ART : Show Schedule Holds Hope of a Happy New Year

A fireboat captain I know (whose firehouse must be the only one that regularly posts art reviews) always kids me about my writing. “Why don’t you ever say something positive?” he jokes. “Just say something nice once in awhile!”

Believe it or not, I yearn to do exactly that. But much of the art shown in Orange County (and just about everywhere else; relax, ye civic boosters!) is mediocre. Too many exhibitions are ineptly conceived and lacking in intellectual substance, and the art too often tends to be timid, boring and parochial.

These days, when we do get worthy art to look at, it is frequently packaged as an homage to a collector’s good taste. Collectors have an important place in the art world, for obvious reasons. Art patrons have played a major role in the history of art.

But art institutions have become too beholden to the consumer mentality of the ‘80s. We need to be looking at significant works of art not as fine possessions purchased by x but as significant entities in their own right. The best and most memorable exhibits tend to be organized around a strong intellectual concept: a curator’s notion of how a particular artist developed his or her style or how a body of art relates to the preoccupations of the society in which it was created.

In a larger sense, museums and other art institutions are doing their job when they give viewers “what’s good for them” rather than what they seem to want. Art is a specialized field--as specialized as computer technology or arbitrage or microbiology. Rather than second-guess the interests of “average viewers,” art institutions are in a position to introduce them to art they don’t already know and love--provided that the institutions’ overseeing boards of directors or city departments don’t stubbornly stand in their way.

By the same token, clarity and depth are the watchwords of first-class exhibition materials. Contemporary art is often based on difficult and unusual ideas. Older art is best understood in its historical context. Too often viewers of contemporary art are expected to wade through confusing texts bristling with unfamiliar terminology, and viewers of historical material are sent on their way with wishy-washy platitudes.

Encouragingly, however, this year’s exhibition schedule includes a quartet of particularly meaty approaches to art.

At Newport Harbor Art Museum, “L.A. Pop in the Sixties” (April 23 to July 9) will reconsider Pop Art in Los Angeles--as exemplified by the work of Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Billy Al Bengston, Wallace Berman, Vija Celmins, John Baldessari and others--in light of the movement’s conceptual underpinnings. To quote the museum’s press materials, the exhibit will deal with “the relationship between visual ‘sign’ and written word, the conceptual manipulation of common objects and an extreme autobiographical bias” on the part of the artists.

“American Landscape Video: The Electronic Grove,” coming in the fall to Newport Harbor (organized by Carnegie Institute Museum of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg) will survey 20 years of video installations by Dara Birnbaum, Frank Gillette, Doug Hall, Mary Lucier, Bill Viola and others (Oct. 20 to Dec. 31). Besides experiencing the sheer visual impact of works by major American video artists, viewers may look for curatorial insights into the way an age-old theme in art--landscape--has been transformed into a psychologically acute and technologically complex form.

At the Laguna Art Museum, “David Park” (March 9 to May 17) will present 75 works from the 1950s by the San Francisco Bay Area painter who abandoned abstraction to strike out on his own as a forceful realist. Organized by curator Richard Armstrong at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the show has been criticized because it analyzes Park’s achievement in purely formalist terms even though the artist was deeply and chiefly interested in portraying lonely people in everyday settings. It will be interesting to see how the work holds up under such heavy-duty, if seemingly misguided, scrutiny.

UC Irvine’s Fine Arts Gallery will offer a peek at the collecting habits of no less than Sigmund Freud, who fancied Egyptian bronzes, Greek and Roman terra cottas and various pieces of Asian art (Nov. 12 to Dec. 10). Unlike the usual run of “collector” shows, the collector is rightly paramount in this exhibit. What did art mean to the founder of psychoanalysis and why did he choose to live with particular works? That’s what we will want to read about in the catalogue for the show, curated by Lynn Gamwell for the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Coincidentally, the exhibition roster also includes three exhibits consisting primarily of drawings by artists known for ambitious, large-scale projects. Granted, such shows tend to be on the dry side visually, but if presented well they can impart valuable information about the way artistic ideas develop and mature.

“Barry Le Va: 1968-1988,” at Newport Harbor, will present 80 drawings (and, happily, six re-created installations) by the California artist (Jan. 20 to April 2). Le Va is famed for his “scatter pieces,” made with eccentric materials that included flour, felt, bullets and paper towels strewn around defined spaces according to a particular logic of their own. The show was organized by Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery.

“David Ireland: A Decade Documented 1978-1988” at UC Irvine (March 28 to April 29) will introduce a Northern California artist whose unusual architectural environments are seldom seen in these parts with a group of drawings for projects.

“Works by Helen and Newton Harrison,” at the Laguna Art Museum (Jan. 20 to March 12), will consist of drawings and hand-colored photographic works for some of the couple’s ecological projects.

A handful of other exhibits will explore pockets of art activity of more than passing interest.

Newport Harbor’s exhibit of work by avant-garde Moscow painter Erik Bulatov will offer a glimpse of the way glasnost has affected the formerly monolithically Socialist Realist output of Soviet art (July 28 to Oct. 1). The museum has organized the exhibit in concert with the Renaissance Society of Chicago and the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Wayne Thiebaud: Works on Paper,” due at UC Irvine (Oct. 8 to Nov. 4), is billed as the first major retrospective of prints, drawings, watercolors and paintings on paper by the Bay Area artist known best for his images of pies and cakes and hilly landscapes. Thiebaud is very popular with viewers. (The Newport Harbor show of the artist’s paintings a couple of years ago was a smash hit.) But I hope that this show (organized by the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the Fine Arts Collections at UC Davis) will provide a fresh outlook on his bright and seductive body of work.

Another Bay Area artist is the focus of “Stephen De Staebler: The Figure,” due at the Laguna Art Museum (June 2 to Sept. 10). The exhibit (curated by Lynn Gamwell for the museum and Saddleback College, where she was formerly director of the art gallery) will survey the sculptor’s life-size works in clay and bronze. The monumental scale and fragmentary condition of these figures--suggestive of archeological discoveries--long ago gave De Staebler cult status in Northern California. In a larger context, his work always struck me as formulaic and redolent of little more than a sort of genteel, wistful humanism.

But maybe this is the show that will change my mind. At the beginning of a new year, even curmudgeonly critics hold out bouquets of hope.