ART REVIEWS : ‘People’ Links Up With Real World

“Working W/ People,” a sometimes touching exhibition at the Municipal Art Gallery, dramatizes a contemporary paradox.

These days it seems everyone wants to be considered a member of a special category. Usually, these classifications are based on singular characteristics visited on individuals who belong to a particular gender or race, prefer companions of the same sex, or who just happen to be young, old or ill.

This current tendency to withdraw into coteries stands in sharp contrast to what the Barnsdall Park exhibition tells us about the state of art. It seems to signal a sphere that has surrendered self-selection in favor of ecumenical inclusion. The exhibition is composed of conceptually based projects by 13 artists who do their thing by going out of the studio into the real world and become engaged with other human beings. It might be regarded as a species of updated Social Realism.

Peter Reiss, for example, presents a series on Alzheimer’s disease. Photographic portraits of its victims are accompanied by wall labels. They tell how these formerly useful members of society have been robbed of the pleasures of lives honorably lived by a scourge that takes away their humanity.

Robert Corbin examines one sort of living purgatory in a photo essay on the homeless. Pamela Fong looks at victims of child abuse.

Video cameras are brought to bear on the ills of the society. Gary Glassman took his into Children’s Hospital, a place he had feared as a theater of suffering and death and came to love as a place of healing.

Several of the artists examine society through its institutions. Wendy Clarke went to the California Institute for Men at Chino where she videotaped interviews with inmates. She showed them to Southland citizens on the outside, recorded their responses which she screened for the guys in the slammer, who again taped their rejoinders, thus setting up an ongoing electronic conversation. Tom Skelly’s “Hall of Mirrors” broadcasts conversations with prisoners. Stephen Axelrad used interactive videodisc technology to make a portrait of a local community college.

Faced with such material, even the most case-hardened aesthete has the empathy to know that this is not the moment to drag out his little box of fastidious, arty, precision measuring devices and start fussing about a bit of overexposure here or some smudged color there. More pressing issues are at play.

Unfortunately, the exhibition doesn’t let it go at that.

By now, close watchers of local talent are familiar with Nancy Webber’s ongoing “Life Imitates Art” series. She finds real people who look like noted works of fine art, poses them appropriately and makes a deft photographic comparison. The wittiest one here is her discovery that Bay Area Funk sculptor Robert Arneson is a virtual double for a Cezanne portrait.

Webber’s work is amusing but it is purely about aesthetics and art history. Set her next to a heartfelt social essay on displaced Vietnamese by Dan Veneciano and Dung Ahn Diep and one of them is a clanging tank.

There is a rather arch project by Carol Vena-Mondt. She advertised in the classifieds for artists to do her family’s portrait from a group photo. The nine results on view are an entertainment for the hip who enjoy a current fashion for thrift-shop art.

There is social text in Laura Aguilar’s essay on people clothed and unclothed, but it is just as much an exercise in Punk style.

Kim Abeles’ installation, “Long Exposures,” is part lab and part memorabilia shrine. It concerns the ruminations of an artist in her later years and is part art and part social history. The radical contrast of sensibility in “Working W/ People” creates cognitive dissonance that leads to two unpalatable conclusions. In this context, the aesthetically minded artists on view look like a bunch of heartless artniks who don’t care about people. Meantime, the socially minded artists look like frustrated journalists not quite good enough to pass muster in a magazine.

Since neither of these is quite accurate or fair to the artists, the problem has to lie with the Muni’s image of itself. It might be able to get away with being a community oriented cultural center addressing social issues part of the time and an art gallery another part of the time.

It can’t be both at once.

Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, 4804 Hollywood Blvd., (213) 485-4581, through March 29. Closed Mondays.

Memorial Exhibition: Joyce Treiman never flinched. For over a quarter century she was L.A.’s favorite maverick figurative artist, painting like an Old Master who’d lived to know and understand the absurdities of the modern world. When she lost a lung to cancer in 1982 her friends thought the end was near. Instead, she lived almost 10 years, getting friendly with death, painting it in her studio garage in the Pacific Palisades. She died last June.

A memorial exhibition consists of over 90 previously unshown works including her last paintings. They are small. She said she was tired of the rhetoric of big paintings. In some ways, they recapitulate her career. There are spectral figures of clowns, wrestlers and guys in derbies who look like Pinkerton men. The landscapes are the best. Calm, foggy ones recall Eugene Boudin. Roiling, explosive sunsets remind us she’d been a gifted abstract painter who gave it up when it was still fashionable.

Treiman was such a heartfelt enthusiast of artists she admired that she alluded to them constantly in her work. Her “Le Chemin Jaune” pays homage to Vincent Van Gogh. Another, depicting a little girl in a rowboat, is an outing with Pierre Bonnard. The title is lettered large into the painting. It’s “Joyeux,” but the way its written it looks like “Joyce.”

* Tortue Gallery, 2917 Santa Monica Blvd., (213) 828-8878, through March 28. Closed Mondays.