THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS : At the Laguna Art Museum, a New Group of Artists Carries on a Challenge to Convention

They let you come to the grown-ups’ party, but you have to stay upstairs. When the guests gossip on the phone the next day, they don’t mention you. The newspaper stories leave your names out. Oh well, at least they let you in the door.

But we’re here to remedy the situation, at least somewhat, for the batch of younger artists included in “New Evidence: Some Recent Los Angeles Art and the Photograph,” the companion piece to the Laguna Art Museum’s massive show, “Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980.”

Of course, “New Evidence”--on view through Jan. 17 in the museum’s small upstairs gallery--is intended only as a speedy survey of newer work that carries on the challenge to photographic conventions begun by the 45 artists in the main exhibit.

Even so, the 14 pieces on view--incisive and slight alike--incorporate several significant currents in contemporary art.

Some deal in political commentary, others are about the nature of art and illusion, and still others relate narratives flavored with deadpan humor.

Robert Cavolina, who has been printing photographic imagery on pieces of concrete for several years now, weighs in with “Lines of Communication; Three Days; Ooh Baby ooh baby, baby, have we sunk so low yet? or Sunny California.” The spare image of a telephone line stretches out over three horizontal chunks of concrete, wryly evoking the distance (perhaps emotional as well as geographical) between lovers living far apart. The short-long-long proportions of the blocks also recall Morse Code.

A black-and-white photograph of the sweet marble face of a female statue--perhaps of the Virgin Mary--rests on a soft bed of white polyester fake fur in Doris June Jew’s “Number 1 (Fake Skin Series No. 1).” A thin, transparent piece of fabric veils the whole piece. In pop culture terms, white fake fur serves as well as marble to connote purity. In fact, the tactile immediacy of the “fur” serves as a stand-in for the marble surface, which can’t be stroked through the purely visual medium of photography.

David Bunn’s “Under the Nose of Stalin With Afghanistan” combines a spoof of art world procedure with a geographic theme that will be familiar to viewers of his installation “Of Color” in “Mapping Histories: The 3rd Newport Biennial” at the Newport Harbor Art Museum last year.

A black-and-white photograph of the mustachioed Soviet dictator is nestled in a gigantic red velvet-lined plywood trophy box. Attached to the wall under the box, a piece of black plastic shaped like a map of Afghanistan also resembles Stalin’s mustache. Geographically, Afghanistan is at Russia’s southern border, while a mustache is in the southern portion of a face.

Inside the open cover of the box, a typed “condition report” on the work of art notes that a stain on the velvet is “reputed to be the result of a vandal’s act of protest with a glass of wine on the opening night of the first exhibit.” Bunn wryly offers the notion that such an untoward act could happen right “under the nose” of the iron-fisted Stalin.

In her silk screened diptych “The Chairman and the Colonel,” May Sun juxtaposes Chairman Mao’s face with a hand-colored news photo of Chinese students protesting at Tien An Men Square--opposite Mao’s mausoleum--in 1989. Mao’s eyes (touched up by Sun) regard the scene with disbelief, and for good reason.

On top of the protesters, Sun painted the familiar logo-simplified face of Colonel Sanders (the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in China had opened just before the protest) and then canceled it out with the international slash-mark sign signifying “prohibited.” The piece underlines the irony inherent in welcoming American fast food with open arms and then brutally suppressing American-style democracy.

The text in Lisa Bloomfield’s ink jet print from her “Motivation Series” recounts the story of an unsuccessful traveling salesman ripped off by a hitchhiker who proceeded to build up a nationally successful chain. The piece also incorporates an ugly printed fabric background (a sample of the salesman’s goods?) and a bland corporate photograph of a man who might be either the unfortunate salesman or the hitchhiker, transformed into a clone of his predecessor.

Nancy Webber’s “Portrait of King Henry VIII by Hans Holbein/Jim McGovern Longshoreman” is one of a rather simple-minded series of works for which Webber located “doubles” for the sitters in paintings by famous artists. Costumed and made up to resemble the originals as closely as possible, the contemporary faces mainly attest to the fact that certain physiognomies recur through the centuries.

The most thoughtfully open-ended work in the exhibit is Connie Hatch’s installation “Some 20th-Century Men,” which portrays the “shadows” cast by seven men--some world-famous, others virtually unknown--who died in violent, untimely or mysterious ways.

The men include actor Rock Hudson (who died of complications from AIDS), Salvador Allende (the former president of Chile, killed in a U.S.-supported coup), Marvin Gaye (the pop singer shot by his father), Vladimir Mayakovsky (the leading poet of the Russian Revolution, a suicide), artist Andy Warhol (who entered a hospital for a gall bladder problem and inexplicably died a few days later) and Jaime Sulca (a Peruvian newspaper reporter who vanished in 1984 after protesting a police raid on his home).

A light shines on a row of evenly spaced laminated photographs of the men’s faces, each one hung at an angle from the wall in order to cast a shadow. Despite the men’s different degrees of fame, all the shadows are the same size. Each temporarily disappears when the viewer’s own shadow falls across it, mimicking death’s final eclipse of ego and achievement.

* What: “New Evidence: Some Recent Los Angeles Art and the Photograph.”

* When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays through Jan. 17 (closed Christmas Day).

* Where: The Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Route 133 (Laguna Canyon Road) and head south. Turn right at Pacific Coast Highway; the museum is just up the road, on the left.

* Wherewithal: Adults $3, students and seniors $1.50, free for children under 12.

* Where to call: (714) 494-6531.

More Art

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“Ralph Eugene Meatyard: American Visionary,” at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, offers a retrospective of one of America’s most original photographers, whose experimental, Zen-influenced sensibility informed his images of humans and inanimate subjects alike. (714) 759-1122.

IN LAGUNA BEACH: PROOF

“Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980” at the Laguna Art Museum is a collection of witty works by 45 artists who printed photographic images on unusual surfaces and stuck them in odd places to demonstrate the malleability of photographic “truth.” (714) 494-6531.

IN SAN DIEGO: COMPASSION

At the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park, “Mary Ellen Mark: 25 Years” surveys 125 black-and-white images by one of today’s leading documentary photographers. Her compassionate view of people in crisis has ranged from homeless people to circus life. (619) 239-5262.