O.C. ART / Cathy Curtis : Show Is a Murky Look at Hockney

Sometimes the ol’ soft shoe is harder to pull off than the big production number. It takes finesse, wit and smarts to make a lightweight exhibit shine in the spotlight. At the Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana, a show of sprightly minor work by David Hockney becomes a vague and lumbering Tribute to the Master.

Hockney, of course, is the technical virtuoso with the passion for pattern and high-keyed color, the affable Brit who found Los Angeles swimming pool culture infinitely more to his taste than the bleak skies of England. His paintings of the aqueous life of Southern California, his vibrant portraits of local collectors and his strikingly original stage designs have gained him a substantial following.

Locally, he cuts a high-profile figure, with his preternaturally blond hair, round specs and primary-color accessories. He’s a celeb, no doubt about it, and his upbeat art appeals mightily to the living-well-is-the-best-revenge crowd. In an age of acute emphasis on style, he is style incarnate. In an era of complex, difficult art, his embrace of humanistic, instantly identifiable themes--friends, houses, landscapes--and his light, ever-so-gently witty touch has made him a hero to the upscale masses.

The 60-odd works in this exhibition are from the artist’s own collection, and most are brand new. The show, organized by Don Cribb, an antiques conservator who is a close friend of Hockney, cries out for a more objective, professional treatment. Too many similar small doodlings weigh down a show that should be the airiest of souffles.

Although the exhibit is touted as an introduction to the artist’s use of “high tech” methods, it offers a few of his familiar photo-collages as well as a bunch of laser prints, and drawings and collages reproduced on copy and facsimile machines. Except for the clever photo-collages, however, the technology on parade here really has more to do with an artist happily fooling around in the studio than with a creative breakthrough.

The photo-collages, constructed with masses of overlapping Polaroids, are sprawling compositions that fragment a scene into myriad separate views. The technique is not a way of analyzing the content or inner meaning of these scenes. Rather, it seems an attempt to convey the way we absorb the elements of a new environment--by being bombarded with bits and pieces of visual information that we sort out in our minds.

In “Mother, Los Angeles,” from 1982, a group of Polaroids build the image of a sweet-faced woman sitting with an afghan over her legs, her bulky white purse at her feet. Other shots offer views of a green valise, acres of dull brown carpet, a biography of actor John Gielgud and paintings by Hockney. By showing his own sneakered feet at the bottom of the collage, Hockney literally inserts the “artist’s point of view” into the scene. Amusing on first look, it’s cloying as an oft-repeated detail.

Ever the dapper stylist, Hockney creates a playful border of feet in unmatched socks below a collage called “Walking in the Zen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto, Japan.” And in “Walking Past Le Rossignol,” he attempts to duplicate the experience of moving past a whimsical stage set he designed for the Metropolitan Opera production of the Stravinsky work.

The “homemade” prints in the show were drawings made with various unspecified media that Hockney duplicated on an office copier. A number of these are as winsome as all get-out. In three childlike pieces, skewed legs on red chairs in a patterned interior give the furniture oddly shy, recalcitrant personalities. Many--too many!--still lifes of fruit and flowers demonstrate the artist’s flair for fluid outline and bold color a la Matisse.

Other prints include stick-figure doodles such as “Man Looking for His Glasses,” happy little experiments in imprinting various textures, and a decorative eight-part set, “The Tree,” of root, leaf, log and branch forms.

Hockney’s so-called color laser prints are blow-ups of portraits he painted, enlarged section-by-section on a laser printer. In contrast to the well-known giant photo-realist portraits of Chuck Close, who uses large-format Polaroids as models for his painted images, Hockney is simply str-e-e-e-tching his original small painting over more space. He winds up, then, with an exaggerated painterliness in which the separate brush strokes almost become objects in themselves. In one of these images, New York City art czar Henry Geldzahler’s white beard looks rather like a mound of aerosol shaving cream.

The fax art--drawings “printed” by being transmitted by a fax machine--is the most throwaway component of the show. Several of these are variations of a little joke about cornball ocean wave paintings made by an outfit called Hollywood Sea Picture Supply Co. That imagery seems to have inspired Hockney to do a set of effortless variations on wave forms, turning them, in one instance, into dancing parentheses sprayed with a confetti of pale dots.

Granted, there would have been no point in charging ahead with another full-blown examination of Hockney’s art after last year’s retrospective of his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But the Modern Museum show still fails to offers a real perspective on Hockney--even on the specific subject of Hockney and “high tech.”

Viewers are obliged to buy a catalogue with a gushing, badly written essay by an obscure art educator to learn even the simplest facts about how the “high tech” works are produced. (To its credit, the catalogue does, at least, contain an artist’s chronology.)

A museum employee was overheard telling a baffled viewer that an explanatory videotape would soon be available in the gallery. Standard practice in museums, however--video or no video--is to offer basic information on text panels mounted on the wall. In this exhibit, there is but one brief notice, posted above a fax machine, that burbles about extending “modern image-making equipment to include creative possibilities.”

Adding to the confusion is an installation that disperses works made by the same process throughout the exhibit, and peculiar labels that list the edition numbers of the prints but not the type of process involved. One gets the feeling that Hockney’s studio simply dropped off whatever was handy and that it was then hung with no particular rhyme or reason.

If this is a “user-friendly” art museum, as its supporters claim, then the “users” must be an amazingly passive and incurious group.

An untitled exhibit of work by David Hockney continues through Nov. 5 at the Modern Museum of Art, Griffin Towers, 5 Hutton Centre Drive, Santa Ana. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Admission is free. Information: (714) 754-4111.