EXAMINING THE VICTORIANS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

There's a deliciously insinuating edge to the title ``Secret Victorians,'' the challenging new exhibition at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center.

It's as if the 20 contemporary U.S. and British artists featured in this refreshingly counter-intuitive show might be closet Anthony Trollope freaks, clandestine lovers of overstuffed furniture, cumbersome clothes and fussy wallpaper patterns. Scandalous!

In our own time, of course, the word ``Victorian'' is typically associated with Dickensian industrial blight, brutal colonial exploitation and stiff-backed social customs camouflaging bizarre erotic predilections.

But ``Secret Victorians'' attempts to expose a very different side of the Victorian sensibility, one associated with the scientific inquiry and creative eccentricity of artists and thinkers as diverse as Lewis Carroll, Charles Darwin, William Morris, George Eliot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edward Lear.

Furthermore, the exhibition posits, this frisky creative spirit is alive and well among several contemporary artists whose works we've been taught to regard as ``postmodern'' - that coolly ironic, grab-bag aesthetic that is the supposed antithesis of fuddy-duddy Victorian tastes.

That's a rough synopsis of the thinking of American independent curators Melissa E. Feldman and Ingrid Schaffner, who developed ``Secret Victorians'' as a touring exhibition through London's Hayward Gallery. A companion show at the Hammer, ``Oscar Wilde,'' drawn from the UCLA Clark Library's holdings of manuscripts, proofs, correspondence and photographs, presents a multimedia portrait of the Irish man of letters and bon vivant whose bipolar sexuality, flamboyant self-promotion and worship of style over substance have made him a 1990s fashion icon.

Both exhibitions are well-timed. A glance at current pop trends reveals a surprising fascination with things Victorian. Recent movies such as ``Mrs. Brown,'' ``Angels and Insects'' and ``An Ideal Husband,'' and plays like ``The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde'' have allowed us to explore our own moral and material conflicts through the filter of a bygone society.

``Secret Victorians'' suggests, for example, that it's easy to spot parallels between the current Martha Stewart-led cult of domesticity and the Victorian decorative-arts craze. Ditto the clash pitting ``family values'' vs. Clintonian morality, which mirrors the Victorian tendency to flip-flop between puritanism and prurience.

Along these lines, Feldman and Schaffner have grouped the artworks into four overlapping themes: ``Ornament & Sexuality,'' ``Photography & Death,'' ``Collecting & Colonialism,'' and ``Science & Crime.''

``Ornament & Sexuality'' takes up much of the first two galleries, where we come upon the painting ``This Discussion, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless'' by Los Angeles artist Lari Pittman. Employing the deliberately old-fashioned idiom of 19th-century silhouettes, this work speaks its own comic, hieroglyphic language of drips, calligraphy, cartoon-like speech balloons and expressive bodily emissions.

The two male silhouettes playing chess and taking snuff simultaneously carry on a subtextual communion through various leaking orifices, while two sedate Victorian ladies harbor male homunculi beneath their hoop skirts. Not only are these pictures themselves worth a thousand words, but they imply other words still seldom spoken in ``polite'' society.

British artist Simon Periton uses oversized, painstakingly crafted paper doilies to convey the pent-up emotions behind this intricate species of Victorian handiwork. The massive black doily ``Queen Victoria'' (1997) reduces the monarch who ruled the British Empire for 60 years to a graceful yet formidable abstraction - a sort of feminized Washington Monument. A fitting tribute to a queen who spent nearly two-thirds of her reign in funereal drag, grieving for her late husband Prince Albert, this work expresses the Victorian idea that mourning was a type of public performance art.

On a brighter side of the Victorian fashion sensibility lies ``Girl/Boy,'' a resplendently dressed mannequin that's a man from the waist up and a woman from the waist down. Adding another layer of visual commentary, this androgynous fop (shades of Oscar Wilde!) is attired in machine-produced African cloth, prompting thoughts of Victorian colonial birds coming home to roost in an increasingly multi-ethnic Britain.

Jane Hammond picks up that theme with her 1994 oil painting ``A Parliament of Refrigerator Magnets.'' Hammond mimics the Victorian ``cabinet of curosities'' by presenting its contemporary equivalent: a refrigerator cluttered with hand-colored postcards and other ``exotic'' souvenirs of those mental excursions we now take while reaching for the orange juice carton.

Several of the works in ``Photography & Death'' reference the Victorian preoccupation with children, mortality and the newfangled photographic medium as a means of mechanical embalming. Sally Mann's gorgeous gelatin silver prints such as ``A Warm Springs'' (1991), in which a young girl's head floats disconcertingly in a pre-Raphaelite tangle of curls, express a creepy, neo-Victorian ambivalence toward our offspring.

Mat Collishaw's ``Soliciting a Reward'' (1994) employs the outmoded technology of the praxinoscope, a revolving cyclorama used to demonstrate the power of moving pictures. Except that Collishaw's fixed image of a modern-day busker on the London Underground, accompanied by a whiny, repetitive dirge, depicts not motion but paralysis, not technological progress but its opposite.

Like us, the Victorians were fascinated with science - and with science gone horribly wrong. Helen Chadwick's cibachrome transparency, ``Cyclops Cameo,'' depicts a deformed infant (fetus?) at the center of a psychedelic gray-yellow swirl, fixing us with the blind, insensate ``gaze'' of a TV set.

In Douglas Gordon's ``Monster'' (1997), the artist presents Jekyll-Hyde self-portraits, his grotesque image seemingly altered by photographic or digital manipulation. On inspection, though, all this Scottish artist has done is distort his features with scotch tape.

Harmless prank or botched lab experiment? Evil or innocuous? The question rebounds on the viewer. Maybe those famously two-faced Victorians aren't the only ones leading fascinating double lives.

The facts

What: ``Secret Victorians: Contemporary Artists and a 19th-Century Vision,'' and ``Oscar Wilde.''

Where: Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood.

When: Through Jan. 2. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. Closed Mondays.

Admission: $4.50 adults; $3 seniors, non-UCLA students, UCLA faculty/staff, and Alumni Association members; $1 UCLA students with I.D.; free for museum members and children 17 and younger. Admission is free to all on Thursdays. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

PHOTO (1) ``A Thing of Beauty, Not a Joy Forever'' (1885), is part of the ``Oscar Wilde'' exhibit at the Armand Hammer Museum.

(2) Lari Pittman's ``This Discussion, Beloved and Despised, Continues Regardless'' (1989).

(3) Sally Mann's ``At Warm Springs'' (1991).