ART/Cathy Curtis : Exhilarating Laguna Show Offers Glimpse of Contemporary Roots

While the American Impressionists and their sunny stylistic cousins hold court upstairs at the Laguna Art Museum, a tiny sleeper of a show on the lower level offers a piquant treat for the contemporary art crowd.

Part of Herbert Hirsh’s donation from the estate of his mother, Pauline, who lived in Beverly Hills, the exhibit consists mostly of early works by Southern California artists.

The show is exhilarating on several counts.

When works like these come to the Laguna Museum, they suggest that a dedication to Southern California art of the past hasn’t crowded out an active interest in serious and provocative art of our times.

Equally important, the collection’s emphasis on art made at the beginning of a career offers an important perspective on where the recent stuff “came from” and how a certain way of thinking evolved.

And the chance to see art obviously acquired “hot off the press” rather than bought as trendy investments also offers a refreshing perspective on the process of building a personal collection.

“Pauline was all the things that make a noble collector,” says Joni Gordon, director of Newspace Gallery in Los Angeles. “Really passionate about young artists. . . . Obstinate. Thrifty-- she determined the prices. Demanding. Opinionated. . . . She bought early (and) I don’t think she ever made a bad move.”

Gordon says Hirsh would make up her mind about a piece “in 30 minutes” and frequently bought several pieces by the same artist.

One terrific little piece in the show is Jud Fine’s “Bresse Orpington,” a square wall sculpture from 1972 made of layers of chicken wire with an unexpected moire effect.

The notion of using such a humble material in such a starkly poetic way--shadows also come into play, casting a cube pattern on the white wall from one angle--still seems fresh. This is a coolly beautiful minimalist vision that also seems to be about the impossibility of perceiving things “straight on,” unencumbered by reverberations of the various phenomena involved in the act of seeing.

Fine got into art when he was a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara studying cultural and intellectual history. His more recent paintings and sculptures (which generally incorporate poles made of various natural and manufactured materials) continue to deal in visually arresting ways with theoretical concerns involving the reception of information.

Allan McCollum is based in New York and has become widely known for making paintings that are blank, prefab objects and sculptures that look mass-produced. He and many other young artists--influenced by the writings of Jean Baudrillard and other French deconstructionist philosophers--make “simulations” of art as deadpan, nonjudgmental reflections of a cultural arena taken over by rabid consumerism.

“I’m just doing the minimum that is expected of an artist and no more,” McCollum is quoted in the June issue of Art in America magazine. “I’m trying to orchestrate a charade.”

But he used to make art with a markedly different look. “Hearsay,” from 1973, is one of these pieces, a rectangular swath of painted and glittered canvas squares attached to each other with big dribbles of glue. Although minimalist in its additive geometry (the clusters of glittered squares form various blocky patterns), the piece has a hugely visceral side.

Long threads dangle from the raw edges of the canvas, the gummy gray paint applied separately to single squares of canvas--sometimes over pinkish stains--has a quick, gestural energy and the squares of green glitter dazzle with an insouciant, deliberately inappropriate glamour.

Still, the piece links up intellectually with McCollum’s present approach. He was always involved in taking apart preconceived notions of the way art looks and functions. In 1973, doing that meant adding a feisty fillip to minimalism. Today, McCollum enlists minimalist shapes in the service of ticklish art marketing issues central to the inflated and dubious art climate of the ‘80s.

Christopher Georgesco was just 22 in 1972 when he made “Piece No. 7.” Each of its three parts looks rather like what you’d get if you reassembled a bunch of canvas deck chairs into a long, undulating length of canvas passing in and out of wooden dowels. The three totems lean against the wall in a disarmingly casual way, underlined by the breezy quality of the canvas.

Working with cast concrete or steel in the intervening years, Georgesco has kept his sphere of activity within the cleanly geometric bounds he set himself early in the game.

DeWain Valentine made his big splash in the ‘60s as a so-called Finish Fetish artist, one of several Southern Californians who had found the dazzling, light-reflecting possibilities of lacquer and plastics while jazzing up custom cars and working on boats.

His “Pink Top” sculpture dates from 1964. With its bowl-shaped bottom, knobby top and raspberry-edged swaths of luscious pink color, the polyester resin piece is deliciously goofy, a big perfect toy for grown-ups.

In recent decades, Valentine has produced more staid-looking work in laminated glass and other industrial materials. But his interest in trapping the various manifestations of ambient light continues.

Other pieces in the show are by New York transplant Andrew Spence (a painting in three textured shades of dark green, separated by thick, curving boundaries), Bay Area artist Mashashi Matsumoto (a stylized life-sized painting of a door, wrapped in plastic and leaning against the wall) and Jim Murray (a photorealist painting of a couple outdoors that captures the awkward immediacy of a snapshot).

A work by Andy Warhol (“Flowers,” a wool tapestry made to look like a commercial lithograph) and Robert Rauschenberg (“Canoebird Door,” a witty construction of cardboard boxes) are also on view.

After the exhibit closes July 24 (to make room for a fresh installment of items from the Hirsh collection), the museum will be seeking to sell these pieces, because they don’t fit with the museum’s policy of collecting California art.

Certain other pieces in the Hirsh donation will probably not figure in the museum’s collections, according to Bolton Colburn, the museum’s registrar and curator of collections.

A Bruce Beasley sculpture that pillories former President Richard Nixon will probably be “a difficult work to show,” Colburn says, adding that the museum may be able to trade the piece with Beasley for a more “generic” work. A few other pieces, including a Tom Holland sculpture and a kinetic sculpture by Fletcher Benton, suffered major damage before they came to the museum.

(Gordon says Hirsh was “a rough and tumble collector” who kept moving her art around her “terrific, madcap house.” As the dealer points out, these works of art had no value at the time: “It was a little like the clothes famous actors wore that are now being auctioned.”)

But there are several other strong (and healthy) works in the group, including more work by Valentine, McCollum and Georgesco, as well as a nifty piece from Alexis Smith’s “Flatlands” text-and-collage series that offers a commentary on group dynamics, power and conformism in the guise of a parable about a community populated by geometric shapes.

As it happened, Hirsh had no special ties with the museum. (The collection found its way there through the efforts of a private art appraiser whose identity Colburn would not reveal).

But perhaps her gutsy legacy will inspire other worthy gifts of contemporary art to an institution eager to build a solid foundation in the art of its region.