It’s “list” time for some of the...

It’s “list” time for some of the best and worst shows seen in San Diego in 1986.

The Oskar Schlemmer exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art was, hands down, the most important show to come our way. Organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art, it was the first major American retrospective of the artist who was an influential member of the Bauhaus faculty. A dazzling exhibition of works of consistently high quality, it surveyed the artist’s entire work, including that for the theater.

Throughout his career Schlemmer sought to harmonize physical and spiritual attributes, modern technology and traditional humanism. In a search for “generic humanity” he simplified the human form in an expressive, semi-abstract, figurative minimalism that will be forever fresh and instructive. A dancer as well as a visual artist, he conveyed in all his paintings a sense of human gracefulness. Abused by Hitler’s New Order, he died in 1943.

Ironically, the show came to the San Diego museum only because the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which had agreed to participate in its national tour, backed out because of technical problems. Museum Director Steven Brezzo, with the exemplary patronage of Gwendolyn Stephens, brought the exhibition to San Diego.

The museum’s own California landscape exhibition, “The Golden Land,” expertly assembled by Paul Mills, retired director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, is beautiful and historically significant. But the museum did not fund a scholarly catalogue to accompany it, which would have enhanced its educational value.

The most unfortunate exhibition by a major institution was the long-lasting “Fine Tuning: Sailing Design Today” at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a failure aesthetically and educationally.

On the plus side, the La Jolla museum did bring us “Sitings,” an exhibition of drawings by site-specific sculptors Alice Aycock, Richard Fleischner, Mary Miss and George Trakas, and retrospective exhibitions of the works of New York artists Jennifer Bartlett and Jene Highstein. It also brought the memorable installation “The Dictatorship of Swiftness” by Francesc Torres.

Also notable were the Jose Tasende Gallery’s museum-quality exhibition of works by the great Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida; the Patty Aande Gallery’s exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles artist Lari Pittman, the Mark Quint Gallery’s show of sculptural furniture works by Roy McMakin, and the Anuska Galerie’s show of barbed wire sculpture by San Diego artist Margaret Honda.

Among alternative organizations, Installation fizzled with Martha Rosler’s video installation “Global Taste: A Meal in 3 Courses,” an exercise in the aesthetics of abusive ennui.

But Sushi gallery, during its summer Neofest of performance art, gave us New Yorker Ethyl Eichelberger’s “Leer,” a ridiculous version of Shakespeare’s tragic king as a Kentucky colonel.

The actor, a gangling figure with flowing white locks and mustache, appeared in a loose-fitting white costume, which could have been the traditional linen suit of a southern gentleman or the garb of the sad clown, Pierrot.

In a frantically paced monologue, Eichelberger played the king, Fool and Cordelia. Changing character through quick shifts in voice and posture, he filled the theater with brilliant language, from vulgar vaudeville shtick to recondite theatrical allusions.

Eichelberger followed “Leer” with two consummate “drag” performances, a lisping Elizabeth I fretting in madrigal-like lines about daddy Henry VIII’s legacy and a hissing Lucrezia Borgia threatening to make the audience wish they had “never seen San Diego” if she didn’t get her way.

Only Philip-Dimitri Galas and his associates had performed equally well here. And he is gone. One of the most significant artists to emerge in San Diego, he died Aug. 12 at age 32. Like others of great talent, he had achieved fame and honors elsewhere but not in his hometown.

The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, in a major art event, sponsored a memorial tribute to Galas on Nov. 15 in Sherwood Auditorium with Sando Counts, Helen Shumaker and Sean Sullivan offering examples of “Avant Vaudeville,” which Galas had liked to boast was “the only performance style to originate in San Diego.”

Avant Vaudeville evolved in response to Galas’s creative needs. “It’s always something different at different times,” he admitted. Its origins were, he claimed, “everything from Shakespeare to the shimmy,” including “Hollywood and Artaud, Jayne Mansfield and Gertrude Stein.” Its essentials were a script, a pose and minimal props. “It is cabaret, poetry, music, dance, burlesque,” he said, “‘but it all begins with my writing carried onto the stage.”

Galas assaulted his audiences with dense, rhythmical, verbal collages. Stridently, relentlessly, he dazzled and bewildered, provoked and beguiled. He was a master of seduction and of terror. He wanted his audiences, he said, “to be completely rattled . . . and to feel like they’ve been entertained.”

He was fortunate to discover sympathetic artists to convey his vision. First he pygmalionized a life-size, inflatable doll prop into actress Helen Shumaker. As his best known character, “Mona Rogers,” she brays, “Instead of being just another nothing, I’ll be the biggest nothing that ever lived in San Diego.”

With Galas, Shumaker and Sullivan acquired fame and honors, including Drama-Logue and LA Weekly awards. Native San Diegan Shumaker has played Mona Rogers for months to sold-out houses in San Francisco, where she has become a cult figure, and will soon take the performance to New York. Sullivan has a career in theater and film.

As Shumaker and Sullivan took on performance responsibilities, Galas concentrated on directing and writing. He was also a successful entrepreneur, supporting his art through his business. In partnership with James Nocito he recycled images from vintage paperback novels as Galas Exoticards.

His lessons were: Life is tragic. People are funny. Have compassion.

Good things to remember as we begin the New Year.