But two other artists in the show have little or no visible political agenda. Connie Hatch employs quotations from women associated with the museum in a way that points out how many strands of experience--how many separate and different viewpoints--exist behind the seemingly monolithic facade of an art institution. And Greg Colson’s shyly inventive constructions are mostly about the way the inventive mind reclassifies and reinvents experience.

Not all these artists are equally successful at stating their case in a compelling and cogent way, but all demand considerable time and effort from the viewer. A closer look:

The major portion of “Entrance Is Not Acceptance: A Conceptual Installation,” by Lou and Sanchez, consists of a long row of doors. They lead either to closet-like rooms covered in impassioned writing (transcriptions of interviews with undocumented workers and others) or to a larger area where three TV monitors and a slide show offer a barrage of information about Mexicans who cross over the Mexican-U.S. border and Americans who want to control the flow of emigres. There is also a wall covered with newspaper clippings about minorities, mingled with ironic snippets from ads (“Own a Piece of History”)--a none-too-original gambit.

The many doors leading nowhere in particular are obvious--maybe too obvious--metaphors. The cramped spaces, in which a viewer is obliged to turn in a tiny spiral in order to read texts winding across all four walls, are apparently attempts to simulate a tiny portion of the discomfort (though not the terrible fear, tension or worry) felt by immigrants.

But the most telling portion of the piece is the low-key reminiscence of a middle-aged man in one of the videos. He remembers his father, a Mexican immigrant, “with that humble little smile, trying to get along.” He remarks how he always knew he was an outsider when people would say, “ ‘Are you, um . . . Spanish? ‘ They would hesitate to say Mexican. “ And he recalls the time he dined at a swank restaurant, got up to go to the men’s room, and was accosted by a man at another table who asked him for a glass of water.

In contrast, Sun’s installation, “Underground,” has a cool, almost impersonal veneer. Oranges in crates line the walls. A spiral path bordered by used rakes and hoes, “planted” upside-down in the floor leads to blowups of two vintage photographs of Chinese agricultural laborers and their white American overseers. A contemporary image of an Asian woman peddling fruit on a busy intersection glows brightly on a back-lit screen. Small maps show the major home counties of Chinese immigrants and the major locations (mostly in California) of anti-Chinese violence in the United States in the late 19th Century.

Clearly, the viewer is meant to weigh the various connotations of all these objects--the burnished nostalgia of old photos and old tools, the sensory pleasure of the oranges, the cold factuality of the maps, the labor conditions represented by the photos, the entrapment represented by the spiral. Partly because Sun offers no concrete information about the workers’ conditions, no visceral appeal to our sympathies, the sensory and nostalgic aspects of the work remain paramount. It would be tempting to dismiss the piece on those grounds, but that’s exactly what the piece is about--our ability to throw history into pretty soft-focus, to see what we want to see.

Small’s “Our Bodice, Our Selves” traces a persistent myth about relations between the sexes--the savagely sexy noble savage (an American Indian) who forces beautiful young civilized white women to do his bidding. One wall-filling grid of texts and images looks back to the 18th Century, with images of stern white men in platter collars and quotes from ravished pioneer maidens (“he gave me a bisquit which I put in my pocket . . . fearing he had put something in it to make me love him”).

Another set of objects and images, drawn from 19th- and 20th-Century popular culture (from book jacket illustrations to a Davy Crockett-style raccoon cap), mirror stereotypes of the Indian and his milieu. And a third set consists of covers of the contemporary pulp romances known as “bodice rippers”--images of swarthy men committing swaggering “romantic” violence.

Popular (white) culture buys into the notion of a higher sexual quotient for nonwhite men--and an accompanying greater magnitude of violence, fear and allure. By placing this alienating, violence-glorifying perspective in a historical context, Small shows just how deep-rooted it is. The urge to domesticate and denature nature--to translate it into the garishly fake sculptures of flowers, cacti and deer included in this exhibit, for example--is the flip side of this urge to find evil in what is different and unknown.

In “The Philosopher’s Suite,” Blake also revisits the 18th Century, the era of the Marquis de Sade, author of “Philosophy in the Bedroom,” an over-the-top treatise on sodomy and the rights of man. Blake’s piece consists of a stage set (a backdrop reminiscent of the cavernous architectural prints of Piranesi, a few chairs and a ladder covered with books) and an “audience” of blindfolded or mutilated marionettes hanging on the wall, accompanied by shelves of, er, tongue-in-cheek sexual props (asparagus stalks, hotdogs).

The marionettes--which all look vaguely 18th Century--are named after real people whose work either involved personifying outre aspects of life (Hans Bellmer, the erotically fixated Polish-French artist; Joe Dallesandro, a star in Andy Warhol’s films) or portraying the solid citizen (Margaret Dumont, the actress who played the overstuffed matron in Marx Brothers comedies).

For some reason, Blake abandoned his original plan of including samplings from the De Sade text in the piece. That’s unfortunate; being able to read the old libertine’s words for ourselves might have made the installation somewhat less mysterious.

“The Philosopher’s Suite” appears to be a meditation on the essentially theatrical nature of taboo behavior when it leaves the private realm (the bedroom) and is exposed to public scrutiny. De Sade lived--by the skin of his teeth--through the French Revolution, a time of enormous social upheaval, public condemnation and furious repression. Similarities with the sexual-artistic-fundamentalist rifts of our own times might be suggested here.

Hatch’s “Sightlines” is literally and figuratively about points of view. Alluding to the 13 women who founded the museum, Hatch asked 13 anonymous female museum staff and board members for such information as birthplace, residence, height and the high and low points of their lives. She also included herself for some reason--possibly as a “control”? (Photographs of the women, with their names omitted, are shown elsewhere in the exhibit.)

It turned out, despite some evasive responses, that these women generally viewed illness as the low point of their lives. It’s tempting to surmise that illness represents an extreme deprivation of power and will. High points were more diverse: travel, family pleasures, sensory experiences (like underwater swimming)--clearly, there are many ways to feel fulfilled and empowered.

Ultimately--despite its amusing guessing-game component for viewers who know people at the museum--the piece seems at once overly didactic and unresolved. Did we really need the image of a lighthouse and a pair of binoculars or the slide show of seemingly random images from Newport Harbor’s history? Isn’t the main point about minor height differences the way others observe us, rather than the level at which we see things?

And what are we to infer about the relationship of personal life to public role when the group of women chosen embody a such a broad range of institutional clout and experience? There might have been more for a viewer to chew on if an equal number of men associated with the museum were asked the same questions.

Colson is the only artist in the group who makes individual works rather than installations. Using weathered, humble materials--a tire, thrift store underwear, strips of wood and metal--he superimposes systems we’ve developed for completely different areas of life. But somehow the combinations produce a new kind of cockeyed (some might say poetic) logic.

For example, “Organization of Knowledge” consists of three old lunch boxes, one marked with numerical classifications reminiscent of the Dewey Decimal System, one painted with the names of subject areas (“social studies, language . . . “) and one with no added inscriptions. Lunch boxes, of course, are associated with school, where such subjects are taught. Here, the boxes are stand-ins for the student’s brain as a tabula rasa (the box with no markings on it) and our compartmentalized system of education.

The sometimes not entirely accurate descriptions of the pieces that serve as wall texts don’t help the viewer’s heavy workload in this show. (They were written on the basis of what the artists said they were going to do, but in some cases these plans changed.) Anyone really interested in the content of the exhibit would do well to buy the catalogue, especially for Buzz Spector’s delicious essay on Colson.

Still, “Mapping Histories”--which was organized by assistant curator Marilu Knode and Anne Ayres, gallery director at Otis/Parsons School of Art and Design in Los Angeles--offers an excellent chance to become engrossed in the meaning of contemporary art as it relates to real life, and the choices and decisions we make every day.

What: “Third Newport Biennial: Mapping Histories,” seven installations by eight California artists.

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, through Jan. 5.

Where: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach.

Whereabouts: Take Jamboree Road to Santa Barbara Drive, just north of the Coast Highway. Turn off Santa Barbara to San Clemente.

Wherewithal: $3 adults, $2 students and seniors; $1 children 6 to 17. Free for everyone on Tuesdays.

Where to call: (714) 759-1122.