Art Review : Ideas ‘Under Construction’ at Armory

There’s an insistent sense of a changing world. When circumstances alter, the effects quickly trickle down to the individual. Questions of intimate personal identity are raised. What must we do to cope? What happens if we rebel and refuse to get in line?

All that is the theme of a new exhibition at Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts. Titled “Under Construction: rethinking images of identity,” it was organized by guest curators Michael Anderson and Sue Spaid .

The show is worth seeing but comes at the price of some noticeable irritations. Most of the 11 artists are represented by several works, often thematically related. Instead of hanging individual artist’s pieces together, they are separated and spaced out, impeding the viewer’s ability to get the message.

Maybe somebody thought this would be a clever way to dramatize the sense of social and personal fragmentation that is at the heart of the exercise, but it just makes a muddle that is sometimes both strident and incoherent.

Hugh Steers, for example, shows four paintings of two men done in a brushy style reminiscent of Eric Fischl. Depicted in the bedroom or bath of a sparsely furnished, run-down dwelling, one is usually nude, the other dressed in a white surgical gown and matching woman’s high heels. His forearm bears a bandage as if he’s just received a surgical injection. Since he tends to float in space, there is a suggestion he’s high. A catalogue entry explains that it’s all one guy.

Steers’ message has to do with an AIDS patient who copes by escaping into his imagination, “flirting, dancing, flying and playing dress-up games” in order to preserve some of life’s joys. That’s very moving once it’s clear. The fact one has to read a text to get it is not good news.

The installation only exacerbates a general problem in an art world that now wants to deal in specific narrative after decades of purposefully oblique visual communication. It’s lost the ability of a Hogarth or Goya to communicate themes with pictures. The gifted and gritty John Valadez comes close to having it both ways in his pastels.

“Rosa” simply depicts a dark-skinned woman. You can tell everything you need to know about her from her flaccid flesh, the way her red dress fits, and the look in her eyes. Someone approaching has incited her suspicion. Maybe he wants her body, maybe the money she holds. He’ll have neither.

“The Chase” is a diptych. Its larger half is crowded with a mass of men who look like workers on the verge of becoming outcasts. They march, robot-like, toward the other panel. It’s full of classical nudes who seem to recoil from the advance. With just that Valadez makes his point.

Traditional Western civilization is under siege by hostile social forces. The late David Wojnarowicz spent his last years fighting indifference to AIDS. It’s not easily apparent that was his reason for attacking the press in “The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of the U.S.A.” He did much better in “Late Afternoon in the Forest.” A keen Expressionist painting, it shows a bird-headed airplane wrecked in a burned-out forest dotted with signs of primal civilizations.

Marginalized to one corner is a photograph of the Greek Acropolis--another prediction of the decline of Western civilization and the rise of a threatening new world.

This is not an exhibition with amusing intent but some artists manage a bit of mordant levity. Carole Caroompas uses traditional literary icons to good effect in “Hester and Zorro: In Quest of a New World; Sacrilegious Moth.” The coupling of the adulteress hero of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” with the popular fop-swashbuckler of the movies raises question about gender roles that are as funny as they are pertinent.

Adrian Piper has carved out a comfortable place between Warhol and Baldessari. There she uses her cool to make our blood run cold about the persistence of racial prejudice.

Monica Majoli’s obsessive, ritualistic paintings on odd sexual themes sum up a tension that runs through this exhibition. It’s so intense it’s easy to miss the essential gentleness of works by Catherine Howe and Joseph Santarromana, Laura Howe’s pure enthusiasm and the innocent romanticism of Kerry James Marshall.

* Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, through March 12, closed Mondays; (818) 792-5101.