ART / CATHY CURTIS : An Artist Does Violence to Violence : Colombian Reflects on Death in Her Native Land at Chapman’s Guggenheim Gallery

Fact: In 1992, 28,000 homicides were reported in Colombia, making that South American country the world’s most violent territory not involved in a civil war.

Fact: Nearly 3,000 police agents were killed by guerrillas, drug traffickers and criminals in Colombia between 1982 and 1992.

Fact: Human rights groups in Colombia accuse police agents--who are part of the armed forces, and not subject to civilian overview--of carrying out “social cleansing” operations, in which street children, beggars, prostitutes and homosexuals are killed.

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Violence is everywhere today. Senseless death happens on gang-ruled streets of Los Angeles and in countries locked in bitter nationalist and religious conflicts. But what must it be like to live in the homicide capital of the world?

In “Cemetery,” a spare installation at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University in Orange (through Nov. 24), Colombia-born artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso has arranged artificial red anthurium, roses and lilies so that they poke horizontally through grids of holes in the walls, on which the arched outlines of crypts were drawn lightly in pencil. The piece refers to Day of the Dead ceremonies, which occur every Monday in Colombia: Mourners at mausoleums sing to the dead and place bouquets in slots provided in the rows of tombs.

Positioned as though they somehow are growing sideways out of barren walls, the blossoms in the piece are not only heartfelt tributes but also ritual devices and ironic gestures. Cardoso links the aura of ritual connected with grieving to rituals (the minimalist grid, hand-drawn lines) connected with art-making.

While the dead are unseen and their earthly resting places are indicated by the faintest of pencil lines, the artificial flowers have a distinct and palpable reality, casting double or triple shadows as if figuratively foreshadowing deaths to come.

In a world of violent death, the rules of life change. Beliefs turn upside down; the unthinkable becomes natural.

Another piece by Cardoso--displayed somewhat jarringly in the midst of “Cemetery”--is “Soccer Ball.” Two plastic hemispheres shaped like portions of the brain, radiated with fissures, are awkwardly stuck together to make a ball. Next to it, a length of plastic tubing curls on the floor.

The association of death and sport has come to be a truism in South America, where the game itself is far less brutal than the drunk, chronically unemployed spectators who sometimes kill each other in post-game melees. The plastic tubing vaguely suggests disconnected life-support systems. More significantly, the image of the brain as a soccer ball--the notion of human intelligence as no more than a plaything to be kicked around by hell-bent team players, is quietly horrific.

Last year, in a Santa Monica gallery, Cardoso showed a piece made of bleached cow bones organized on the floor in geometric patterns. Exotic though it seemed, the piece actually mimics a form of decoration common in Colombia.

Cardoso’s art is so subtle and so specific to her homeland that it can be quite baffling to the uninitiated. But it provokes questions about the cultural forces that cause death to be viewed in particular ways in particular places.

In the United States, mainstream culture sanitizes death, substituting euphemisms even in the context of the mortuary, while the medical establishment views death as a form of defeat.

In other societies, death often is acknowledged as a powerful but natural force. But perhaps no set of cultural habits is adequate to deal with violent death as an everyday way of life.

* “Cemetery,” an installation by Maria Fernanda Cardoso, remains through Nov. 24 at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Hours: Noon to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. Free. (714) 997-6729. *

TAKE TWO: A couple of weeks ago, I gave what turned out to be a rambling, scattershot talk about newspaper art criticism to students at Chapman. My big mistake was to say I loved being interrupted by questions. That’s true, but I’d never before been asked so many, so fast and furiously, with the result that I drifted from my notes and probably wound up making few coherent points.

While I have no idea what, if anything, the students got anything out of the event, I was startled by the intense and angry questions of one woman student. She was outraged--in the way that most of us are in college, when the follies of a world run by grown-ups are exposed in all their glaring unfairness--that I am not an artist and yet write art reviews.

How could I possibly understand what artists go through, she wanted to know. Her gloom seemed more appropriate to someone who had undergone a decade of dismissive reviews, rather than to a student just beginning to evolve her own means of expression.

She also wanted to know what I had in mind for a specific body of art when I reviewed it. Was I proposing that it be included in a museum exhibition? That it be sold to someone? I explained that I was not concerned with those matters; I was simply registering my feelings about the work.

I could see how a student might confuse published art criticism with a studio critique, which is quite a different thing. In the studio, a teacher has only students’ interests at heart, and may suggest ways they may rethink or rework their projects. Having gone through their own struggles with making art, teachers can serve to some extent as role models.

Art critics, on the other hand, generally don’t write specifically for artists but for a much broader public. Our role is not specifically to nurture or direct artists’ careers, although we’re delighted to find exciting new work and tell the world about it. We have all sorts of backgrounds (mine is in art history) but we share a belief in the value of expressing opinions about art as a spur to thought about the field as a whole.

Someone else wanted to know why I didn’t call up artists to ask them to explain their work when I was baffled by their points of reference. That’s because I believe that the work must speak for itself--otherwise, why make art?

Art criticism is a written form of the transaction that happens each time a viewer spends time considering a work of art--a blend of perceptions, knowledge, beliefs and experiences.

It is true, on the other hand, that some works require viewers to understand certain ideas about art as a whole. One aspect of postmodern art is that it presumes viewers are savvy about the history of style and the debased status of imagery in a world full of reproductions.

Artists’ statements can be helpful, although many seem irrelevant and pompous. Past reviews by thoughtful, articulate critics sometimes help to illuminate aspects of the artist’s work not visible in the work at hand. But most artists are not fortunate enough to be written up with such care. It is true that much of what masquerades as criticism is vague, dull or ranting prose.

Another student wondered about the “power” of art critics, which I said I believed to be relatively minimal.

Consider how few people actually read art criticism, and how few readers actually buy the art or even see the shows. The cultural and economic impact of theater reviewers and movie critics is doubtless much greater. Consider also what little attention was paid to the most ardent remarks of the critical establishment supporting socially daring art that was condemned by right-wingers in recent years.

In a way, this state of affairs is a positive thing. No single art critic makes or breaks anybody’s career. That role belongs to a bigger group of tastemakers working over a period of years--top dealers and heavyweight museum curators and big-circulation media--who may choose to give artists “exposure” or ignore them completely.

Being written about inevitably means being in some way misunderstood or given short shrift. (No writer is likely to care as much about your work as you do.) Sometimes it means gaining a new perspective or being praised. Being ignored for awhile may be a secret boon, a way of just doing your work without having to live up (or down) to anything. The unfortunate thing is that some artists begin to believe that--like the tree falling in the forest that no one hears--their work doesn’t really exist if no one writes about it.

In a world that runs on publicity, it’s harder to have faith in your art if it gets no printed recognition. The only answer is that good work eventually does get noticed, and it may be just as well that nobody felt like writing about the stuff you did before you figured out what you really wanted to say.

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HAPPY DAYS?: Worth noting, in an otherwise unremarkable three-person show at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, is Mary L. Thamann’s photo-and-text piece, “Leaders of Tomorrow 1959.” It consists of grainy blow-ups of black-and-white head shots from a 1959 high-school yearbook interspersed with current photographs of some of the graduates and fragments of interviews with them.

Each interview adds a piece to the puzzle of what happened at a dude ranch and nearby motel somewhere in the United States in 1959--a graduation bash involving quantities of booze and sex, including an apparent gang rape and the possible complicity of a teacher.

“I wasn’t even there when all that stuff went on,” one person says. “She claimed a bunch of them did it.”

“We had 25 or 30 guys in the (motel) room,” another remembers. “We were just playing cards and being quiet,” says still another. “I do remember her bathing suit being dirtier every time she came down (the hill),” says someone else. “She never did bring charges. It just ruined her reputation. . . . The school supposedly paid for her hospital care . . ., “ another graduate recalls.

“Each photograph or text is interchangeable with any other,” Thamann writes in her accompanying note (which also states that the photos of the adults do not “relate directly” to the yearbook pictures). In this way, the artist increases the aura of mystery in the piece and also gives the speakers anonymity (extending to their gender identity) while retaining the period look of the squeaky-clean yearbook images.

The piece seems to be about several things, including the social dynamic of participating in “forbidden” events (many people were there but none of the speakers claim any awareness of what happened to the woman) and the prevailing social standards (the woman was chastised, but apparently not the man or men who may have raped her).

Other intriguing aspects of the event recalled by the piece are the selective habits of memory, the persistence of stereotyping, the need--even among good students and model citizens--to rebel, the speed of gossip in the closely knit, repressive world of ‘50s suburbia (one student’s mother said, “It’s all over town, what happened”) and the accompanying censure and secrecy.

What makes the piece work is Thamann’s refusal to play moralist or nudge the viewer toward a particular point of view. The combination of presumably genuine recollections about a credible event and the utterly evenhanded tone of the piece piques viewers’ curiosity and generates thoughts that a more didactic presentation would short-circuit.

* “Leaders of Tomorrow” by Mary Thamann is part of a three-person exhibition, through Nov. 19, at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Space 111, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana. Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday. Free. (714) 549-4989.