ART REVIEW : As England Is Different, So Pictures Reveal

The UK/LA ’88 Festival has brought us the British way of looking at the world through art, but it’s hardly a unified vision. Among other things, the festival has served as a sharp reminder that people under the same government don’t always see eye to eye.

Take the pair of UK/LA photography exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art: a group show called “Mysterious Coincidences: New British Color” and a survey of Michael Kenna’s black-and-white work. Both picture the contemporary landscape (urban and rural), but the views are so divergent that the two shows might have come from opposite ends of the world.

The 10 artists in the color show could hardly be more up to date in their great big prints or more outspoken on issues ranging from the conflict in Northern Ireland and racial tension to rampant consumerism and pollution. They look around them and see the worst, though often with such humor, irony or love of beauty that their work can be a visual delight.

Big orange letters spell out beware on a wall in one of Paul Graham’s Irish landscapes, but such disruptive bits as political posters, dripped paint or trash are tucked away in idyllic countrysides and peaceful-looking towns in his other photographs.

Keith Arnatt makes trash the centerpiece of lush landscapes, while Matthew Dalziel presents peeling paint, sour milk, rotten bananas and industrial waste as formal components of handsome abstractions.

But there’s nothing subtle about Tim Head’s “Toxic Lagoon,” a nasty lake of synthetic foam and coagulated fluids. The same can be said for Ron O’Donnell’s elaborately constructed interiors that collapse under the weight of indulgence and gluttonous consumerism.

Martin Parr’s nosy views of supermarkets and amusement parks might be innocuous if he didn’t insinuate that we are all a bunch of lumps who spend our time stuffing our faces and stocking up on more things to eat. Even the kids in his pictures are grasping consumers or lazy blobs who ride around with the groceries in shopping carts.

Boyd Webb’s work (also on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary) is much more oblique in its questioning of life styles and value systems. In fact, Webb builds such peculiar constructions to be photographed that meaning seems less interesting than appearance. The works at Long Beach include draped forms against starry-sky backdrops. One reads like a telescopic view of the moon with craters containing sausages and a nest of coconuts. This sly mix of the sublime and the vernacular snaps us back to the world of food after a brief departure into the cosmos.

Olivier Richon also sets up situations to be photographed, but his are mock-elegant still lifes, presented with evidence of academic breeding. “Perspectiva Naturalis: Still Life With the Fowl of Icarus,” for example, offers a dead duck with an open book on a draped table.

The mood of witty irreverence is broken by Mitra Tabrizian and Andy Golding who collaborate on somber photographs of human confrontations and barriers. A work with “exchange” printed across the top pictures a black man presenting a piece of paper to a supercilious-looking white man. “You are rich because you are white. You are white because you are rich,” says the message on the paper. “They put the words in his mouth, so why wasn’t he saying what they wanted to hear?” is printed in a corner of the photograph.

The exhibition title, “Mysterious Coincidences” was plucked from Milan Kundera’s novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” according to a catalogue essay. The rationale is that the female protagonist in the book is a photographer who makes no distinction between fine art and photography and that the show reflects the story’s “flow” across social and cultural subjects. Well, OK, but it’s the critical attitude that unifies the exhibition. As the catalogue puts it, the “overwhelming plot” is “a serious questioning of the fabric of British society.”

Michael Kenna, on the other hand, doesn’t ask rude social questions in his photographs. Nor does he see all the ugly stuff. His romance with landscape is so pure that he can make a smokestack look gorgeous or a road resemble a ribbon of moon dust.

Under his sensitive direction, discordant shapes line up in finely tuned compositions, while anything that doesn’t contribute to the dramatic effect disappears into shadows. Yet there’s a sense of freshness about this work that suggests Kenna is sharing sparkling discoveries instead of deft orchestrations of light.

Kenna has lived in San Francisco for the last decade, though he was born in England and still takes most of his pictures there. While he seems more akin to Ansel Adams and Edward Weston than the photographers in “Mysterious Coincidences,” Kenna’s aesthetic is not determined by geography or nationality. It’s a free-floating sensibility that rides the romantic edge of classicism.

He loves the telling simplicity of a starkly ordered landscape and the touch of one open window that points out the regularity of closed ones, but he also gravitates to such mysteries as a foggy abyss, a foaming wave and an aura of light that dissipates into atmosphere. Unconcerned by the fact that his style is unfashionable, Kenna simply makes photographs that take your breath away.

A third exhibition, “New British Video,” offers a two-hour program of recent work by artists and independent producers from the United Kingdom. One caustic--and often hilarious--segment features feminist Germaine Greer portraying Margaret Thatcher as nanny to an infantile nation.

All three shows continue to April 17. The museum is open Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 5 p.m.