ART / Cathy Curtis : Wear Your Imaginary Dada Hat for This Show

Yes, it’s the painting from outer space--the canvas that struck people dumb! When asked how he created it, the artist--born on Mars and brought to Earth as a small child--exclaimed, “It came to me in a blinding flash of light!”

The sampling of Donald Bradford’s mixed-media paintings at the Laguna Art Museum (through July 23) sometimes seems strange enough to inspire National Enquirer-type copy. Sure, you can easily identify the individual subjects in his works--the people and objects. But that’s not exactly the same thing as getting a handle on what is going on--or why the artist uses a different style in each panel of his triptychs.

Bradford, who was born in 1949 (in Yuma, Ariz.) and lives in San Francisco, seems to view the world with the deadpan humor of the TV generation. He has worked in video and performance art; the temporal distortions and bizarre imagery often present in those art forms are an integral part of his paintings.

Most of them are based on biblical narratives (such as Jacob and the ladder) or the works of well-known artists (such as the Italian 17th-Century master Guercino or 20th-Century French painter Yves Klein). But Bradford does a number on his source material, transforming it into a slippery, disjunctive set of images pieced together rather like successive frames of a comic strip.

All of which means that viewers of his work are expected to possess a degree of cultural literacy--as well as the ability to make imaginative leaps.

Several of Bradford’s pieces come from his “Waiting for Godot” series, based on the Samuel Beckett play. Written in 1952, it has two main characters, hobos Vladimir and Estragon, who wait for someone named Godot. Although a boy appears at the end of each of the two acts to announce Godot’s imminent appearance, he never shows up.

The tramps’ spare dialogue--often quarrelsome, repetitious and disjointed--is broken by odd bits of stage business, mostly having to do with the speakers’ own boots and hats. The only other speaking characters are the whip-brandishing Pozzo and his slave, Lucky.

“Godot” introduced a new, nonlinear kind of theater, mirroring the struggle to find meaning in the postwar world, a phenomenon closely identified with the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. The play also incorporated the kind of rough-and-ready body language associated with vaudeville acts, locating essential truths within its amiable routines.

Vladimir and Estragon appear in the first panel of Bradford’s “The Hat Makes the Man (After Max Ernst),” rendered in a precise, linear style and outfitted according to the artist’s whim in mini-masks with fake cheeks and noses. Actually, the pair appear twice, as if observed at different moments during the bizarre exchange of hats in the second act of the play.

Each pair of men has three hats--Vladimir has also swiped Lucky’s hat--which makes their actions look especially ridiculous. There is a vaudeville quality about this silly activity, which goes on for several minutes. Essentially meaningless--just a way of passing time--the hat exchange also seems to have something to do with the notion of trying on another man’s identity.

The next panel of the painting is a borrowed image: a portion of a collage from 1920 by the Dada artist Max Ernst, “It’s the Hat That Makes the Man”--a group of hats sandwiched between vertical abstract forms in higgledy-piggledy columns. The effect is almost like a molecular diagram, with hats absurdly replacing the molecules. Once again, the hat is viewed, absurdly, as the equivalent of the person who wears it.

Born during World War I, the spirit of artistic Dada clowning was calculated to set a rigid and bellicose bourgeois society on its ear. In one of the most memorable Dada films, “Ghosts Before Breakfast” by German artist Hans Richter, there is an utterly delightful sequence about a wayward hat that leaves its fussy gentleman owner to go on a series of silly adventures.

The third panel in Bradford’s painting zeroes in on the three bowler hats--now broadly painted, with exaggerated shadows--stacked up on top of each other. The image does not appear to reflect any specific moment from “Godot.” Instead, the pile-up of hats looks like a close-up from the end of a real vaudeville act--like the expertly timed, harmonious resolution of a string of madcap confusions on a music hall stage.

It is tempting to add that in vaudeville, there are neat, happy conclusions; in life, there usually aren’t. We know that hats do not make the man, but we are hard-pressed to say what does. Whether Bradford intended viewers to draw such metaphysical conclusions from this painting, however, is difficult to say.

But his stylistic shifts are all of a piece with the eclecticism of his vision, the way he glides from the vaudeville aspects in the play to the borrowed Dada image, then to a melding of Dada playfulness with the vaudeville image.

At the same time, the incorporation of three distinctively different ways of portraying imagery deliberately calls attention to the way the painting is constructed. Bradford’s ideal viewer is not a passive spectator, someone who enters the world of a painting in the same trusting way you curl up with an old-fashioned novel. Instead, he keeps you at a skeptical arm’s length, never forgetting that you are looking at how someone’s mind works and are obliged to cope with the parts that do not fit neatly together.

You might say his paintings are like a succession of brief moments from a performance, separated by blackouts, or like clues in a mystery for which you have to provide the motivation and the resolution.

“Donald Bradford: Selected Works” remains on view through July 23 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $2 general, $1 for students and seniors. Information: (714) 494-6531.