ARTS BEAT / LEAH OLLMAN : Curator Steals Limelight at La Jolla Museum Exhibit

Since the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art mounted “A San Diego Exhibition: 42 Emerging Artists” in 1985, tongues have wagged over the question of who was in and who was not. With “Civilians,” the museum’s latest dip into the pool of local talent, more controversy is bound to be stirred up by the man who chose the artists than by the choices themselves.

The museum invited Dave Hickey, a writer for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and Art in America, and the author of several catalogue essays, to curate the show at its downtown space (838 G St.).

Hickey chose to feature 13 artists, but more compelling and disturbing than his idiosyncratic grouping is his own curatorial statement accompanying the show. He stays refreshingly free of the self-congratulatory tone so typical of spotlights on local culture. But his remarks, written with a melange of curiosity, humor and bitterness, can be abrasive.

Hickey moved to San Diego from Texas last year, and what he encountered here, he writes, was a slap to his sensibilities: “The general public’s concern with visual culture was apparently limited to looking at the view and, failing that, looking in the mirror.”

Though this is hardly a revelation to those involved in the arts here, diplomacy and self-protection have prevented most from stating the truth this bluntly and this publicly.

Hickey goes on to attack the very cultural institutions that are struggling against this tide of indifference. He likens them all, equally, to the city’s military and educational bureaucracies, characterizing them as remote, vaguely evil powers that taint one’s soul and stifle one’s search for meaning.

Only “civilians” like him--”independent souls, private operatives”--who function in the secular realm remain uncompromised by these government or government-like powers. To his disappointment, most of the people Hickey met in San Diego did not identify with the secular realm, but instead “defined themselves externally in terms of their ranks and roles.”

For this exhibition and, presumably, for his own satisfaction, he thus set out to find more civilians, “people who define themselves according to the nature of their private vision and the quality of their personal endeavors.”

What Hickey’s observations suggest is that affiliations are damning. One can either be a teacher or an artist, a museum curator or an independent spirit, but not both. This is where the writer’s engaging style wears thin, and his statement comes to resemble a reactionary, blanket condemnation of all who work within a system. Not all organizations require that you sell your soul, of course. After all, Hickey did agree to collaborate with the La Jolla Museum. “I am a civilian,” he writes, “not a fanatic.”

The artists Hickey chose for the exhibition, which he curated casually at first, then with a detective’s zeal, make for an eclectic group. He was not out to prove anything, “except that there was something there,” he writes, thereby covering his tracks and lessening his accountability. One thing the show certainly doesn’t demonstrate is that civilian artists have any kind of edge over the other type, the “enlisted” ones, for strewn among the refined and commanding works here are plenty of others of shallow, unrefined character.

Casey McLoughlin’s “Invasion of Privacy Series,” for instance, exploits the most facile form of visual punning in its representation of walls with ears. For all of its indulgent illusionism, Dan Masters’ painting, “Usted Esta Aqui,” is similarly one-dimensional.

One of the themes that Hickey does point out as common among the artists he selected is that “private citizens in a republic tend to make art about private life in a republic--about privacy and justice (or the lack thereof)--about the difficulties of articulating and sustaining an individual vision in an obsessively group-oriented, issue-crazed, consensus-loving culture.”

This applies especially well to some of the strongest works in the show, such as Russell Forester’s miniature, enclosed environments, which address the subject of modern life with haunting poignancy. Openings in the walls of these boxlike dwellings reveal highly controlled, pristine interiors, shrines to the television sets that play continuously within. A profound sadness and sense of alienation overwhelm these elegant spaces. The only life in these otherwise silent and empty rooms is secondhand, contrived. Flashing circuitry visible at the opposite end of the structures undermines the magical aura of this slick existence, revealing the wizard to be nothing but a complex of wires and lights.

Robert Ginder focuses on the domestic environment as well, but as symbol and archetype rather than stage. In “Friday 7:30 (In Progress),” he paints a common, tile-roofed Southern California house an an icon, an object of reverence. Suffusing its stucco walls with a sublime glow and setting the house against a pure gold sky (symbolic of heaven in traditional painted icons), Ginder casts the familiar in wholly unfamiliar terms--treating the mundane as holy, the relatively new as centuries-old, the known as strangely evocative.

Others in the show distill experience to an essence of melancholy, passion or absurdity. The crisp lines of Hans Feuerhahn’s intaglio prints define scenes of an ineffable sorrow. Li Huai’s grouping of 54 small canvases exudes a jittery intensity, each image a compressed, abbreviated impression, brusquely painted in blood red, black and gray. DeLoss McGraw’s paintings of impossible hybrid creatures visualize the world invoked in the poetry of W.D. Snodgrass, McGraw’s collaborator and friend.

Eloquent images are also presented here by Eugenie Geb, Jay Johnson, Michele Burgess and Salvador Torres. Hickey’s sticky concept of civilian art also embraces the work of Carl Peck and Harry Sternberg. The show continues through Oct. 9.