Orange County 1980s : ART : Vision, Commitment Must Expand Along With Museums

At the outset of the ‘80s, if someone asked me where Orange County was, I’d have said “in New York state.” (Yes, they have one too.) It wasn’t until 1985 that I left Berkeley for the land of nodding oil pumps, aerobics acolytes, not-in-my-back-yard conservatives and passionate love affairs with money and earthly goods.

So my view of the decade has a certain Johnny-come-lately flavor, I’ll admit. On the other hand, it’s probably just as well I wasn’t around in the bean-field days, when the art scene that mattered seems to have consisted of a promising museum in Newport Beach, a sleepy one in Laguna Beach and maybe a decent gallery or two.

In any case, it doesn’t take too much research to know that the big ‘80s news in Orange County visual arts was bricks-and-mortar stuff. Consider:

* The Laguna Art Museum (which spiffed up its name from “Laguna Beach Museum of Art”) built a $1.8-million addition that wrapped around the original galleries.

* Re-dubbed the Fullerton Museum Center, the Museum of North Orange County in Fullerton got an $800,000 face lift.

* Newport Harbor Art Museum commissioned internationally renowned architect Renzo Piano to design a $25-million building now set to open in 1993.

* The Bowers Museum, which completes its $6-million renovation in 1991, finally came up with a plan to expand the original 1932 structure threefold while accommodating a possible future revenue-enhancing development on the site.

* The Center for the Study of Decorative Arts opened in a converted home and garden in San Juan Capistrano.

* Art also rode in on the coattails of the commercial building boom. The new regional office of Security Pacific Bank on Anton Boulevard in Costa Mesa contains a massive gallery dedicated to contemporary art. The Modern Museum of Art set up shop in Griffin Towers in Hutton Centre, Santa Ana.

* Art found its way into the lobbies and landscapes of corporate, retail and residential developments countywide, from the obsessively programmed Noguchi Sculpture Garden (“California Scenario”) near sprawling South Coast Plaza to numerous undistinguished examples of “plop art.”

* As early as the mid-’70s, cities including Brea, Irvine and Newport Beach began developing well-intentioned, though not always well-executed, public-art programs.

The energy that has gone into all these projects is not in question. Neither is the real need for more space devoted to art and more planning to integrate art into daily life. But the art building boom brings with it a couple of major problems.

One is a general lack of awareness of the need to support day-to-day activities at Orange County museums. It’s great to erect a bigger building or revamp the one you have. But the building is just a shell. A museum is only as prestigious and useful as its collections and exhibitions--and the staff that scouts, researches, preserves and teaches us about them.

It is highly likely that readers of this column pay their executive secretaries more than some curators and other key museum staff in this county make annually. Curatorial salaries at the Laguna Art Museum are under $30,000, for example, and only in the low $30,000s at the Bowers.

These depressing numbers are more or less in line with salaries reported this year by the California Assn. of Museums: The average curatorial wage at art, history, science and youth museums in the same budget range--$1 million to $3 million--is $32,702. But the higher-than-average cost of living in Orange County makes such a salary seem most unprofessional. It’s time for donors to come to the rescue.

In addition to financial support, Orange County also owes its museums moral support. These days, art that doesn’t reflect “mainstream” ideas about sexual and political issues has come under vituperative attack from conservative politicians, including our own Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita).

A museum’s true friends will continue to support the right--the obligation-- of an art institution to show work that reflects whatever points of view the significant artists of our day wish to express.

The second problem has to do with quality control. I’m thinking of the man who called to tell me about a presentation an art consultant was going to give to a group of Irvine residents interested in public art. The consultant’s name was not familiar to me, so I asked how she was chosen.

“Oh,” came the answer, “she sent us some materials and she sounded real enthusiastic and said she could help.”

Now, it’s doubtful that my caller would have gone about selecting a stockbroker, a Realtor or a computer consultant in such a happy-go-lucky way. The same people who scratch their heads over “difficult” contemporary art somehow tend not to realize how specialized a field art is and how little they know about it.

Committees deciding the nature of the art to be placed in a city or a private development too often fail to enlist the services of people who are on top of recent developments in contemporary art--not interior decorators or folks who may have taken an art course or two, but art-world people with major reputations.

With proper guidance--and some serious research on their own--a “lay” committee can select an innovative, thoughtful artist who reflects the issues of our time rather than simply the first person whose price sounds good or an individual touted by some self-proclaimed art consultant.

Of course, there are always committee members who “just want something pretty” and don’t want do get involved with the gnarly, off-putting and unconventional world of la-de-da contemporary art. But that’s like saying you never want to take a trip to a country where they speak a different language, or deciding you’ll never read about child development theories because kids are so cute and cuddly and you don’t want to get disillusioned.

The fallout from this point of view is all over the map in Orange County. Was a blandly traditional sculptor like Marton Varo really the best choice for Brea’s “artist in residence”? (Who else was in the running, anyway?) Would reputable art professionals have chosen silly figurative sculptures by one Paolo Borghi for the intersection of Jamboree Road and Campus Drive in Irvine?

Is it appropriate for the new Costa Mesa Tourism, Arts and Promotion Council to disburse city money without serious, ongoing consultation with the people whose working lives are intimately connected with the arts? These questions keep coming as more and more people in the county view art as an indispensable “amenity.”

There are some bright spots, of course, like “California Scenario” and the laudable efforts of Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach to acquire a significant work of sculpture for the lobby of its new Patty and George Hoag Cancer Center. (The committee, which included Newport Harbor Art Museum chief curator Paul Schimmel as well as prominent collectors, chose a sprightly piece by major American artist Nancy Graves.)

But until the quality of art outside of our top museums is equal to the quality frequently represented inside their walls, Orange County will merely confirm the notion that this part of the world is a provincial outpost of Los Angeles . . . the land of nodding oil pumps, aerobics acolytes, not-in-my-back-yard conservatives and passionate love affairs with money and earthly goods.