ART / Cathy Curtis : ‘Perfect Country’ and ‘Blinder Paintings’ Challenge Points of View

As a child in an all-white classroom in the mid-’50s, I watched my teacher pour containers of white, black and yellow paint into a large glass pot.

“This is the melting pot,� she said gaily. “All these different races live happily together in America.� Inside the pot the colors had blended into an ugly gray, but the teacher didn’t seem to notice.

No era, of course, has a monopoly on bland optimism and blinkered thinking. The muddled, unquestioning state of public opinion in today’s age of 10-second TV commercial spots and focus-group marketing is invoked by Los Angeles artist Erika Rothenberg in “America, the Perfect Country,�at the Newport Harbor Art Museum through Sept. 24.

Using techniques perfected in advertising--excited slogans, typecast images of sex and race, sociobabbling statistics--she weds perky texts and colorful images. All the images have the flat, simplified look of cartoons or coloring books--the better to convey the cocoon of happy-talk and comforting stereotype that enables the average person to tune out.

“Make the World Perfect� reads the label on the cutout image of an aerosol can tilting over another of Rothenberg’s story boards. “At last! A way to end war, hunger and disease!� trumpets the first panel, awash in aerosol-sprayed smoke. The next panel shows what life was like “before�: a sad-looking black child with the swollen belly of malnutrition, a morose-looking man being comforted by a Latina with a black eye, dark-skinned guerrilla fighters, houses billowing with smoke, a missile launching. In the “after� panel, a smiling white New York Mets player greets his biracial fans, a white couple gets married, white ballet dancers pose and a blond girl with a teddy bear eats an apple.

Obviously, nothing has changed except a point of view; don’t think about the bad stuff and-- voila!-- it goes away. Rather than simply offering a sweeping indictment of fundamentalist right-wing beliefs, however, Rothenberg locates the ambivalence in even the most ardent liberal heart. Who has not wished the world’s problems would quietly solve themselves so that the pleasant aspects of middle-class existence could be pursued without guilt?

The installation also includes a full-size viewer-interactive miniature golf game, “Which Country Is the Best Country?,� garnished with an eye-catching spinning globe. But although there are six traps, each labeled with the name of a different country, all but one (“U.S.A.�) have been walled up in various clumsy ways to keep balls out.

The artist’s point, of course, is that an American’s seemingly boundless freedom of choice--in art and other matters--is contingent upon policies that are subject to change. Someone in charge can mess with the game (by censoring a potentially controversial exhibition, for example) and thereby circumscribe the range of choices.

By wrapping her message in such superficially unthreatening visual packages, Rothenberg shrewdly gains a lot of ground, co-opting the seductiveness of the very media establishment whose quick fixes and intellectual Pablum she is out to discount.

Fred Fehlau’s “Blinder Paintings,� at Newport Harbor through Oct. 1, are invitations to enter a rigorous discussion about the nature of a work of art. Anyone expecting a dreamy, cosmic experience is advised to look elsewhere.

Although just as dependent on the viewer’s perceptual awareness as “light and space� art, Fehlau’s work is far more autocratic and unrelentingly intellectualized. Each painting offers the viewer a group of sometimes conflicting (and often hard-to-process) visual information that must somehow be assimilated and assembled in the mind.

On the panels are various configurations of identical greenish-black painted bars that line up perfectly at one point but subsequently fall out of sync. There are just enough bars that you can’t easily account for them all without sending your eyes through dizzying calisthenics.

And that’s just for starters. Each surface is actually composed of two layers, the panel and its sailcloth covering, curving (imperceptibly to the eye) in such a way that the bars on the sides of the panel read more sharply than those in the center. The nylon sailcloth works like a theatrical scrim--veiling the shadowy, insubstantial bars painted underneath it on the panel and serving as a backdrop for the bold, slightly textured bars painted on its outer surface.

But wait: There’s more. Aluminum “blinders� attached at either side of each wood panel--most project from the wall at 90-degree angles or are free-standing--firmly delimit the viewer’s gaze at the work. So you are thrust, willy-nilly, into the midst of a shifting play of surfaces and marks that refuses to stand still. In addition, each work actually contains a back-to-back marriage of two double-surfaced painted panels. Which means that the piece is like a hall of mirrors (the light-reflecting aluminum plays its part here, too) that continually shunts the viewer back and forth in a vain attempt to find a central perceptual experience.

And that’s the central riddle of this work. It has no center, no inside or outside in the conventional senses of those terms. Fehlau’s paintings are demon constructs of a mind that revels in the play of ideas and shows no mercy for the impatient, the merely sensual or the philistine viewer.

Erika Rothenberg’s “America, the Perfect Country� remains at Newport Harbor Art Museum through Sept. 24; Fred Fehlau’s “Blinder Paintings,� through Oct. 1. Both exhibits are part of the New California Artists series. The museum is at 850 San Clemente Drive in Newport Beach and is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $3 general, $2 for students and seniors, $1 for children 6 to 17. Admission free for everyone on Tuesdays. Information: (714) 759-1122.

LAGUNA PROJECT GETS LIFE: “The Tell,� the 600-foot-long photomural erected alongside the Sycamore Hills area of Laguna Canyon Road, is featured in the “Snapshot� section of the August issue of Life magazine. Referring to the donated snapshots that compose the mural, the story says the piece “tells an uncensored story of California life, births, deaths and volleyball on the beach. The nudes got top billing--out of sight of the children.�

The piece, devised as an Orange County Centennial project to raise consciousness about the need to preserve the natural environment, is due to be completed by Aug. 19, the day it will be formally dedicated.