UA Alums Go From Dusting Their Professors' Work To Displaying Their Own. By Margaret Regan A COUPLE OF rebel Tucson artists, who first made their mark in the '70s, no doubt are enjoying the irony of their official show this summer in an establishment museum. The University of Arizona Museum of Art's Under Influence exhibits the work of the two UA alums and former Paradise Group activists: Victoria Looper-Horne, who's showing paintings, sculpture and an installation piece, and George Arntz, who exhibits large acrylics on canvas and a performance art video. Lately, the 1970s, when these two were in school, have gotten a bad name as an apolitical, slightly embarrassing decade typified by treacly Bradys and unspeakable polyester. But this curious idea is hardly the whole truth. You could say the turbulent '60s lasted at least until the mid-'70s: Nixon did not fall until 1974, nor Saigon until 1975. Around 1976, UA art students formed the Paradise Group, described by Looper-Horne on her résumé as a "group of deconstructivist artist-peers" who simultaneously "work(ed) within the university and infiltrat(ed) the community at large." The subversive Paradisers were given to staging radical performance art "cameoed within the more traditional gallery format." In one so-called Janitor Performance the students dusted the art exhibited in the annual faculty show. Where do radical deconstructivist artist-peers go after dusting off their profs? Well, not necessarily to the top of the art-scene heap. Though their work has a strong connection to the local landscape and streetscape, neither one of these artists exhibits regularly in Tucson's gallery circuit. Arntz still does performance art and plays guitar for the Downtown Saturday Night crowds, but in this museum show at least the two artists' formats don't have the rough outrageousness of their long-ago "infiltrations" and "performance cameos." With a couple of exceptions, they stick primarily to the centuries-old tradition of paint on canvas and paper. But their paintings, in jangly colors and surrealistic images, still ask the big questions that so troubled the counterculture of a generation ago: What is the meaning of life? Why is there war and poverty? How does one make an authentic life in a world corrupted by materialism? Arntz, a self-described "latter-day hippie metaphysician," answers those questions with a howl of despair, delving into the troubled contemporary psyche in wildly energetic paintings. Rocket ships, skeletons, Day-Glo colored animals, naked, headless women carom across the seedy urban checkerboard floors and scraggly deserts in his paintings, whose influences seem equal parts comic book art, art history, and sexual fantasy and terror. In "Red Queen No. 1," a tile floor, lurid in red and black, stands in for every late-night scene of squalor that ever unfolded in a bar. A nude woman stands at the ready but her head is horrifyingly, violently gone. A dizzying yellow spiral curves down toward a frightful giant fish. And looking down on the whole is the upside-down, troubled head of a man, probably Arntz himself. But just in case you thought Arntz was in danger of putting too much confidence into the redeeming power of art, he's hurled a real-life hatchet into the whole thing, permanently tearing the canvas. The hatchet remains, planted in the rent fabric. Most of his 13 paintings, painted in lurid brights and blackest blacks, are similarly savage explorations of angst, though a few testify to Arntz's more cerebral preoccupations. Full of art historical references, "Consort/The Dream" for Arntz is downright serene. His biggest painting, it's divided into horizontal bands of green, brown and purple. As a sign in the painting tells us, this is a "junkyard Rothko." But Arntz has transformed Rothko's abstract bands of color into a bathtub, where a lovely young woman lies with her eyes closed. Above her floats a head straight out of Picasso, below her a sleeping grizzled man, possibly from Rousseau. Looper-Horne achieves some of the same serenity in her works on paper, acrylic washes arranged into flat, simplified shapes. Unlike Arntz, whose creative frenzy simply bears witness to the disorder and pathos of modern life, Looper-Horne is more overtly political, though the solutions she proposes appear more spiritual than activist. She reconstructs the Virgin of Guadalupe as a new female icon of power ("Guadalupe's Comfort"). She depicts the homeless teens in her Street Angels series as exactly that: forlorn angels with drooping wings, trapped on Tucson's streets, as in "May Day Angel, Outside of the Co-op," or abandoned on the Southwest highways, as in "The White Queen's Bishop Coming to Terms with the Sod-Weed Factor." If her Street Angels occasionally border on the insipid, her feminist works about power and abuse are harder-hitting. "Bride Stripped Bare," a large acrylic on canvas, is a meditation on marriage, in which the shadowy new wife seems to have lost not only her old identity but her flesh itself. This work is more interesting structurally too: The marriage bed, draped in a flaming red blanket, forms a sharp diagonal across the painting, a counterpoint to the vertical arrangement of marriage symbols at left. Looper-Horner's installation of art reviews penned by the late David Horne, another former Paradise artist, an Arizona Daily Star art critic in the early '80s and her husband for a time, along with lovingly placed shoes and backpack and scholarly tapes, offers a more ambivalent perspective on marriage. She calls the piece "Under Influences or Thru the Dark Glass with My Soul-Mate" and it suggests a profound effort to truly know another human being. The work includes some of Horne's important personal documents, including one dating back to the days of the Vietnam War, the horror that triggered so much of the '70s' upheaval. The paper is Horne's 1971 discharge document from the U.S. Army Reserves. Its simple, terse message of freedom is reprised in another Looper-Horne work, a small, jubilant painting of a woman floating free over Tucson's mountains and skyscrapers. Its title? "You Don't Need That Duty Stick Now, Kid, or U.S. Airborn, Released from Duty." Under Influence continues through September 8 at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Looper-Horne and Arntz will construct an installation out front on August 29. A free closing reception will be from 2 to 4 p.m. on Sunday, September 8, and Arntz and members of the group Not Since the Accident will do a performance at 3:30 p.m. in front of the museum. Summer hours, through August 25, are 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Regular hours, beginning August 26, are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. For more information call 621-7567.

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