Art in the Age of Animosity : A pair of exhibitions in La Jolla just possibly might offend everybody

Two exhibitions at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art bring shadowed thoughts to the bright beachside town. One show is the 1989 edition of Awards in the Visual Arts, that regional U.S. survey that last year included a now-notorious photograph by Andres Serrano provocatively titled “Piss Christ.”

As every reader of culture columns now knows, that photograph, along with the elegant, sometimes kinky, oeuvre of the late Robert Mapplethorpe, is the centerpiece of a political controversy that threatens the independence--if not the very existence--of the National Endowment for the Arts. Lawmakers including the influential Sen. Jesse Helms (Rep.-N.C.) have proposed legislation to prevent the endowment from backing art they regard as offensive, thus rekindling all the usual fears of official censorship and all the familiar arguments about whether or not tax dollars ought to be used to foster art that most Americans neither like nor understand.

If this ominous fuss were not under way, there would be no reason to look at the AVA exhibition or the accompanying installation by British conceptual artist Richard Long as anything other than the aesthetic events they in fact represent. (Both run to Oct. 15.) Neither Long nor any of the 10 artists selected by the AVA appear to be out to scandalize anyone, but in the present climate of touchy self-righteousness it is impossible to look at any of this work without imagining people who would find every bit of it an occasion for indignation. The worst thing about an atmosphere of official coercion is a created paranoia that distracts from one’s own reality--a kind of invasion of artistic privacy. The best thing it spawns are opportunities for rueful humor.

Long, born in Bristol in 1945, is presently artist-in-residence at the museum. His work has long been familiar on the international circuit, where it shows up in summer extravaganzas from Kassel to Venice. This year he was one of the few bright, apt spots in the sprawling, disastrous “Magicians of the Earth” at Paris’ Pompidou Center. It is no trouble to conjure up a host of folks to wax huffy at his art. Here it consists--characteristically--of two circles of massed stones about 12 feet across, two wall compositions painted with terra-cotta slip applied by hand (one doughnut circle, one long rectangle) and two compositions of listed words. Long’s natural predators are, of course, those legions of citizens who know on sight that this sort of thing is not art.

Of course they are right, except for one crucial caveat, which is that stone circles, mud smears and lists are not necessarily art. Neither, for that matter, are huge canvases bursting with cupids, naked goddesses and armored heroes. Artworks become art only when they transcend the simple facts of their existence, and they can do that only when they blend with the sensibility of the viewer. It’s chemistry in the same way love is chemistry and just as fraught with anxiety over ambiguities of meaning and authenticity.

Long’s wordworks paint an image of him as an aesthetic nomad seeking art in primitive nature. One uses arrows to diagram wind direction during 20 days when the artist walked 560 miles across Spain and Portugal; the other is called “Early Morning Senses” and consists of a list of words he associated with strolls on tropical Frigate Island in the Indian Ocean--words like Sun / Damp Dust / Cock Crows / Guano / Coco Plum. The pieces seem to want to be poetry but they are too skeletal for me.

On the other hand, his slip painting of a circle the size of a crane tire is magisterial. It appears to spin on account of splatters off its edges. Subtle handling of scrubby surface lends an illusion of dimensional solidity. Besides, it’s sheerly beautiful with drawing as inevitable as Oriental ink splash pictures.

Long’s stone circles appear randomly arranged but he must have done something right because they transform themselves, evoking Stonehenge and Zen Gardens at once. One is made of buff-colored Utah sandstone marbled with pink which seems to change from a desert landscape to a sea of flower petals. The other--in dark Baja La Cresta granite--metamorphoses from a forbidding mountain range into a lake of molten bronze. The whole jells into an aesthetic that finds the magic of art in human reverence for nature. Corporations that pollute the environment should either flee from it like a vampire from a cross or patronize it to polish up their image.

Long’s work would surely set off the old it-looks-too-easy-I-could-do-it-myself reaction in his imagined detractors. In reality, of course, it’s much tougher than it looks, apparent effortlessness being a mark of mastery.

By contrast, virtually all the AVA work is still struggling for Long’s kind of seamless integration. Although one feels very protective of the AVA in its current travail, the truth is that its mandate--scouring 10 regions of the country for worthy talent--sometimes turns up art that has not quite as yet found itself or is possessed by the kind of cranky self-defeating individuality associated with provincialism. (In this regard it is probably significant to note that Serrano did not get in the soup over his murky image of a plastic crucifix in an ambiguous liquid but over its title, which was either questionably naive or an invitation to trouble.)

None of which is grounds for shooting the messenger. Shows like AVA are artistic forums. Debate over their content is crucially appropriate because it vivifies the work--but only as long as the wrangle remains in the realm of intellectual discussion where it belongs. Taking real legislative action against these fantasies is wacky.

Picketing would be OK.

At Germany’s Documenta exhibition, citizens--usually excluded artists--often picket the survey in pious political accents: Why are these East German Commies included? Why Ignore the Good Old Boys for these International Fops?

It makes a nice carnival atmosphere, shows the art is taken seriously and is completely harmless.

Maybe the National Rifle Assn. should picket the AVA exhibition. James Drake from El Paso shows painted copies of Goya, Delacroix and Boucher mounted on steel plates and juxtaposed with model rifles associating sexual and religious repression with violence and violence with firearms, which are, of course, in reality only used for target practice.

The aerospace industry might demonstrate against the effrontery of Charles Wilson who hails from Evanston, Ill. He makes fragments of aircraft out of wire or plexiglass and puts them with neon signs--like “Berlin Desire”--which suggest that airplanes are used in nuclear war. My own placard will read, “Looks Too Much Like Bruce Nauman.”

The works of Paul Kos, Roy Fondaw and Patrick T. Dougherty were not fully installed during an exhibition preview. Fondaw appears politically neutral unless there is an Ant-Funk Society. Dougherty makes sculpture by

wrapping live foliage. The work looks pro-environment so The Society for the Destruction of the Amazon Rain Forest should be on alert. One of Kos’ pieces incorporates a bell and an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe so atheists can charge it with unfairly promoting religion. There must also be people who are incensed by virginity.

Speaking of religion, the drawings and sculpture of Anne McCoy deal with spiritual beliefs so old we call them myths. Huge drawings in colored pencil depict--among other things--a fish-headed god in a classical landscape where fetuses sleep in floating wombs. The meaning of this image is so superbly unclear that both pro-choice and anti-abortion forces could probably find reason to hate it.

Well, you get the idea. We live in an ambiance that appears to seek occasions for hostility, causing art to be perceived in ways that utterly miss the point. David Hammons shows scruffy fetish sculptures that employ cast-off black sheet rubber to bring together the traditions of African tribal art with urban American junk sculpture.

Ed Fraga makes dingy, naive reliquary paintings desperately dreaming of sweet magic in Detroit. Jo Anne Callis is trying to turn black-and-white photography into a Post-Modernist stew of Expressionism and Neo-Classicism. Eric Levine’s abstract sculpture is a particularly keen blend of geometry and organic surprise.

It’s just art. What good is it if there is no reason to haul it into court?