New Directions, Dead-Ends in ‘Subliminal Fictions’

Most exhibitions encourage audiences to concentrate on the significance of singular art objects. Others cause viewers to ponder the interplay between various works and media. “Subliminal Fictions,” at the Pasadena Armory, does a bit of both, which causes it to be somewhat incoherent.

The show involves some two dozen artists. Eight of them are showing videotapes shot in places as far-flung as New York and Chile. By contrast, more than half the work is in traditional media--drawing, painting, photography and assemblage. Mostly, these are L.A. artists of the slightly less recognized variety, although there are more famous exceptions, such as Michael McMillen.

One of the show’s charms is the way it catches us up on seldom seen veterans as various as Ynez Johnston and Tom Wudl. Johnston continues to work a variation on the art of Paul Klee, made distinctive by intermixing aspects of tribal art. Wudl, best remembered as a maker of delicate paper abstractions, has grown into an imaginative figurative painter. His big “The Rapture of Dionysius” looks like a still from a “Star Trek” movie. It’s a wide-screen galactic explosion. Animals from predators to primates float through cosmic space next to fancy furniture and other man-made objects. The work seems to express a hope that human civilization isn’t going to spoil nature’s endless trouble in getting us evolved.

The pictorial and object-oriented art in the exhibition is notably diverse, but it also has enough in common to coexist uneasily under the banner of Surrealism. It manifests the style’s characteristic tendency to suggest stories told in dreams or in waking realities that feel like nightmares.

Surrealism’s stock in trade has always been mystery and surprise. Neither of those qualities is fostered by familiarity. By now there must be enough of this sort of art to fill countless warehouses, not to mention competition from its inspired past masters and endless co-optation by advertising and film.

Given all that dilution, the major wonder of this part of the exhibition is that any of it can still incite a double-take, an authentic sense of the horrific or a chuckle of insight. F. Scott Hess’ magic-realist “Checkpoint” depicts a Middle Eastern family whose car is detained at an invisible border. Armed civilian guards lurk menacingly. Exaggerated views of tense hands and averted eyes contrast with homey details of the gearshift or a bottle in a basket. By placing the viewer inside the car, Hess induces an sensation of paranoia so convincing that the scene is universalized.

It’s less easy to explain why the work of Sarah Perry, Patty Wickman, Eileen Cowin and a few others is equally compelling. In form, it’s all traditional modernist art rendered in conventional ways. The only sensible conclusion to draw from this is that the work appeals to a basic human fascination with image, narrative and problem-solving.

Video art is something else. The tapes here vary in length from about a quarter- to a half-hour. Those I sampled were at least twice too long and virtually impossible to relate to the rest of the exhibition.

After more than a quarter-century of effort, video art has produced a handful of masters such as William Wegman, Nam June Paik and Bill Viola (whose work is currently surveyed at the L.A. County Museum of Art). In my experience, however, video’s success rate is extraordinarily low.

That may have to do with the fact that the form appears to be based in a negative. Video’s identity seems to derive almost solely from its determination to be different from mainstream television. Conventional storytelling is scorned, visual coherence disdained and technical competence irrelevant. One watches art video in the wan hope that the miraculous will emerge from a combination of cantankerousness and willful ineptitude behind the camera.

That said, there is authentic magic in Jem Cohen’s “The Lost Book Found.” Set in New York, its loopy, stream-of-consciousness dialogue recounts the thoughts of a former street vendor who finds a notebook of enigmatic observations about the city. They come to be the narrator’s personal experience of a commercial metropolis eroding into the rubble of its own discount detritus. Judiciously edited, it would be a masterpiece.

It appears in this and other promising tapes that video is slowly learning that, like any art, its job is not to reject tradition but reinvent it.

Curators for “Subliminal Fictions” were Armory gallery director Jay Belloi, Josine Ianco-Starrels and Carole Ann Klonarides.

* Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena; through Jan. 18, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, (626) 792-5101.