RATTLING SKELETONS IN NEWPORT BEACH

As California settles towards another warm Kool-Aid summer, the last thing it wants on its mind is a shrouded skeleton with a scythe lurking behind the banana tree at the edge of the patio. But there he is. Settle into the chaise, unfold the paper and there he is concocting a nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, smearing an airline lounge with tourists’ blood or turning sexual fun into the danse macabre of AIDS.

On the face of it, one tends to assume that these peculiarly contemporary and spectacular manifestations are the subject of the recent art of New York sculptor Robert Morris. An exhibition surveying his work of the ‘80s in 25 examples is on view until June 30 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, organized by museum curator Paul Schimmel in collaboration with his colleague Mary Jane Jacob of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

The subject is death.

Plaster reliefs in bleached-bone white look like casts taken from mass burial sites. Huge mural-like drawings depict heroic male nudes sucked into a purgatorial vortex. Landscapes wracked by pyrotechical disaster are set into enormous carved frames encrusted with skulls and cross-bones. One inevitably thinks of disasters of a particularly modern sort, the Jewish Holocaust of yore, the Atomic Apocalypse to come. One must think of these things.

But not for long.

If Robert Morris were out to remind us of present death, he is peculiarly well-qualified to manage the job. Although little seen on the West Coast, the 53-year-old artist has long been considered a bulwark of the radical New York sculptural establishment whose work shades from confrontational Minimalist monoliths to the perceptual mind-games of Process art and the subversive aggression of Performance.

Morris’ peers are the likes of Richard Serra, Carl Andre and Sol Lewitt. His trademark works in the past have been pieces like a big solid ring divided by a light that made it seem to float, great swags of gray felt somehow suggesting prehistoric animals and odd, cage-like structures. Morris’ work never limited itself to the purely formal qualities of some Minimalist art. It often carried slightly Surreal overtones of threat and pure provocation, a tendency dramatized in 1974 when the artist issued an exhibition poster that was a photograph of himself, muscular and nude to the waist, wearing a Nazi-style army helmet and festooned with chains. It was a macho- Sadist image typical of a then-prevailing fashion that encouraged acting out fantasies.

Given that command of modernist syntax, it would have been easy enough for Morris to couch his ruminations on mortality in present terms. Instead, he has done a dramatic volte-face, fleeing into the past with such force as to make the recidivist Neo-Expressionists look downright Mod in their mild retreat to the teens of the century.

Morris’ plaster reliefs look absolutely archeological, more like scientific records of ancient tomb sites than modern art. The only non-prehistoric note is the use of casts of heads, hands and other anatomical parts obviously taken from a live person, possibly the artist. This makes the casts personal but not modern. Big mural drawings and some lesser sheets allude quite clearly to Michelangelo and Tintoretto.

The most imposing works in the show, those explosive landscapes in the big frames, move into the 19th Century. The imagery is pure J.M.W. Turner, the frames are a literalist pastiche of early Expressionism combining formal elements of Art Nouveau whiplash curves with Edvard Munch’s symbolic use of skull, fetus and phallus.

Not one ounce of intentional social commentary is to be found in this art. It is a purely personal act of self-election to the pantheon of the grand Romantic sensibility. It drips with the love of narcissistic sensation that equates death with the ultimate orgasm. There is nothing here about the death of the spirit or any hint that a spirit exists in the first place.

In Morris’ art there is only physical death, and thus it has to be a big turn-on, a Wagnerian rock concert. It is Delacroix’s “The Death of Sardanapalus,” where concubines are butchered, horses slaughtered and the palace torched while the sultan expires in insane luxury. It is the Jugendstil Dandy’s worship of decadence and the sophisticate’s salacious attraction to the exotic. (Some of the carving suggests Gauguin.) It appears to be Morris’ proposal for a revivalist style of Neo-Romanticism.

There is something admirably wacky about the idea of ignoring the troubles and dangers of the real world in favor of dramatic escapades of the ego linked to giants of history--some of Morris’ “blindfold” drawings evoke Leonardo’s “Deluge” series. The work--seen in reproduction--has heroic proportions that solicit admiration. Then you get a first-hand look at it.

The art is positively dreadful.

Morris has conceptualized the work quite beautifully and one would like to escape into the sophistry that this is some form of idea art that is immune to technical evaluation. It just doesn’t wash. Morris brought up the idea of past Romantic art and that art derived its crucial authority from its ability to deliver on its promises. We don’t love Byron and Shelley because they uttered shrieks of rebellion, we love them because they couched grandiose emotion in beautifully controlled language.

Morris’ big murals are weak, fumbling swaths of ink and smears of charcoal that make a world composed of grimy bed-sheets.

Morris’ Turneresque landscapes are lumpish amateur imitations in pastels. His frames--his most impressive device--are basically pedestrian assemblages of objects cast in a simple technique that lends them a specious aura of unity. Their morbidity is slightly less nuanced than a third-rate horror movie. The whole show drums away on the idea of pyrotechnical death like a demonstrator banging on a tin garbage can. This lack of variety makes the show seem even smaller than it is and certainly a lot duller than it wants to be.

Social commentary is here after all. When a modern Romantic tries to join the masters of the past on their terms he is capable of making the gesture, but it is a grand flaunt with wet Kleenex. The sheer ineptitude of this art turns it into one more tired variation on those old macho jokes about the braggart he-man who can’t deliver the goods.