THE BAY IS ON VIEW IN NEWPORT

Nowhere in the United States is art made with more passionate conviction or a greater sense of noble futility than in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more than 40 years this gorgeous, moody precinct has nurtured art that counts. If you fill in the blanks before and after its brushy figurative art, its Zen ceramic tradition and its cockeyed gooney-bird Pop movements of the ‘50s and ‘60s, you come up with an impressive list of artists from Diebenkorn to Voulkos to Wylie and many another.

For at least 10 years the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art stood undisputed as the leading showplace for modern art in California. A small but engaged cadre of dealers and patrons are so dedicated they will occasionally pool resources, as they did in a subscription drive to bring out a handsome and heartfelt book on their art, “Art in the San Francisco Bay Area” by the late critic Tom Albright.

For all that good stuff, the Bay Area missed a reputation as a real contemporary art market or creative center, remaining an “interesting outpost” like Chicago. In the ‘60s it was Los Angeles that stole--and kept--the palm as a seedbed of innovation when the truth was there was so much cross fertilization between the North and South they might claim equal parentage of the emerging art.

Anyone who puts himself to the trouble of examining the stable lists of old vanguard La Cienega Boulevard galleries like the Ferus or Nicholas Wilder galleries will find that a weighty percentage of the artists now thought of as typically Los Angeles were from the Bay Area, including Robert Graham and Ron Davis. Wallace Berman linked Los Angeles to San Francisco’s Beat poetry scene and heavy talents like Diebenkorn and Sam Francis moved down South.

Now Los Angeles is on the eve of the opening of a Museum of Contemporary Art and a new building for modern art at the County Museum of Art. Henry Hopkins, the director who put San Francisco’s modern museum in the forefront has resigned to direct the proposed Frederick Weisman museum in Beverly Hills. If these combined events make Los Angeles into the anointed and institutionalized international contemporary art center imagined by their devotees, are they bound to effect aesthetic morale by the Bay?

Such musings may provide the best background for a trip down to the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Through Nov. 23 they are up to the second edition of a biennial event that surveys California art in three-part round from Los Angeles to the Bay to Everywhere Else. At the moment it is the Bay’s turn.

Assistant curator Anne Ayres has chosen to characterize the area by assembling the work of a dozen artists out of several dozen who would have done the job slightly differently but equally well. Perusing the catalogue, one gathers that the curatorial strategy behind the selection was somewhere between protective and defensive. Essays by a group of art writers and curators have a similar aura of parti pris, thoughtful and well-meaning but perhaps flavored with excessive advocacy. We see enough advertising on television.

Anyway, the point seems to be to prove that all Bay Area art is not fueled by that combination of personal eccentricity and historical clogging that results in the Funk sensibility sometimes associated with the geography. It’s a funny premise but it has the effect of creating an interesting, vaguely surprising show. It’s like running into an old, familiar friend who has decided to get a perm or trade jock-style outfits for Italian suits. You get a little different take.

The Bay’s artistic sense of history, for example, does not come across as a rejection or a satire as it sometimes does. The work here--particularly the sculpture--seems historically cultivated, subtly absorptive and cosmopolitan. Mark di Suvero’s selection includes “To Intuit,” a rusty dinosaur made out of a defunct earth-moving machine. It is basically like ‘50s cool jazz brought slightly up to date, admirable in its humanism and throbbing harmonics, glancingly smug in its inertia and self-righteousness. Di Suvero’s presence is a nice touch. Since we don’t identify him as a Bay Area artist (he lives mainly in New York), we are reminded of San Francisco’s fertilizing influence.

Viola Frey grafts ancient Egyptian monoliths to folk art to come out with one of the rare examples of Neo-Expressionism that works. We’ve seen her 10-foot painted ceramic figures here recently in commercial gallery exhibition. At Newport something makes us wonder at the staying power of a content somewhere between a Steig and Hamilton cartoon but there is no question that she captures the looming oppressive pettiness of domestic and bureaucratic life.

John Roloff’s work does clog up. The unfamiliar artist hooks the convolutions of old Chinese art to the surrealism of H. C. Westermann in a series of Flying Dutchman boat models that seem to be covered with bonsai trees and frozen over in some awful nuclear winter. It is a sensibility that may appeal to fans of Vincent Price horror movies.

Anybody freighted with the idea that art up there is purposefully retardataire and sarcastic is directed to the works of Paul Kos and Tony Labat. Both pursue the most advanced mode on hand, conceptual video environments. Kos’ “Chartres Bleu” consists of a wall of 27 color TV sets arranged like a stained-glass window, each broadcasting a section of a window at Chartres cathedral. The effect is very convincing even though the morning I went down the sets did not compress a day’s light into 12 minutes as they are supposed to do. They just blinked occasionally. No matter.

Labat’s piece consists of two arched niches and is called “Icarus.” The far space contains a Classikitsch nude garden sculpture and sweet little live birds on a perch. The near space has a TV monitor on top of a pile of plaster fragments. The sculpture and birdies are shown on the TV by a panning camera. Because it moves, we automatically look at the picture rather than the real thing. The two artists are so deadpan that any social satire the pieces may suggest has to be supplied by the viewer. All they say is that television is the classic--that is standard--art medium of our time.

Very gentle stuff.

So are the fruits of the five painters on hand even though they try to hang tough. Roy DeForest’s Jungian cartoons make spooky noises with their nubbly moonlight surfaces, panting puppies and zonked-out shamans, but they are basically campfire ghost stories. They are charming and gorgeously well made.

So is everything else. Wally Hedrick’s Neo-Ex-flavored work is supposed to be sexually fixated and rife with social protest over South Africa. Well, it is, but its brushy poster style is so full of campy valentine hearts and images of Fay Wray and King Kong that it begs off seriousness. It’s coy. Harry Fritzus occasionally bangs out a good classic modern still life, but he too gets balled up in complex technique and the need to entertain us with images of Bogey and Gable and MM peering out of layers of labyrinth canvas.

A curious combination of virtuoso handling masks as primitive candor laces through this art. Kate Delos makes odd imaginary portraits that are yet another example of grafting old art to new. Dubuffet meets Roman funerary images in large and small versions whose best quality is their immediacy. They look like they appeared on the canvas all at once, like footprints.

Christopher Brown comes off as well as any painter here. There is too much of late Philip Guston in his swampy landscapes but images like a gooey basketball and red tree trunk have startling force, as if they flashed unexpectedly on the artist.

Group exhibitions, even those with so broad a theme as geography tend to force the viewer into generalizing perceptions that unfairly blur the artists’ individuality. All these folks finally stand on their own but none more strongly that the two photographers on hand.

Nothing, we think, is duller or more antiseptic than an empty classroom. Wrong. Catherine Wagner presents a suite devoted to American schoolrooms that turns out to be loaded with feelings, ranging from the hilarity of a professional dog-grooming school to the different forms of rigid discipline imposed by a military academy and a Sunday school.

Nothing, we think, is tougher than a maximum security prison. Right. But Ruth Morgan found even more to it in an essay on San Quentin. She photographed male prisoners in their tight little cells and the pictures are charged with energy. Maybe it came from the inevitable sexual aura created by a female photographer confronting imprisoned males. The guys seem as vulnerable as women scrutinized by a skin-mag artist and they react with the same range of feelings.

One pretty kid postures seductively like an odalisque. A couple of biker types try to look contemptuous. Other prisoners show off their tattoos or look winsomely pitiful. A guard and a con shot together have an air of conspiracy that makes you wonder what’s going on between them. Whatever chemistry sparked life in these remarkable pictures, it did not sentimentalize the subjects. They seethe with meanness or self-pity and it is all about the realization that they are healthy, violent young animals whose lives are wasted.

So what does the art make one think the Bay will think if L.A.’s new museums make it the Kontemporary King of the Western Lands?

Frankly, and quite rightly, they probably just won’t give a damn.