Not-So-Striking Resemblances Mark ‘COLA 2000’

It’s always disheartening when exhibitions that are intended to celebrate individualism--that is, cultural diversity in its highest form--are stifled by a sense of homogeneity.

Uniformity comes in various sizes and stripes, and the type that takes shape in this year’s installment of works by the 12 visual artists who received City of Los Angeles--COLA--Individual Artist Grants has less to do with any medium or style than with an overweening embrace of professionalism. The prevalence of pieces that go to great lengths to dress up important social issues, literary texts and philosophical arguments in arbitrary aesthetic costumes makes for a staid, unengaging show that is safe, uninspired and, worst of all, deeply cynical about the transformative power of art.

Exceptions, of course, are present, namely compelling pieces by Ingrid Calame, Carole Caroompas, Robbert Flick and Susan Mogul. But, in general, it would be easier to defend the majority of the paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages and digital prints in “COLA 2000” before a panel of bureaucrats (and their attorneys) than it would be to convince an art lover of their effectiveness.

Although Conceptual art is often valorized for its rigorous, systematic nature, the academic version represented at the UCLA Hammer Museum merely mimics standard bureaucratic operations.

For example, the dimensions of Nancy Buchanan’s series of digitally printed photographs of a few square feet in empty lots around Los Angeles are inversely proportionate to the value of the land picture. That is, the cheaper the land, the larger the artist’s elaborately framed picture.

Despite differences in size, all of the works in this series represent equivalent monetary values--of the land, not the art. It is significant that Buchanan does not factor in the value of her own work, preferring the presumed objectivity of art-as-critique to the unpredictability of art as a desirable and marketable object.

Like a fastidious bookkeeper, John Divola pairs 20 photocopies of various pages from Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” with 20 of his own black and white photographs illustrating passages of the text he has highlighted. This empty exercise in cross-referencing may be of interest to an armchair philosopher but goes nowhere visually.

Likewise, Millie Wilson’s vapid arrangement of various found objects linked by their soft blue hues pretentiously nods to Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin but doesn’t measure up to a tastefully decorated room courtesy Martha Stewart or Ikea.

Daniel Joseph Martinez’s 7-by-5-foot color transparencies mounted on lightboxes depict the artist with his throat slit, his shaved head stitched from ear to ear and his brains being blown out by the blast of a handgun. The most impressive aspect of these shamelessly sensationalistic images is their production values, especially the gory details provided by makeup artists Bari Dreiband-Burman and Tom Burman.

But Martinez’s photos fail to do more than shock. Despite loading their titles with references to Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe and Harold Edgerton, the artist’s in-your-face self-portraits function like movies whose special effects are their only content. The best thing that can be said about them is that they make Andres Serrano look like an important artist.

The heartless, cover-the-bases atmosphere of the exhibition as a whole is due, in part, to the fact that it was essentially organized by a committee. The lifeblood of committees is compromise and plausible deniability, and evidence of such trade-offs abounds in “COLA 2000.”

It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to picture the debates that must have taken place as panelists argued over individual cases. What unites the superficially diverse works here is the seriousness of the ideas on which they’re based. Unfortunately, too many pieces fail to develop these ideas into anything more than good intentions. Although the awards are granted to artists “solely on the merit of their artwork,” to be truthful, the mission statement should read: “solely on the merit of the ideas behind the artwork.”

Paradoxically, the best works begin with dumb ideas--or at least ideas that are difficult to defend without seeing the works’ actual effects on their surroundings. Tracing street and sidewalk stains (Calame); shooting a nonstop video out of a car window (Flick); recording middle-aged women singing a pop ditty about the children they didn’t have (Mogul); and making garish rock-’n’-roll paintings framed with embroidered doilies (Caroompas) do not sound like sufficiently serious endeavors to merit city funding.

But art works in mysterious ways, and the pieces by these four fellowship recipients repay visitors handsomely. Calame’s pink and yellow wall-painting, which extends through two galleries, lifts quotidian mishaps from underfoot, giving the leaks, spills and accidents that make up a large part of the urban environment architectural structure and animated levity. Similarly, Flick’s 3-by-5-foot color prints of hundreds of sequential street scenes (and the videos from which they’re culled) create staccato rhythms that capture the pulse of various boulevards and avenues.

Giving voice to 10 women who chose not to have children, Mogul’s 11-minute video simultaneously offers a hilarious and poignant meditation on all manner of life-choices and the necessity of living with their consequences. Finally, tucked away in a cramped, hallway-like corner, Caroompas’ three rambunctious paintings of heroines and their leading men add some rough-around-the-edges energy to a generally stuffy show.

Calame, Caroompas, Flick and Mogul are more concerned about making raw, unpolished works that engage viewers physically, emotionally and intellectually than in providing the appearance of seriousness. Convinced that art doesn’t simply make abstract propositions, these pragmatic artists carry on as if they actually had the power to transform their surroundings. Rather than wasting the day in explanation, they go right to work, bringing their idiosyncratic visions into the world with as much force as they can muster.

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* UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Westwood, (310) 443-7000, through June 4. Closed Mondays. Adults $4.50.