Fifteen years ago, the Museum of Modern Art staged a photography exhibition titled Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. The show gathered work from some of the country's best-known and mid-career photographers. Cindy Sherman styled herself a housewife, picking up spilled groceries. Carrie Mae Weems explored kitchen-table negotiations. Larry Sultan pictured Dad watching the Dodgers while Mom posed by the wall.
The inescapable theme, at the end of the Reagan era and two years into Bush père, was that the family, the essential core of conservative politics, was rotting from within. This is not an astonishing revelation, and it depended on your perspective whether you found it a refreshing gust of frankness or a disingenuous swipe at the sometimes untidy life of families.
Flash ahead, past the Clinton interregnum, to the depths of Bush II, and family and home again are sacred. But the internal logic of the terror war has turned the home into a bunker. And so Laura Kleger photographs not the messy interiors but the shaded, gated, dog-watched yard and sidewalk, the "perimeter" of security-speak.
HOME FRONT, at the Charleston Heights Arts Center Gallery through April 2, combines two of the Los Angeles photographer's projects. Patriot Memory is arrayed along the gallery's far wall like an assortment of framed family pictures, which in a way it is, if you think of 19th-century monuments as the posings of a collective family. The larger-format prints of Neighborhood Watch line the two walls, lending the gallery a chapel-like air.
The latter project plays with light and shade as do chapel windows. Only these windows show windows and walls and streetscapes with deep shadows carving ominous swaths across house exteriors. Two cast-concrete travesties of museum-facade lions confront a lapping shore of shadow, whose curve follows the curb line. Three dogs press against a wire-mesh gate between two yards.
You would get the point of menace at bay without Kleger's telling you this is what she intended, by way of the artist's statement. I have long imagined compiling a coffee-table book composed entirely of artists' statements from shows I've seen over the years, some rambling in coded jargon and inviting the viewer to see what he wants in the art, others clinically describing, as if for a grant proposal, the visual strategy and intended effect. This latter approach, to say the least, robs a little from the effect, as you look for it instead of merely finding it. Kleger dilates a bit on our "post 9/11 world ... in which media and government have created a perpetual undercurrent of dread."
This glance behind the curtain only encourages the viewer to understand Kleger's images as shrewdly tactical, seizing optimum moments and settings to make something otherwise innocuous seem malign. It's no secret photographers do this, but Kleger's assertions undercut her work. In cabinets outside the gallery, she has assembled the notes of what might be an interesting thesis on The 9-11 Commission Report viewed through the prism of Death of a Salesman, but here she expects the viewer to make sweeping connections—and to read long, small-print pages of text.
This is unfortunate, because some of Kleger's images are quite splendid. One shows a mural-sized scenic backdrop of a flaming aircraft carrier, with the empty chairs of a departed discussion in front. A Neighborhood Watch C-print focuses tightly on a small figurine of a little girl holding a puppy and distractedly twisting her hair. This finds a vividly evocative moment in a kitschy artifact.
Kleger's sentiments about government drum-beating might be justifiable, but her statement only gets in the way of discovering what her images do.