TASTY TAPE : At ‘Choice Encounters,’ the Videos Steal the Show

Elegant geometric paintings by Wassily Kandinsky in the same gallery as films of dancing geometric shapes, shot by Oscar Fischinger (who collaborated on “Fantasia”)? Not every small museum has the resources to show such works side by side.

But that’s the kind of eclectic collection that the Long Beach Museum of Art owns, and the current exhibit, “Choice Encounters,” (through Feb. 14) wisely takes full advantage of it. Artfully dodging the spotty nature of the museum’s holdings, curators Noriko Gamblin and Carol Ann Klonarides group works by famous and little-known artists in ways that allow their strengths--or at least their subject matter--to reinforce one another. Even lesser works at least offer a broader context for a particular style or approach to materials.

One gallery offers a taste of the development of early California modern art, with canvases by pioneering abstract painter Lorser Feitelson and his wife, Helen Lundeberg; a minor, not yet completely abstract work by Karl Benjamin, and a jaunty early painting by Fischinger.

The two small Lundeberg paintings, from the late ‘50s, show the shadow-striped interiors of her dreamy Post-Surrealist period evolving into the flat color fields that would mark her later work. In the Feitelson paintings, both from 1963--more than a decade after he began working in a strictly abstract style--hard-edged serpentine shapes evoking bodies in motion slice rapidly through bright flat fields of color.

Too bad John McLaughlin’s yellow-and-white untitled painting from 1956--a sublimely meditative work representative of the high point of Southern California geometric abstraction--is not included in this grouping.

It hangs in another, larger gallery, near the monitor that screens the delightfully retro Feininger films, which include a primitive commercial enlivened by dancing cigarettes. After these brief animated abstractions, the tape segues to pulsing, computer-created abstract videos by several contemporary artists. Most compelling is “Voice Windows,” in which the dimensions of the computer imagery (by Steina Vasulka) are altered by the startlingly inhuman sounds of vocal artist Joan LaBarbara.

The artists’ videos are the best aspect of the exhibit, and it’s great to see them integrated into the gallery groupings as well as in the video screening room--making it more likely that a video-shy visitor might fall under their spell. (One thing the curators seem to have forgotten, however, is a standing person’s relatively short attention span in a gallery. Please, bring on the chairs!)

In a second-floor gallery devoted mainly to paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture that literally or metaphorically evoke the human body, the videos represent another facet of body-conscious exploration in art.

The stationary works in this gallery range from Abraham Walkowitz’s romantically disheveled, untitled drawing from about 1911 of early modern dance doyenne Isadora Duncan to Tony DeLap’s pair of sinuous floor-hugging sculptures, “Tango Tangles III” from 1966. Other artists represented in this uneven grab bag include Pablo Picasso, Bruce Nauman and Joyce Treiman.

But the real treat (for open-minded and patient viewers, anyhow) is on the small screen. The videos include excerpts from Harry Kipper’s amusingly witless exercise in infantile vulgarity “Up Yer Bum With a Bengal Lancer”; brief untitled works by Wolfgang Stoerchle in which he rolls his body in a big roll of paper and wiggles off his clothes without using his hands, and Joan Jonas’s hypnotic “Vertical Roll,” in which the repetitive imagery (portions of Jonas’ body, mostly) moves slowly in vertical formation, frame by frame, to the accompaniment of a banging spoon.

Thanks to the personal interests of former video arts curator David Ross--now director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York--the museum’s greatest strength lies in its collection of wildly adventurous tapes made during the video explosion of the ‘60s.

As a result, viewers intrigued by the sly menace of Chris Burden’s 1973 lithograph “Dos Equis” hanging downstairs (the words “If you Drive” are written above a photograph of two burning Xs, evoking the beer symbol as well as Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings) can check out his “TV Tapes” in the screening room upstairs.

One of Burden’s 10- and 30-second TV spots--which actually ran on stations in Los Angeles and New York in the ‘70s--shows Burden crawling on his stomach on asphalt littered with broken glass, a performance piece he called “Through the Night Softly.”

The rest of the TV-related videos showing in the screening room--by numerous other artists--also are pretty wild.

Especially worth a check-out: “The Eternal Frame,” a re-creation of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It was done by T.R. Uthco and the Ant Farm, a group from the Bay Area, with a male actor playing Jackie and much behind-the-scenes irreverence.

Produced to raise questions about the role of TV in shaping our comprehension of current events, the video is by turns “disturbing and entertaining,” as a viewer remarks at the San Francisco screening. (In pseudo-documentary style, the video also incorporates interviews with viewers, during the taping of the action in Dallas as well as after the screening.)

Other video nuggets include Bill Viola’s “The Reflecting Pool” (screened in its own room on the second floor)--which offers a magical vision of time at once flowing and suspended in nature--and Ilene Segalove’s “The Mom Tapes.”

These amusingly deadpan slices of suburban life are screened a few feet away from Robert Frank’s 1956 photograph “Long Beach, California,” an utterly banal view of a car shrouded in a protective cover and parked next to an ugly, flat-topped dwelling landscaped with a couple of palm trees. That kind of juxtaposition is exactly what makes this show tick.