ART REVIEW : The Murky Waters of Curating in Santa Monica : Museums: The Santa Monica Museum of Art’s “BonAngeles” exhibit is a noble effort to introduce fresh blood into the L.A. art scene, but the show is confusingly presented.

The Post-Modern architectural ego trip known as the Santa Monica Museum of Art (a Frank Gehry creation, of course) was more or less completed 18 months ago, but the museum’s exhibition schedule has been limping along as though the place hadn’t officially opened for business.

That changed in September with the launching of the ambitious “BonAngeles,” the museum’s first plunge into the murky waters of serious curating. A noble attempt to introduce fresh blood into the L.A. art scene, this confusingly presented exhibition doesn’t bode well for the museum’s future.

A group show introducing eight German artists from Dusseldorf, “BonAngeles” features older work by the artists, all of whom are in their 30s or 40s, as well as pieces executed during a recent four-week residency in Santa Monica. If the point was to arrive at some sort of cross-cultural hybrid, that doesn’t really come off. The show--which looks for the most part like outtakes from any Documenta of the last 15 years--sheds no light whatsoever on the artists’ responses to Los Angeles. (A video offering a few words from the participants might help in this respect.)

Three of the six artists here--Manfred Muller, Hilmar Boehle and Marcel Hardung--owe a sizable debt to the man who’s cast an almost inescapable shadow on Germany’s art landscape, Joseph Beuys. Using industrial materials to express slightly precious and highly personal mythologies, their mixed-media installation pieces are tough, tender and cryptic in the manner perfected by Beuys.

Julia Lohmann and Adolphe Lechtenberg are essentially Abstract Expressionist painters (she paints with great passion on metal, he paints with equal fervor on wood and canvas), while printmaker Annette Leyener’s large black-and-white works resemble an elegant synthesis of Franz Kline and Ann McCoy. Fragile figurative abstractions populated with faintly whispered human figures, Leyener’s three large pieces are a welcome tonic to the effusively robust work that dominates the show. Leyener’s work is quite pleasing, but “BonAngeles’ ” real standout is the stuff by Ernst Hesse.

Handsome mixed-media installations combining haunting black-and-white photographs of birds, still-life arrangements, plants and water (they look like stills from a Tarkovsky film), and strange, metal sci-fi forms that resemble props from “Metropolis,” Hesse’s exquisitely poetic pieces read as metaphors for all the great dualities of life--nature versus technology and past versus future, in particular.

Hesse’s pieces are fairly easy to read, but unfortunately most of the work here needs some explanatory text--and you certainly won’t find that in Klaus Schrenk’s badly written, appallingly translated catalogue essay. Big and glossy though it is, the catalogue offers neither biographical background on the artists nor any insights into their work.

One of the few things one does glean from Schrenk’s essay is that these artists operate very much as a unified collective and are quite active politically in their homeland (the show was in fact jointly curated by the artists themselves with the assistance of Schrenk). This distinctly European mode of living is in marked contrast to the artist’s life in America, which is for the most part a loner’s game. Moreover, the fervid idealism one senses in this work makes it seem doubly foreign to the American avant-garde of the moment, which is presently swamped with irony and neurasthenia. Sad to say, “BonAngeles,” which resonates with young energy and faith in the power of art, almost seems a bit square on these jaded shores.