Exposing the Inner Child of U.S. Politics : Review: Kim Dingle’s provocative work uses images of children to debunk myths of our nation’s supposed innocence.

Priss is back. When last seen, eight or nine months ago, the terrible toddler was tearing up Blum & Poe Gallery in Santa Monica, shredding her cuddly stuffed animals, smearing paint and crayon and who-knows-what on the pretty lambs dotting the wallpaper in her nursery, busting up the prison bars of her confining crib with power tools and generally wreaking havoc with malicious glee. Now she’s doing it again, this time at the Otis Art Gallery, in the final room of a six-year survey of artist Kim Dingle’s paintings, sculptures and installation works.

For a fussy porcelain doll dressed in lovely lace, crisp white crinolines and black Mary Janes, Priss has a decidedly ferocious temper.

Priss comes in several versions, black or white, with or without glasses. Her thick bushy hair is made from dense steel wool, which seems particularly tough and unruly against her smooth porcelain skin. Standing with her feet planted apart, as if in grim determination, and with her pudgy little fingers clenched into a baby fist, she exudes all the delicate charm of a pit bull.

Her face keeps you riveted, like a deer in the headlights. It feels pinched, as if the clay had begun to collapse into itself around her nose. Priss’ big eyes are narrowed into diagonal slits above a wide, thin-lipped mouth, which is fixed in a permanent sneer pocked on either end by deep dimples. She looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before, all the while feeling oddly familiar.

Now that Priss is back, as the edgy climax to the enlightening Otis show, she has been given a context that makes the mixed attraction/repulsion of her prickly persona even more richly compelling than before. Surrounded by Dingle’s earlier work, it seems plain that the childish, mean-spirited little devil, who has thrown such a wicked tantrum, is in fact a veiled portrait. You’ve seen that crabbed and pudgy face before, because Priss looks suspiciously like Newt Gingrich decked out in Shirley Temple drag.

Orphanage anyone?

The show offers numerous hints that Dingle’s dolls aren’t purely anonymous little girls. Even if you didn’t notice the small framed photograph of Speaker Gingrich hanging on one of the cribs in the rambunctious nursery installation, her earlier work frankly displays a loopy interest in portraiture, gender reversals, the trauma of childhood and figures from American political history and pop culture, all mixed into an eccentric stew.

A group of altered photographs from 1991 and 1992 show classic figures from American history who have been distinctively transformed. One is a photograph of Abraham Lincoln, painted over to convert “The Great Emancipator” into a portrait of Geronimo, the valiant Apache chief. Another switches George Washington into Annie Oakley, while still others meld the face of Dingle’s grandmother with that of Ronald Reagan and Dingle herself with Jimmy Carter.

In a portrait of Washington in the guise of Dingle’s grandmother, who is further decked out in the role of Queen Elizabeth, the layering of personal and social identity accelerates.

The show also includes various altered baby pictures. Through the painted addition of a hand grenade, a rifle or a pair of boxing gloves on little cutie’s fists, sweet formal photographs of happily cooing babies become quiet, sneak-attack depth-charges. The painted photographs--sort of “kitten with a whip” for the junior set--throw into doubt bland assertions of youthful innocence.

The mixing and matching take a further spin in two funny and eccentric oil paintings. “Portrait of Ed Sullivan as a Young Girl” (1990) shows him/her in an awkwardly iconic, cross-armed pose, ready to emcee the “really big show” of adulthood to come. “Baby Cram Dingle as George Foreman” (1991) fuses a baby picture of Dingle’s white grandma (“Cram”) with one of the bald black fighter, creating a strange but pointed familial legacy for the artist.

The social and political tangle of American history lurks in most of Dingle’s work, and often it’s bound up with images of babies and children. In fact, heavily armed and utterly raucous babies and children.

Dingle sometimes paints on baby blankets and kiddie wallpaper, mingling generically cheerful cultural images with privately traumatic ones. Innocuous pictures of sweetness and light bleed through to permanently tattoo a little girl riding a giant panda, while bucolic scenes of country life are populated with wild girls, one of whom has been hanged in a tree.

The idea of childhood as a placid time of serene innocence and, well, childlike wonder gets shredded in Dingle’s work. When deftly interwoven with assorted icons from American history, the debunking of myths of youthful innocence also lacerates our common pieties about a golden age of guilt-free American life.

Our frequent attempts to identify the cataclysmic event that signals the tragic loss of American innocence--JFK’s assassination, the national humiliation in Vietnam, the scandal of Watergate, the explosion of the space shuttle--show how foolishly ingrained is our naive faith. For how could any nation, founded on near genocide and made wealthy on the backs of slaves, ever have thought itself innocent in the first place?

Dingle has found a distinctive way to explore politics, both public and personal, in her art. Her best paintings and sculptures feel like social observations made by a citizen of this strange republic, because their disparate, ambiguous layers reflect the actual situation of politics in contemporary life. They’re free of one-dimensional hectoring.

While Dingle mounts a wicked satire of current politics, she also asserts her own position. Her sculptural sex-change operation, transforming Gingrich into an angry little girl who is sometimes white, sometimes black, slyly remakes the conservative Southern pol (and former history teacher) into a tiny feminist and champion of civil rights. Priss is furious all right, but her tantrum is far from petty. She emits a righteous yowl.

As she does, she also takes on a variety of recent art. Jasper Johns’s paintings are recalled by dart boards hung up in the nursery, for Priss’ target practice. Her furious, fecal scribbles on the wallpaper put you in mind of Cy Twombly’s art.

It’s Mike Kelley’s work that is probably the most potent precedent for Dingle’s own. His 1989 “Reconstructed History” photographs are pictures culled from high school text books that Kelley drew over and transformed--such as Lincoln made into Charles Manson, whose helter-skelter ranting warned of a race war to come. And his well-known sculptures made from abject and degraded stuffed animals achieved notoriety for their own shrewd assault on American pieties of childhood innocence.

Dingle acknowledges Kelley by way of the tatty stuffed animals strewn about Priss’ squalid nursery. Then she gleefully performs the necessary artistic patricide by yanking out their stuffing and chopping them up with Priss’ handy table saw.

The Priss installation is Dingle’s most significant body of work to date. (A new group of cast-ceramic “John Wayne Cookie Jars” will at the very least cause a slack-jawed double-take.) One hallmark of great portraiture is that it goes to a core of human identity; Priss certainly does that.

Want proof? Dingle’s exhibition opened at Otis while the federal government was shut down because of the budget impasse. Two days before, Speaker Gingrich, recently returned from Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral on a now-notorious flight aboard Air Force One, was on the cover of the New York Daily News next to the insolent headline: “Cry Baby; Newt’s Tantrum.”

A caricature showed the Speaker as a sobbing child in diapers. Hey, they could have just run a picture of Priss.

*

“KIM DINGLE,”Otis College of Art and Design Art Gallery, 2401 Wilshire Blvd. Dates: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Through Jan. 27. Phone: (213) 251-0555.