ART REVIEW : ‘EMERGING ARTISTS’ AT LA JOLLA ART MUSEUM

In the quagmire that inundates art museums and their constituencies, no territory is boggier than relationships with local, living artists.

Institutions concentrating on home-grown products are labeled provincial--unless, of course, their locality happens to be New York City--while museums maintaining a national or international perspective are assailed as insensitive and irresponsible to the area that supports them.

A no-win dilemma? Not necessarily, as the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art demonstrates in “A San Diego Exhibition: Forty-Two Emerging Artists,” a survey that opened Saturday and continues through April 28.

After establishing a pattern of restricting its local stamp of approval to well-known major figures who happen to live around San Diego, the museum has finally marched into the sticky terrain of up-and-comers. Planting its boots in a largely uncharted region, it has taken a stand on emerging talents, honored 42 of them--and offended a host of others.

When the verbal mudslinging abates and the Salon des Refuses that sprouted up in a nearby public library is dismantled, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art will have produced three significant winners: the 42 artists, who surely will benefit from such validation; the museum itself, which has rounded out its program by presenting a fresh and creditable batch of art that could not have been produced in a cultural backwater, and the audience, given an opportunity to see work that has been languishing in studios and offbeat showcases.

Only half a dozen or so of the names peeking through square holes of the exhibition catalogue’s cover are familiar from shows in Los Angeles, though the artists are not beginners. Director Hugh M. Davis, curator Lynda Forsha and former assistant curator Burnett Miller (who recently opened his own gallery in Los Angeles) chose artists ranging in age from 25 to 52. All have exhibition records, but none have had major representation at either the La Jolla museum or the San Diego Museum of Art.

“A San Diego Exhibition” is predictable insofar as it embraces a broad slate of pursuits--from painting and sculpture to video, film and fashion--as well as an equally commodious span of aesthetic attitudes. Pluralistic tolerance has become a sure mark of sophistication, even though individual styles periodically dominate the marketplace.

Visitors approaching the museum have their choice of Frank D. Cole’s funky anti-war windmill (an engaging, painted wood contraption called “Tower of Power”) and Kenneth Capps’ massive steel abstractions that derive their strength from silent enclosures.

Inside the museum, one can drift from Jens Morrison’s lightweight ceramic and wood amusements (transforming houses and doors into long-nosed faces) to Nancy Kay’s crisply painted and cut-out dislocations of geometry or Roy David Rogers’ painted translations of black-and-white photographs depicting ordinary people squinting at a camera.

Some of the most interesting conclaves in this sprawling exhibition are involved with recycled styles and historical periods, regional concerns or political commentary.

Robert Glen Ginder pulls off an arresting historical pastiche by painting Southern California’s little Spanish houses, towering palms and glass high-rises as if they were relics of medieval or early Renaissance churches. These mundane images, backed by gold leaf, rest on arched slabs of wood. Another group of works by Ginder emulates fragments of Mexican walls, complete with faded ads as frescoes.

Regionalism is largely a matter of Southern Californian or Mexican subject matter. Raul Guerrero overlays white marble statuary with a brown-skinned nude native as he compresses emblems of classicism and primitivism. Wick Alexander uses day-glo pigments to illustrate bullfight rings and ghoulish carnival street scenes in Mexico. In such politically charged works as “Procession” and “Dos Judas,” Alexander emerges as a contemporary James Ensor.

The most graphically dramatic political statements are by Deborah Small. “Against Apartheid” uses painted letters on wooden blocks to spell out ludicrous official explanations of political prisoners’ deaths. “I Hear America Singing” is a striking wall installation of black bird and airplane silhouettes, camouflage squares and block letters. This piece seems indebted to Terry Allen, but Small effectively counters Walt Whitman’s poetry with ominous phrases about military destruction.

Such energetic variety from a fresh roster of artists brings a flush of excitement to La Jolla’s elite house of culture--despite reservations about some of the artworks and the inevitable familiarity of products created in an art world whose very diversity has become homogeneous.

Rogers’ painting, for example, looks dated by Photo-Realist fixations though he intends a new conceptual wrinkle by posing family members for his portraits of snapshots; Mark-Elliot Lugo’s painted nudes are hung up on William Beckman and Philip Pearlstein; Walter Cotten’s color photographs evoke a subtle strangeness from juxtapositions of lush landscape and bleak man-made structures, but not to the point of distinction.

On balance, though, the exhibition is a responsible move in a positive direction toward acknowledging unrecognized achievement and promise.

Several events are planned in conjunction with the exhibition. Each Wednesday in April, from 6 to 7:30 p.m., artists will talk informally about their work in the galleries. Film shorts by Beth Accomando, Babette Mangolte and Kevin Morrisey and fashion designs by Margaret Honda and Carol Vidstrand will be presented at 7:30 p.m. April 6 in the museum auditorium. Mangolte’s film “The Sky on Location” will be screened at 7:30 p.m. April 11. A group called Poyesis Genetica will perform “Ocnoceni,” a play about Mexican Americans’ “fractured culture,” at 8 p.m. April 27.