FLASHES OF THEUSUALSUSPECTS

You need schlep to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest show only if you’ve been in an incubator, isolation ward, solitary cell or time warp for the last six months.

If you’ve seen half of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Individuals” exhibition, you do not have to go to La Jolla. Ditto if you saw the Whitney Biennial or “Avant-Garde in the ‘80s” at the County Museum of Art. Any of those exhibitions makes the present one a tad redundant.

On the other hand, La Jolla is a nice town and anybody might want to go there for a picture-postcard beach, or the relaxing sense of civic perfection that hovers about with a self-satisfied smile. Once there, certain types will gravitate naturally to the museum because that is their wont. What they find turns out to be an unnecessary puzzlement.

On its face, the show is a flashily correct sampling of recent American art put together by a family named Smorgon that lives in Melbourne, Australia. It might look dramatic hanging in somebody’s house, but now it’s a touring show, visiting here until May 31, and we want it to say something more to us than “and this is my new Joe Zucker.”

It consists of about 30 large works by nearly as many artists, most of whose names you can probably guess without peeking at the program. The usual suspects.

Robert Longo is on hand, doing his “Men in the Cities” routine. A red minimalist relief sculpture suggesting the Manhattan skyline’s oppressive glamour looms between overlife-size drawings of a man and woman in ambiguously agonized poses. Longo’s work is striking and may well come to symbolize a certain moment in art. It is also clear that it has all the substance of an aluminum TV-dinner tray and the poetic resonance of a pop ditty by Gary Lewis and the Playboys.

The obligatory David Salle and the mandatory Julian Schnabel look like the result of a collision between two fully loaded waiters, but less exciting.

In this company Eric Fischl passes for a master. At least he has something to say. “The New House” is one of his calmer, more convincing pictures. A big-footed nude teen-age girl stands in a dark kitchen empty of everything but built-in appliances, packing boxes and the ghoulish light of a TV. She talks on the phone. Maybe it’s her best friend from the old neighborhood, or the folks saying they’re spending the night at the old house. What matters is the evocation of goose-bump mystery and sexiness that can make ordinary circumstances seem bewitched.

Cindy Sherman’s endless series of photographic self-portraits in dress-up is here a young woman asleep by the telephone. It might be the tomboy in Fischl’s painting after she’s been turned into a female banality waiting for a call from her worthless boyfriend.

Too much of this art is just overgrown illustration. Kenny Scharf’s “Hypnozen” shows a cartoon atom surrounded by snaky purple beasties that looks like an outtake from a Tidy Bowl commercial. It makes you wince for the artist. David True’s “Memory” might as well be a blown-up panel from a ‘60s underground comix of the masochistic self-pity persuasion.

The holiness of personal taste and current conditions are the only excuses for the amount of bad art in this show. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s graffiti-based painting looks more like a pan-flash every day. Susan Rothenberg can be authentically haunting, but here she looks like a yuppie matron dressed up as a witch doctor.

The show occasionally captures one of our little tin masters in a nice moment. There’s a Keith Haring that links him to aboriginal Australian rock painting so that he seems momentarily serious.

And there are good works by offbeat artists. Jack Goldstein’s conceptually tinged night scene of spotlights in the sky echoes Fischl’s theme of ominous magic in the ordinary. Goldstein suggests a neighborhood like yours or mine about to suffer a nuclear attack. It’s not the only work here that loves a mystery. A black-on-black triptych by Troy Brauntuch hints dimly at a decapitated figure sitting in a go-cart, but it doesn’t pay off, so the general effect is of irritating mystification.

There’s a nice stylish “Les fleurs du mal” decadence in paintings by both Lois Lane and Bill Jensen. Slowly something that may represent the sensibility of the collectors begins to seep from the collective of this art. There is a love of florid floral decorativeness that is almost tropical. It pulls in a sketchy Terry Winters painting clearly inspired by the late work of Philip Guston. It breaks out in the weedy tangles of Joan Thorne’s Punk-Pollock “Wa Kort” and settles into Robert Kushner’s “October,” a double-figure painting rendered unreadable by a crazy-quilt of patterns. Elizabeth Murray’s shattered abstraction, “Get Back,” may be the best of the lot, but the installation prevents a clear take.

Smorgasbord exhibitions like this are always difficult. Serious viewers soon weary of bits and pieces, requiring an arrangement that throws light either on the collective sense of the art or the particular interests of the people who put it together. Nothing is done here to suggest an obvious community of conceptual ideas linking the photographic-cum-mechanical works of Sherman, William Wegman, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer.

Somebody might have spotted an updated-landscape theme that threads Goldstein to Robert Moskowitz’s windmill to Louisa Chase’s sawtoothed mountains and all of them to word-association imagery.

There is insight about art that burps up from the subconscious to be had in putting Jonathan Borofsky’s “Painting With Light Bulb Eyes” in the same neighborhood as Rothenberg, but it is not done. Musings on the poetics of the commonplace might be deepened by setting Fischl next to Salle and Longo, but it is not done. The cliche-comic mentality that currently substitutes for deep Jungian archetypes could have been confirmed by tacking together Basquiat, Haring and Scharf, but it is not done. Installation is a tricky business, but hanging for decorative variety is a mistake in a show that desperately needs intelligent juxtaposition.

The Smorgon collection reveals little of itself or its times other than to confirm the anarchy stalking the land like a plague. In art, the chaotic should stimulate the creative. Instead, the muse is confused.