ART / Cathy Curtis : Show Centering on Traveling Wanders Off in All Directions

They say we use up one-third of our lives sleeping, but when you think of all the hours a typical Southern Californian spends creeping along the freeway in a wheeled metal box, driving looks like the real time-gobbler. Yet for most people, American car culture still invokes the thrills of potential danger, sexual dalliance and delicious escapism.

There must be hundreds of pop songs, from the Soul Survivors’ “Expressway to Your Heart” to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” that use behind-the-wheel metaphors to make their point. A whole genre of novels, beginning in 1957 with Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” have detailed the lives of restless young people who crisscross the country in search of new kicks, old loves or self-knowledge. And, of course, movies wouldn’t be same without romantic drives, screaming car chases and the long-distance auto travel of unlikely couples (“Rain Man,” “When Harry Met Sally”).

In visual art, the famous abstract crumpled car-body sculptures of John Chamberlain come to mind, as well as Edward Kienholz’s once-scandalous “Back Seat Dodge” (a real car body with figures copulating on the back seat). But in general, cars don’t seem to matter much in contemporary art--perhaps because the center of the contemporary-art scene is New York, where many people don’t own a car or even a driver’s license.

Nothing daunted, the Muckenthaler Cultural Center has come up with an exhibit (through Sept. 3) called “The Traveling Show: Art Influenced by Transportation.” The title encompasses other types of vehicles besides cars and the show itself wanders farther afield to deal--too vaguely, alas--with pathways and the general idea of movement. But cars and the basic on-the-road experience are the main event here.

There is one fine Chamberlain, “Etruscan Romance” from 1984, a bulwark of lustrous, compressed metal components in deep red, rose, green and blue aligned in vertical slabs. And there is also a strong and wildly varied group of other works that deal specifically with the mystique of the automobile.

Carlos Almaraz’s painting “Flip Over” exults in the brilliant colors of a terrible freeway fire and the wild, ghastly freedom of a car somersaulting in the air.

A mixed-media work by Mel Rubin, “Rampant Miasma,” replays the view from behind a steering wheel, with the rear-view mirror wryly reflecting a sweetened image of the Home Sweet Home the driver left behind. In one of his atmospheric watercolors, George James captures the blurred beauty of reflections of taillights in a delicatessen parking lot (“Subs Made Now”).

Steve Lapin’s mixed-media painting “Karen” is a tongue-in-cheek treatment of the sex-and-freedom side of car culture. The image is of a woman lounging by a back-yard pool with a Cadillac half-submerged in it. “Her skirt ripped the engine roared the car leapt . . . “ reads the text incorporated in the work. But Karen moved away after this tumultuous encounter, and the narrator decided he was “through with love.”

Dustin Shuler, known in these parts for his long-term interest in car imagery, is represented by several works. The most successful of these is the slyly sexual “Ships That Pass in the Night.” Recreated on a giant scale with bamboo and rice paper, a full-blown breastlike ‘50s taillight and a baroque tail fin share a patch of wall space.

At first somewhat mystifying, Richard Sigmund’s gray painting, “Century Park E. and Pico, LA, CA, USA,” proves to be a dryly minimal image of a swatch of the asphalt at that Los Angeles intersection.

Craig Stecyk’s installation “Fish Tale” is an array of hubcaps organized with the ponderous symmetry typical of a zealous amateur collector. Deadpan text-and-photo documentation explains that the collector (shown in typical proud-fisherman pose with his catch) “worshiped the big fish.” But, realizing that “destiny now favored another voyager,” he began stalking nocturnal streets and parking lots looking for Plymouth Barracudas and Packards.

Other topical work on view includes Michael Hart’s painting “On the Road” (a flashy guy in a car that absurdly straddles two square mountains), Tom Jenkins’ fanciful painting of freeway disaster, “Alternate Route Advised,” Roger Kuntz’s vintage painting “Signs” (an impressionistic view of a cluster of signs above a moody underpass), and Robin Palanker’s pastel “I-5,” a soft, gray curve under a bleached-out sky.

With so much zesty art based on the car-and-road theme, it is unclear why the show veers into other areas. Such works as Karl Matson’s “Wagon for Guatemala” (superficially about transportation, but clearly begging questions of a political nature) and Michael McMillen’s painstaking construction “The Observatory” seem radically misplaced in this show.

Rather than roam all over the map, stretching the “transportation” theme to the breaking point, it would have been better to try to analyze just what artists are saying about the impact of travel on our lives. All viewers have to go on is a brief wall-text essay by Bonnie L. Grad, an associate professor of art history at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. It’s much too short to do justice to the subject and wallows in generalities instead of making clear-cut, concrete points.

For his part, Muckenthaler curator Norman Lloyd says his institution is unable to fund even no-frills, Xeroxed brochures for the exhibitions, and he has only a tiny budget for guest wall-text essays like Grad’s. This is most unfortunate. If nothing else, community art centers should be information centers, places where people can absorb basic information about how to look at art and how it relates to real-life issues.

Assembling good art and hanging it in logical ways are important ingredients of a successful exhibit. But even the snappiest exhibit title can’t replace a thoughtful essay that places the art in a meaningful context and illuminates the reason someone went to the considerable trouble of pulling all the pieces together.

“The Traveling Show: Art Influenced by Transportation” remains through Saturday at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave. in Fullerton. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 738-6595.