ART : Cable-Video Exhibit Is ‘In’ Joke Meaningful to TV Generation : “Media Pranksters” at the Laguna Art Museum uses standard TV-show formats for outspoken commentaries on racial, sexual and political issues.

My brain is fried. My eyes are spinning. I feel like eating a Pop Tart, buying a nebbish doll, redecorating my home in Naugahyde and acquiring Big Hair. I also feel like going somewhere where everybody has taken a vow of silence.

The roots of this malaise are easy to diagnose. I’ve just been watching a few hours of artist-devised madness normally broadcast on public-access TV but now--through March 24--available six days a week, six hours a day at the Laguna Art Museum.

“Media Pranksters: Public Access Art Television” was organized to coincide with the L.A. Freewaves Festival, a celebration of the wild and woolly world of independent video with 44 offerings in March at art spaces throughout Greater Los Angeles, plus programs on numerous cable stations.

Unlike network TV, but often deriving inspiration from the bizarre late-night offerings of “straight” cable, these videos offer outspoken commentaries on racial, sexual and political issues as well as campy programming that revolves around obsessive details of recent pop styles.

There’s no doubt that members of the MTV generation view these efforts much more warmly than their elders, who may wonder what the fuss is about. Talk, talk, talk (much of it about seemingly trivial topics) and busy, busy visuals can be awfully grating over the long haul. But getting with the program means feeling free to drift in and out of consciousness (or in and out of the viewing room) according to your mood.

TV is, of course, a world unto itself, an orgy of undifferentiated information in which the momentous and the trivial are presented with equal emphasis, making it hard to tell them apart. So you look for cues, and on TV those clues are mostly about style. On TV, style becomes substance.

A frequent ploy among the video artists is to use standard TV formats--talk shows, soaps, news, public service announcements, commercials--as a basic vocabulary to be mined for humorous, polemic or deadpan effects. The formats offer countless details of style and delivery that can be imitated in an ironic way that adds a mildly, or radically, subversive new content.

The Laguna show consists of three tapes. Each is about an hour long and offers a smorgasbord of work by several artists. The most successful of these works are either fanatically style-conscious or so stark and strident that they burn their way into your attention.

The few works that don’t conform to either approach--such as “Anima,” Frances Salome Espana’s rough jigsaw of moments from Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations, and Alan H. Nakagawa’s “Hako,” a dancer’s solo given a tepid special-effects treatment--seem awkwardly out of place.

Most fun is Andre Dupuy’s “Barbra! No Tears Please” (Tape I, 19 min.). Barbra and Kent are Barbie and Ken dolls--she’s a concert pianist; he’s a newspaper reporter. They fall in love against a background of (real) crashing surf, but she learns she will die of Steinway syndrome if she continues her career. She persists and dies onstage while Kent watches, powerless. But the tragedy turns out to be only a TV show or, as Barbra says, “a dream.” Same difference.

Dupuy orchestrates this tongue-in-cheek soap with loving attention to detail. From the ‘50s-style, diamond-patterned background of the titles to the arpeggio-laden works Barbra plays and the perky theme music of the show, he gets it all just right. His mingling of stage sets with real-world shots helps create the fantasy-within-a-fantasy world of his doll characters.

Although commercial breaks for Shut Up and Eat It cereal are disappointingly sophomoric, it is funny when Kent--mouthing a script in a celebrity “spot” for the Tournament of Roses Parade--turns to Barbra and asks what “pageantry” is.

As deliberately cliched as the plot is, it holds a kernel of yuppie truth--that women often feel they somehow won’t be lucky enough to maintain both true love and a serious career.

Anyone who has spent listless days in front of the tube can attest to simultaneous feelings of detachment and overload. Such reactions are grist for several of the video makers.

In an excerpt from Brian and Steven Kane’s “The Leisure Channel: Why You Dream What You Dream” (Tape II, 2 min.), a young man in dark glasses sits, still and emotionless, next to some potted plants. The low hum of New Age music vibrates, and a disconcerting message flows across the bottom of the screen.

“I am watching you,” it reads. “I know what you ate. I know your feelings. I know what you wish you knew. . . .” At once absurd and plausible, the message might be issued by the corporate Big Brother of consumer research, the data banks that really do “know” lots of personal things about us.

This is a cool, postmodern invocation of the invisible demons of modern-day life. Indeed, the Kanes call such works “video wallpaper.” They are meant to be both invisible and ubiquitous, slipping into the viewer’s consciousness with the easy electronic hum of all the veiled messages that play in all the living rooms of the land.

Bits and pieces of TV news, past and present, twitch across the screen in Jonathan X’s “Art Maggot Hysteria” (Tape II, 29 min.), a group of brief videos that rage against the treatment of blacks in the United States, political leadership and the institution of war. X’s works depend largely on rhythmic repetition and simple, hypnotic movement for their effect.

In “Bad News Is Good News,” for example, images of Ronald Reagan’s attempted assassination--the former President waving to the crowd, the crowd ducking, police running--play over and over, subdividing into smaller and smaller versions of themselves until the event becomes stripped of meaning. The sound track layers repeated fragments of crowd reaction until the end, when one voice is allowed to have the last--absurd--word.

“If we’re gonna start killing Presidents,” the voice asserts, “we should elect Presidents that have bigger bodies and bigger heads.”

The carefully scripted vacuousness of talk shows also is irresistible to some of the video artists.

“Unwind With the Sweeties” (Tape III, 29 min.) features the verbal warfare of a Los Angeles couple who appear incognito, muffled in woolly masks and eyeglasses with painted-on eyes. Continuously addressing each other as “sweetie” as they trade insults thinly veiled as banter about various trivial topics, the Sweeties sit in an outdoor paradise of chirping birdies, toy rabbits and smiling-face decorations.

If there can be an “in” joke that is meaningful to millions, this is it. And that’s the key to the focus of most of these cable videos--they “narrowcast” to members of a particular age group that spent precious years slurping their cereal and downing their Fritos in rooms illuminated by the blue light of the tube.