Radical Things Are Happening in Orange County

Radical art seems to thrive in places where it has an abrasive clash with its surroundings. It’s like that teen-age kid in the French film “Petit Con” who heaps scorn on the harassed mother who washes his socks and the harried dad who pays his bills while the kid reads Marx, lusts after a trashy chick and sneers at how ordinary his parents are.

The world’s most renowned radical art convention is held every few years. And where? Kassel, West Germany, a nice frumpy industrial town where middle-age burghers still look abashed at a cross word from an ancient parent.

Or take Orange County. Mythically conservative, it is supposed to be a good place to raise kids or dance a corporate minuet. At the moment there are at least three interesting radical art exhibitions in Orange County. At least they are trying to be radical. Don’t forget we are only a dozen years away from the 21st Century, which means that Radical Art has been a rebellious teen-ager for about a hundred years. Radical Art is like one of those immortal comic-strip characters who don’t seem to age--Archie, maybe. They look as cheeky as ever while the rest of us develop bags. All the same, when they have outlived two or three of the cartoonists that draw them, even immortal comic-strip characters start looking like the victims of too much plastic surgery, seedy and fake.

The largest of the current radical exhibitions in Orange County is “CalArts: Skeptical Belief(s).” On view at Newport Harbor Art Museum to March 20, it consists of 100 works by 47 artists including a contingent of film and video makers shown in four programs that change daily. The show is an expanded version of one organized by the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago.

If any art school is the very model of a hotbed of artistic radicalism, it is CalArts. And where is CalArts located? Valencia, a beautifully dry, rolling hunk of real estate where yellow grass and sprawling eucalypti are laced with ranch-style tract houses, Volvos, moms, dads and kids.

And an uncle, Uncle Walt. The school, opened in 1961, was, of course, the brainchild of Walt Disney, who apparently provides the art department with a permanent and massive invisible father figure like the great colossus at Pleasure Island who was jeered and vandalized by the Bad Boys just before they sprouted tails and started to bray.

Fortunately the exhibition is not structured as a contest between Disney’s shade and the fruits of his rebellious offspring. Any evenhanded list of the greatest artists of the century would have to include Disney along with Picasso, Norman Rockwell, Duchamp, Pollock and Warhol. Only history will decide if any of the CalArts artists will make that grade, but the deck seems stacked against them.

The exhibition is, quite aptly, about CalArts’ prodigious short-term success in spawning artists who have captured the attention of the art world and have risen comet-style in a sphere that has come to resemble the worlds of movie making and pop music more closely than ever before in its tendency to value success based on externals like sales and publicity and its willingness to accept flash-pan celebrity that fizzles faster than pet rocks and mood rings.

All the same, the roster of young stars on CalArts’ marquee is phenomenal, including such prominent names as Eric Fischl and David Salle and a long gaggle of interesting artists like Jill Giegerich, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Matt Mullican, Marc Pally and Lari Pittman, among others.

You certainly can’t accuse the CalArts faculty of imposing a look on a student body that ranges in style from Fischl’s brushy figures to David Cabrera’s witty swaths of awning-striped polyester fabric, but you do notice characteristics that lace this variety together.

“If Uncle Walt would hate it, thou shalt do it,” provides a convenient rule of thumb, along with its flip side, “If U.W. loved it, thou shalt not.”

If the Disney product was antiseptic and sexless, then Mike Kelley will show sausage strings of feces and Jim Shaw will parade sex and religious iconoclasm in a comic called “The Adam and Eve Show.”

If Disney was a genius of popular entertainment who believed in art produced through the cooperative contribution of many skills, naturally CalArts artists are esoteric, singular and appeal to a small audience. They leave out the Philistines by speaking Pig Latin. The lingua franca is Conceptualism, which is art based on ideas. Ideas express themselves through words, so all this art suggests words even when there are none in it. Everything’s a kind of pictograph. Also, don’t forget that in Hollywood the phrase “high concept” is a euphemism for one-liner.

Disney’s ideas of originality were corny by high art standards, but he was fundamentally original. Naturally, CalArts artists are into not-original. In Pig Latin that’s pronounced “appropriation.” Judith Lasker laconically frames two reproductions of a Renoir nude side by side. They are identical except that the printing process tints one red, the other green. She calls it “Realism.”

Pretty funny. Like those old books of doctored masterpieces that made fun of art, CalArts art is avowedly critical of art, society, the media. The catalogue reflects the mind-set in essays of trenchant intelligence and fastidious distance that ping away at school, faculty, students. Everybody criticizes everything but themselves, a tactic inevitably leading to a cold aura of arrogance. Art comes out feeling microwaved, surface-dead like a TV with the sound off.

There are plenty of artists here whose next solo exhibition one would not willingly miss. They hold the mind’s eye rapt with their crisp cleverness. Mitchell Syrop’s little air-conditioned room is entered through a shower door painted black and lettered, “In the Can,” a funny pun combining film-world slang for finished film with a reference to being in the john, thinking. Inside are posters with photos of microscopic and simple undersea life with labels like “Critical Mass,” “Rough Trade” and “Convenient Terms.”

“Winter Cellar” by Kate Ericson and Eric Zeigler is a shelf of fruits and vegetables, preserved in mason jars and etched with leaf shapes, that looks like it wants to be nostalgic and sweet. True to the reigning sensibility, it curdles into criticism, making the jars suggest containers of fetuses.

Tough and smart, but if you’ve been around long enough to see jitterbuggers become zoot-suiters become beatniks become hippies become punks, it all starts to seem like a predictable generational rollover. You find some self-righteous sophomore giving you a condescending lecture about social injustice or semiotics and you wonder how the hell your poor dad put up with it when you did it to him.

That’s life. It takes time to grow up, and on the way everybody plays with cards from the same deck. But it seems that this art is playing from a pack that’s missing a suit. It’s like Marcel Duchamp took out all the hearts and left this gang dealing predictable hands. It’s a risible inevitable paradox that Uncle Walt’s intransigent wards wind up a bit like the old man making Pop Conceptual art that’s not much harder to figure than a Donald Duck cartoon.

Thanks to the legacy of bohemianism, just about any artist who professes religious convictions of a traditional sort is immediately assumed to be kidding. That is probably why the first sight of Audrey Flack’s paintings of saints and churches incites suspicions of irony. The 26-work exhibition, on view at UC Irvine’s art gallery to March 13, is titled “Saints and Other Angels” and consists most noticeably of images of elaborately costumed statues of saints painted to the life and furnished with glass tears--images most often associated with Spanish Catholic churches. Some such statues are artistic masterpieces aside from their votive significance, but the genre in general has long since been reduced to kitsch through trashy reproductions painted bright pastels and gucked up with rhinestones.

Flack’s saints have that pastry-window brightness augmented by arid air-brush surfaces that carry over to images of Pisa cathedral and the like. Just another iconoclastic sendup. But wait. We find that the 56-year-old New York artist has been drawing saints since the ‘40s in a sincere and tremulous manner. Not all of her “saints” are anointed Catholic holy persons. There is a black boxer and a matriarchal black woman, not to mention a stunning painting of a green-eyed beauty who appears perfectly down to earth except for a pendant on her forehead. There is also a kind of Egyptian tomb portrait with illusionistic air-brush shadows, and a group of Catholic sisters leading black marchers done in a muscular style recalling Courbet. No, Flack is not kidding.

Maybe she confounds religion with feminism the way Judy Chicago did in “The Dinner Party,” giving it such a creepy edge of cult worship. Flack says she admires regular people who feel such a strong sense of mission about this or that that they become larger than life. Maybe she is confounding religion with heroism. You come away from the show convinced that it is all done with a kind of innocence that simply doesn’t realize what a crocodile’s nest of conflicting messages and convoluted sensibility this art sets off.

We still think of Betye Saar as a maker of small assemblages of magical junk reflecting aspects of her experience as a black woman, from pure nostalgia to a fascination with the occult. In recent years she has traveled about making room-size environments, which are now on view at Cal State Fullerton’s gallery to next Sunday under the title “Resurrection.”

“Mojotech,” the first work encountered, is just a windowpane-size stained glass beautifully lit and looking like an enchanted version of Duchamp’s “Large Glass” translated from a world of chessboard gamesmanship to a tinkling fairyland. It’s a good start, made better by “In My Solitude,” where a little decorated lavender ladder-back chair stands on a floor of fragrant foliage. The chair casts two shadows on the wall and one of them has the silhouette of the artist, reading. The effect is so convincing you think at first Saar must be behind a scrim, but it’s all painted. It’s more that a tricky effect, it’s a poetic evocation of the way we can disappear into a world of imagination as we read or daydream.

Nothing else in the show quite comes up to this start. Oh, a wall of found objects suggesting a city nightscape is fine in its suggestion of a high-tech town with a sky full of merry spooks, but Saar has run smack into the same problem confronted by Alexis Smith when she moved up in size from sheets of notebook paper to wall-size environments.

The change caused neither artist to blow it, but both have struggled ever since with the problems of expanding an art of poetic intimacy to billboard proportions. Work threatens to lose concentration and appear pedestrian. “Sentimental Sojourn” is two walls of great thrift-shop treasures from a plastic radio bank to miniature log cabins to plastic doll’s shoes, but they remain found objects whose great numbers refuse to rhyme. Maybe the answer is to blow up the little stuff and make the viewer feel small.