THE 1988 YEAR IN REVIEW : ART

W as 1988 the year of the dead in the Orange County arts scene? Well, it was the year Pacific Symphony conductor Keith Clark was termed “a dead fish,” the year William Shakespeare was nearly a dead duck in Garden Grove and the year the rock zanies in Oingo Boingo held yet another “Dead Man’s Party” at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre.

Jokes notwithstanding, there were encouraging signs of life locally. South Coast Repertory Theatre won major national recognition with the 1988 Tony Award as best regional theater in the country. The Grove Theatre Co. triumphed over considerable civic adversity that threatened for a time to shut down the county’s only annual Shakespeare festival. The Pacific Symphony demonstrated new enthusiasm , with concerts led by guest conductors vying for the soon-to-be-vacated music director post.

Local rock bands seemed to flourish, live and on record, despite a paucity of clubs in the county that would book them or radio stations that would air their music. The Improv in Irvine paved the way for a significant increase in the quantity and quality of stand-up comedy in the county.

With that in mind, in the following four pages critics for The Times Orange County Edition offer compendiums of the best--and in some cases, the worst and the silliest--that the county had to offer during the year in art, music, dance, theater, pop and comedy. *”Chris Burden: A 20-Year Survey,” at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Orange County’s major art exhibition of 1988, a massive display of prickly and sometimes downright ornery works that are ultimately revelatory of a continually questioning, first-rate mind.

*”The Figurative Fifties,” at Newport Harbor. Another major show, conceptually not as strong as it might have been but with important work on paper by Willem de Kooning and terrifically ebullient pieces by the likes of Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan and George McNeil.

*”The Early Works of Charles E. Burchfield,” at the Laguna Art Museum. The year’s most enjoyable historical show, with passionate, idiosyncratic paintings by an American original.

*Works from the Pauline Hirsh collection at Laguna Art Museum and the museum’s South Coast Plaza annex. Provocative early pieces by several mostly lesser-known contemporary artists.

*The Lorrin and Deane Wong collection at the Art Institute of Southern California. Pieces by important contemporary American and European artists, many of whom have never shown in Orange County.

*”Bare Facts, Sly Humor,” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center and “Suburban Visions, Middle-Class Dreams,” at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton. Recent unconventional work in photography and a timely subject illustrated with some wonderfully quirky picks. Both of these shows were part of “Photography: Inside Out,” a countywide series of exhibits that helped boost the level of community art center offerings this year.

* Angie Bray’s “Night Lies” installation at BC Space in Laguna Beach: An installation tapping

deep psychological veins via artlessly simple means, and also very possibly a breakthrough for the Laguna Beach artist.

*”Inside Out” at BC Space. Shattering images and voices of the mentally ill imprisoned in a locked ward (by Mary Ellen Mark) or trying to make it on their own in the “real” world (by Lonnie Shavelson)--surely the year’s most significant show addressing a major social issue.