Art on Art: "Postcards From Camp"

By Art Harris

It is a remarkable fact that Santa Monica once had a Republican representative in the US Congress, almost equally remarkable to be reminded of this fact in an art exhibit.

But a quote from a Jan. 20, 1942 speech by then US Rep. LeLand M. Ford is carried on one of Ben Sakoguchi's series of paintings about World War II internment camps for Japanese-Americans residing on the US mainland.

"A patriotic native-born Japanese, if he wants to make his contribution," Ford is reported to have said, "will subject himself to a concentration camp."

The work, which is now on display in the Roberts Art Gallery at Santa Monica High School, is part of an exhibition that includes 51 of Sakoguchi's Camp Postcard series, as well as 60 of the artist's better known "Orange Crate Labels."

While it is comfortable today to look back with disdain on the treatment of US residents (and citizens) of Japanese origin during the wartime period, Sakoguchi's reality-drenched images remind us that even some of the most revered liberal figures of that time supported the internment program.

Sakoguchi is, notably, an exemplar of the tradition that makes the artist a "witness of his times," as the French put it. Few American painters of any stature are so dedicated to this viewpoint, and that makes many of his subjects at least somewhat familiar, and often interesting.

The wryly-named "Postcards from Camp" are cumulatively powerful, at least in part because they show the painter as a very small child and his family as inmates in an American-run concentration camp. But also because such camps were in operation elsewhere, albeit with a far harsher regimen and results that have become a byword for the barbarism of a civilized age.

Inevitably, one looks at Sakoguchi's paintings for their content, particularly because he tends to include so much text in his pictures. But take the time to examine his work as art, and not just as documentation, and it becomes apparent that Sakoguchi is a gifted and prolific composer of images with a fine sense of color. And, as a documentarian, he provides comment (often only indirectly) as well as content.

Sakoguchi (now retired from many years as an art professor at Pasadena's City College) grew up around his parents' small San Bernardino grocery. The bright orange crate labels that were used then to create a sense of brand identity for what was otherwise mostly indistinguishable produce, also have come to be remembered as part of the advertising that drew migrants from other parts of the US to balmy Southern California. The painter absorbed these images so early that they became a natural format for the expression of many of his ideas and observations.

The current exhibition of Orange Crate Labels includes a few dozen of the famous and notorious (from Queen Elizabeth to Stalin, Mark Van Doren, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, on to Nixon and JFK, Hugh Grant and Divine, and - for Li'l abner fans - Lonesome Polecat. Jimmy Swaggart, Claude Monet, Christine Jorgensen, Elvis, Woody Allen, Mathew Perry, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, Huey Newton, Big Brother and others possibly less famous share wall space with the Last Carrier Pigeon and the Last Tasmanian Thylacine.)

SAMOHI's La Monte E. Westmoreland has curated a fascinating and diverse show of paintings for the school's students. But, if you have time available on weekdays between 8:30 and 2 p.m., from now until May 19, and the persistence to find the gallery on campus, there is a great deal for adults to see as well.