ART REVIEW : ‘MATTER’ EXHIBITION SHOWS IMAGINATION AND COURAGE

Remember late-night college bull sessions? “The Art of the Matter,” an exhibit intended to air issues in contemporary art, recalls those freewheeling talk-fests. Seventy artists have contributed work in two and three dimensions to the evolving, five-part show at BC Space in Laguna Beach--yet no one has come up with any earthshaking answers. Or any earthshaking art, for that matter.

But credit for imagination and emphatically non-commercial gutsiness goes to gallery owners Mark Chamberlain and Jerry Burchfield, masterminds of the project, which will remain on view through Nov. 7.

Chamberlain and Burchfield solicited work from artists around the country for mini-exhibits based on specific themes (“Success, Reality, Myth,” “Society, Patronage, the Edifice Complex,” “Money, Commerce, Survival” and so forth). The idea, the invitation stated, was “to establish a forum for open and evolving dialogue (among) working artists, critics . . . educators, collectors, students, the viewing public and any other concerned individuals.”

Whatever hung on the walls or sat on the gallery floor was more or less constantly being replaced by the next wave of submissions. By the end of this six-month process, Chamberlain and Burchfield somehow hoped to have come up with “a clear survey of opinions and attitudes.”

Some of the participating artists’ opinions and attitudes were surely clear, if predictable. Worries about cuts in federal funding for the arts, sarcasm dumped on the tortuous route supposedly leading to artistic fame and fortune--such responses came through loud and clear. But for the most part, as is true of most one-dimensional, propagandistic “art,” the pieces themselves registered very low on the scales of imagination, subtlety, wit or craft.

In the final, most conceptually fuzzy installment of the show, “Ideas, Spirit and the Future,” the work lurches out in many unsatisfying directions.

Some contributions are numbingly obvious, like Susan Lohrbach-Facett and David Levy’s “Bull----,” a TV with the image of Oliver North testifying and a plate of (mercifully odorless) painted dried animal waste. Other stuff is simply weird, like Robert Gonzalez’s tourist gallery-type painting, “Figures With Bleeding Eyes.”

Still, other efforts seem poised to make a point but stop short of really saying anything, like Miriam Sacks’ “Lawsuit,” a dummy wearing a business suit with artist-law articles from Artweek plastered over his head and hands.

Roger Vallande attempts a satire on religion and the modern age in his painting, “My God Is Better Than Your God,” a revision of the famous Michelangelo image of God creating Adam. God now has a chesty lady companion and Adam is busy watching a space shot on TV. Nearby, two odd-looking creatures slug it in a storm of symbols and objects (hammer and sickle, swastika, cocktail glass, snake). This is comic book stuff, not commentary.

Although the untried, “emerging” artists likely to be interested in such shows probably feel the injustices of the art world most keenly, a jurying system of selection would have helped things greatly. More clear-cut topics also might have added a more rigorous edge to this disconcertingly unfocused endeavor.

The idea of artists and others investigating the many troubling aspects of contemporary art remains a worthy one. But maybe that is better accomplished via panel discussions and lectures than in works like these, in which the “dialogue” can be short-circuited by basic issues of aesthetic acceptability.