ART / Cathy Curtis : Cox Exhibit Acts as Bridge for Laguna Art Museum

A sure-fire way to make the atmosphere crackle is to ask a bunch of artists how much attention they get from their friendly local art museum.

If that institution has any pretentions at all, it will attempt to seek out the highest-quality art available. Even in a major metropolitan center, that means choosing only the cream of the art produced locally. And in a smaller town--where “local” may more likely mean “provincial” or “run-of-the-mill”--it may be hard to find work that really shines.

Sometimes, to be sure, a prejudice against the local product is exactly that--a failure of nerve in the face of work ignored by the art establishment. Conversely, a museum is no more obliged to cater to the wishes of the artists in town than it is to those of local collectors. By exposing everyone--including local artists--to a broad range of significant work, a museum is best fulfilling its educational function for the community.

In Orange County, resident artists by and large know better than to expect to be shown at Newport Harbor Art Museum. In recent years, only a handful of county artists (none of whom, it appears, actually lives in Newport Beach) have been among the elect. This group includes conceptual artist Nick Vaughn, painter Don Karwelis and (in the current exhibit of photographs from the collection) Jerry Burchfield, Laurie Brown, H. Arthur Taussig and Martha Fuller.

But the Laguna Art Museum--founded by a group of Laguna artists and located in a town teeming with people who consider themselves artists of one stripe or another--traditionally has been very hospitable to art produced locally. Now that the museum is striving for a sharper profile, however, the issue is trickier. How do you find enough work that’s “local” but also up to the standards of the imported shows that have become the museum’s mainstay?

The most recent answer to that question is “Kris Cox: Sculpture and Paintings,” an exhibit that continues through Oct. 22. It presents the work of an artist who lived in Laguna Beach for 12 years before moving to Los Angeles this year.

Ceramics do continue to occupy a sort of netherworld in the pecking order of art. The old distinctions between craft and fine art die hard, and indeed, much work in the clay medium does lean toward the decorative and insubstantial. But the choice of Cox seems a reasonable, if not wildly exciting, bridge between the town’s longstanding emphasis on crafts and the museum’s attempt to nudge its viewers toward a more adventurous vision of art.

Although Cox’s wife, Elaine Dines-Cox, has guest curated several exhibits at the museum, only a holier-than-thou observer would cry foul, given the tiny, hopelessly overlapping world of the arts. Besides, Cox’s work has been fairly widely exhibited in Southern California, including a 1986 ceramic show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

A master of fine art graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Cox started out as a traditional potter and evolved a more personal, sculptural treatment of the medium. A group of vessels from the early ‘80s offers gentle variations on familiar shapes, cracked surfaces that suggest the texture of dried mud and occasional bursts of incised markings that resemble calligraphy. This is attractive stuff, but it’s still in the mute category of decorative object rather than the voluble one of art.

Subsequently, in his “Sanctum” series, Cox invested vessel forms with architectural features: towers and lookouts, scaffoldings and niches. These give the pieces the air of projects hacked into forbidding terrain by civilizations at once futuristic and medieval.

The combination of rough-and-ready bulk, delicate engineering and imaginative vision displayed in these works boosts them head-and-shoulders above the run of ceramics that wish they were sculptures. You get the idea that if Cox weren’t working in ceramics, he’d be out in the garage, tinkering with a new gadget, or in the study, reading up on ancient cultures. Unfortunately, none of the other works on view lives up to this standard.

In his wall-hung “Sentinel” series, painted and gouged ceramic tablets are fitted into scaffolding-like frameworks. One piece resembles a bizarre marriage of a crossbow, a pickax and a sled; still another takes the shape of a boat. But they seem underdeveloped, without the adventurous edge that marks the fully three-dimensional sculptures.

Also disappointing is the “Morpheus” series, which (as Peter Frank notes in his catalogue essay) resembles heads of dressmakers’ dummies or helmets. You’d think that the “head” motif would offer opportunities for statements about the mysterious ways of the human mind, isolation in a dehumanized era or some other thoughtful topic. Yet these sculptures--made of steel and hydrastone (a clay-like substance)--don’t seem to offer much more than careful craft.

The closest Cox gets to evoking a more substantial image is in “Constantin,” a gyroscopelike cage enclosing an oval solid lying on its side, somewhat reminiscent of the colossal ancient head of the early Christian emperor Constantine the Great.

Cox’s most recent projects are mixed-media paintings. In most of these, a roomlike space holds an immense object contoured like a child’s top. In “Red Alcove,” this form takes on a humanoid form with a menacing, muscle-bound appearance and a helmeted head suggestive of Alexandre Dumas’ Man in the Iron Mask or a creature out of a comic book.

Elsewhere, though, the object-in-the-room idea isn’t terribly compelling. The steady patter of gouges and vague, incised “drawings” that skitters over these paintings seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that not enough is going on here. But textural “interest” doesn’t seem to be the solution. It looks like time to start puttering again.

Also showing in the museum (to Oct. 1) are manipulated photographs by Los Angeles artist Judy Coleman. Using a Polaroid of her nude body as a working surface, she paints on it with oil and wax, draws on it with graphite and scratches it with sandpaper and steel wool. Then she re-photographs the finished piece and blows up the 8-by-10-inch negative to make the large finished work.

The resulting images make her body look as though it is suspended in fog or washed over by heavy rain or consumed by fire. The viewer doesn’t register the nakedness of the figure--which is largely obscured, anyway--so much as its untethered, helpless state.

“This has a gothic quality,” a gallery visitor remarked the other day, looking at Coleman’s photograph “Maelstrom,” in which her small, glowing body arrows like a comet through a murky void pockmarked with big watery splotches.

Indeed, most of Coleman’s dreamscapes convey the notion of female submission to raging forces beyond her control, a way of life that is the lifeblood of gothic fiction. Coleman herself views her photographed alter egos as simply “riding out some psychological moment.” Well, it isn’t the first time artist and viewer have differed about the content of a work of art. But perhaps elemental figurative work like this is particularly likely to call up highly subjective feelings about control and freedom.

It would be interesting to get a perspective on this subject from a psychologist. Any volunteers?

“Kris Cox: Sculpture and Paintings” (to Oct. 22) and photographs by Judy Coleman (to Oct. 1) are at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive in Laguna Beach. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission is $2 general, $1 for students and seniors, free for children under 12. Information: (714) 494-6531.