ART : Early Exhibits to Display Contemporary Look

Well, out with the old year, in with the new. What’s coming up on the visual arts scene in Orange County? Happily, some impressive-sounding shows--nearly all devoted to contemporary work--are on tap for the first six months of 1990.

One important point to keep in mind: While it’s great for our museums and galleries to host fine shows organized elsewhere, an institution’s real prestige comes from having done the planning, thinking and legwork on its own.

Newport’s first big blast for the year opens April 8. “OBJECTives: THE NEW SCULPTURE,” (through June 24) is chief curator Paul Schimmel’s last project before he leaves for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The show presents a type of work by younger American and European artists that has come to dominate the offerings of a number of major galleries in L.A., New York and Europe.

Called “Neo-Geo” or “Simulationism” in the United States, this work is about our attitudes toward everyday objects and the way they reflect assumptions held by the society that produced them.

Without knowing these works were created by artists and meant to carry a particular set of meanings, viewers are likely to see such pieces merely as mass-produced kitsch, a bizarre kind of window dressing or the whims of an eccentric collector.

Clearly, work such as this cries out for explication--a task that a museum survey is equipped to undertake. Artists in the show include the much-lauded, much-derided Jeff Koons as well as Grenville Davey, Katharina Fritsch, Annette Lemieux, Julian Opie, Haim Steinbach and Robert Gober. Financial support comes from the Irvine Co. and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Associate curator Lucinda Barnes’ first show at Newport Harbor is also the first one-person exhibition of Buzz Spector’s art in California (Jan. 21 through March 18). An art critic and former book designer, Spector transforms books “from object(s) of communication into . . . object(s) of the imagination,” as a Museum of Modern Art curator has written. Part of the ongoing New California Artist series, the exhibit--supported by the museum’s Century Club--presents several of the artist’s “altered books” (created by tearing or carving) and one of his sculptural installations, made with 6,500 stacked volumes.

Although an exhibit called “Selections from the Permanent Collection” (Jan. 21 through March 18) sounds like old news, Newport’s includes some significant recent additions. One is “Rondo,” an installation by celebrated “light and space” artist James Turrell, purchased with funds from the Peter Norton Family Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Laguna Art Museum’s big contender--the pet project of director Charles Desmarais--is “The Profound in the Banal: The Art of Ilene Segalove” (April 27 through July 8). The Los Angeles artist is well known for her deadpan videotapes exploring the amazing-but-true blend of blandness and weirdness experienced by middle-class suburbanite living in a consumer culture.

The show--funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts--will include 30 large-scale photographic works, 12 videotapes and 20 audio works. (Viewers may already have heard some of Segalove’s audio pieces on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition.”)

The Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza Satellite site starts the new year with a group of installations by San Francisco artist Paul Kos (Jan. 11 through April 15). His new piece, “Ber lin”--the title is divided to represent the Berlin Wall--incorporates neon, lights, two-by-fours and cuckoo clocks as metaphors for recent political upheaval in the East Bloc.

Kos’ other work in the show includes a couple of recent pieces--”Silenced Tongues” and “Trotsky”--as well as “rEVOLUTION: Notes for the Invasion--mar mar march” from 1973, in which the rat-a-tat-tat of a typewriter stuttering over the same word creates a hypnotic, marchlike cadence.

How brave of South Coast Plaza, which is bearing some of the costs of the show, to have opened its pocketbook for such subversive-sounding stuff.

Other exhibits are imports from points east and north.

“Success Is a Job in New York ... The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol” runs from Jan 21 through March 18 at Newport Harbor, where is also is funded by South Coast Plaza. Organized by the Grey Art Gallery and Study Center at New York University, the show traces the artist’s early commercial and non-commercial art, before he became a big shot in the Pop world.

In 1959 Warhol came to New York from Pittsburgh, a 21-year-old with a design degree from Carnegie Tech. His early jobs were with ad agencies, fashion magazines and department stores. (The show’s title comes from a magazine article Warhol illustrated.) A few years later he was hired to design book jackets and record albums, and he dabbled in “image shaping” for retail stores.

Only in 1957 did he give up commercial stints to focus on his own art--which was, of course, derived from the look of advertisements and throwaway media imagery.

“Jay DeFeo: Works on Paper 1951-1989,” which runs July 13 through Oct. 7 at the main location of the Laguna Art Museum, was organized by the University Art Museum, Berkeley. DeFeo, who died in November at 60, showed at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and was included in the prestigious “Sixteen Americans” show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959. One of the few women painters of her era to hold her own with the big boys of the art world, she worked in both figurative and abstract modes.

This exhibit--funded by the Exhibitionists, a Laguna Art Museum council--includes drawings, photo collages and paintings on paper.

For the die-hard lovers of California Impressionism, Laguna is trotting out “Colors and Impressions: The Early Work of E. Charlton Fortune” on Feb. 2 (through April 15). Fortune was one of the handful of women (the “E” stood for Euphemia) among the painters who introduced the French style so belatedly to California in the ‘teens of this century. Originated by the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, the exhibit is supported in Laguna Beach by Wittenberg/Livingston Inc.

The non-commercial galleries also have come up with a bunch of shows that sound well worth checking out:

“John Paul Jones: The Man in the Mirror: The Constant Image” opens Jan. 9 at the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach (through Feb. 20). Phyllis Lutjeans, guest curator for the show, says it is not a real retrospective; instead, as she modestly says, it’s based on “a funky idea I had.” The exhibit includes about 40 works made by the UC Irvine art faculty member from 1948 to 1989. Lutjeans believes the somewhat murky, amorphous figurative images in Jones’ early paintings and works on paper are strongly related to the sculptures he has been making recently, in which viewers can see reflections of themselves.

The redoubtably titled “California Collectors and Collections II: The Arts and Crafts Movement in California 1900-1918: Traditions and Antecedents” opens Feb. 6 and runs through May 26 at the Center for the Study of Decorative Arts in San Juan Capistrano. This movement--led by English poet-artist-craftsman William Morris--was a revolt against the lack of quality and overdone embellishment in machine-made Victorian furnishings. As Morris once said: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

In California, the Arts and Crafts spirit involved the use of restrained designs and lavish use of natural woods, metals and minerals. It was kept alive by such true believers as Greene & Greene, the Pasadena architecture firm; furniture maker Gustav Stickley; and Dirk van Erp, a San Francisco lamp maker. Their influences will be visible in this exhibit of furniture, ceramics, metalwork, lamps and textiles, including period rooms.

Only sparse information was available last week about upcoming offerings at Saddleback College Art Gallery in Mission Viejo, but they include “Leningrad Artists,” Feb. 8 through March 9, recent work by painters who broke away from the officially sanctioned styles and subjects of art in the U.S.S.R. The exhibit is curated by Selma Holo of the Fischer Gallery at the University of Southern California.

Coming up Jan. 7 (through Feb. 10) at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery is “The Pleasure and the Terror: An Exhibition of Landscapes,” works by Los Angeles artists Richard Sedivy and Lynn Aldrich. He does mixed-media constructions on canvas; her works are free-standing painted sculptures.

Sedivy is a popular guy in these parts: His paintings also can be seen in “Insistent Landscapes” at Security Pacific Gallery in Costa Mesa. Opening Feb. 3 (through April 1), the exhibit includes paintings by Lawrence Gipe (whose work was at the Laguna museum a couple of years ago), Tobi Kahn, Marcia Cygli King, Vicki Teague-Cooper and Jean Towgood. For that matter, work by Annette Lemieux (shown concurrently in Newport Harbor’s “OBJECTives”) makes another appearance in a Security Pacific show provisionally called “Representational and Non-Representational Strategies” (April 21 to June 3), along with Moira Dryer, David French, Jim Iserman, Ronald Jones, Lari Pittman, Rosemarie Trockel and Sohki Wagner. Meanwhile, the gallery’s Project Room gets a mysterious new tenant: an installation by Los Angeles artist Michael McMillen called “Train of Thought” (Feb. 3 through July 29).

Art, architecture and music are the topics of several hot-ticket lectures and lecture series this winter and spring at the museums.

Francoise Gilot, an artist who was Pablo Picasso’s mistress in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s speaks on “Cocteau as I Knew Him 1944-1963” at the Severin Wunderman Museum in Irvine on Jan. 20 at 4 p.m. Picasso introduced Gilot to author and artist Jean Cocteau, and they remained friends until his death in 1963. The museum is at 3 Mason St. Ticket prices are $20 general, $12 seniors and students with ID. For more information and reservations, call (714) 472-1138.

“California and Beyond: The State of Design in the ‘90s,” a five-part lecture series, begins Feb. 7 at Beckman Center on the UC Irvine campus. Sponsored by Newport Harbor Art Museum, the series includes talks by architect Michael Graves (Feb. 7), landscape architect George Hargreaves (Feb. 28), architect Steven Holl (March 14), graphic designer April Grieman (March 28) and architect Frank Israel (April 11).

Supported by The Western Regional Philanthropic Committee of Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc. and the Shearson Lehman Hutton Mortgage Corp., the series is a project of the Forum, the museum’s architecture and design council. Tickets are $75 for the entire series. (Mail checks no later than Feb. 1 to the Newport Harbor Education Dept., 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, 92660). Single-lecture tickets will be sold at the door only ($15). All lectures start at 7:30 p.m. For more information, call (714) 759-1122.

At the Laguna Art Museum, the California Contemporary Composers series, co-sponsored by the UCI School of Fine Arts, continues with 7:30 p.m. lectures by David Raksin (Jan. 11), Nicholas Slonimsky (Feb. 15), Morton Subotnick (March 14) and Steven Stucky (April 11). Admission to each lecture is $6 general, $4 students and seniors. Call (714) 494-8971 to purchase tickets; space permitting, they will also be sold at the door.

Laguna’s “Good Morning Laguna” series continues Jan. 11 with sculptor/installation artist Lita Albuquerque, one of whose works was recently purchased by the museum. Admission to the 9 a.m. talk, which includes continental breakfast, is $4.50 general, $3.50 for students and seniors. Reservations are not required.

Of course, there will be more as the season progresses, so watch this space!