ART : Unfocused Show Reflects Weak Curatorial Stance

On the way to the Muckenthaler Cultural Center on Saturday morning, I wondered if there would be any place left to park. The center has been the focus of intensive media attention during the week, ever since trustee Beverly Gunter had Annie Leibovitz’s photograph of rock star John Lennon removed from the exhibition “Heroes, Heroines, Idols & Icons.”

Gunter’s complaint was that the nude image of Lennon--curled up in a fetal position against fully dressed Yoko Ono--was not in keeping with the theme of the show. To Gunter, the show was about the “positive” portrayal of heroes. But then came the deluge: a barrage of phone calls, threats by three lenders to remove their pieces from the show, Page 1 stories in the press.

On Thursday night the board voted unanimously to restore the photograph to the exhibit, and Gunter said she regretted her involvement in removing the work. Still, Curator Norman Lloyd resigned immediately after the vote, saying that the board was still usurping the role of professional staff in determining what art will be included in an exhibition.

As it turned out, despite reportedly heavy attendance during Friday’s “A Night in Fullerton” arts festival, the Muckenthaler was its sleepy old self on Saturday. A handful of visitors drifted in, and only two were heard to inquire nervously about the whereabouts of “that controversial art exhibit.”

But a blank wall--ironically, next to Leibovitz’s photos--testified to further reverberations. On Friday, Los Angeles collector Leonard Vernon had the center remove his loans of photographs by Yousef Karsh, Max Yavno, Aubrey Bodine and Myra Albert Wiggins.

The whole series of events has raised issues that strike at the heart of the way an art institution is run. It’s bad enough when an institution must battle outside interference. But to be censored from within is far more insidious. Had there not been loud and insistent nay-saying by people on the outside, it isn’t very likely the censors would have reversed themselves.

In a joint interview with Lloyd two years ago, center director Judy Peterson said the city-supported Muckenthaler was run by “a very conservative” board of directors and program committee. Lloyd agreed, saying that “sexual references” had been the prime reason for board disapproval of art in the past.

A humble tone permeated that interview. “It’s not (our) place to present us ,” Lloyd said, referring to art they personally like. “We’re serving the community. . . . If we can appease the crowd and go assertively in the middle. . . .”

Something is wrong with this picture. The point of hiring a professional art staff is to allow it to use the benefit of its knowledge and contacts to present exhibits that lay members of the community could not have assembled on their own. This enterprise is not inherently democratic.

Does a patient get to prescribe his or her own medicine? Does a defendant tell his attorney how to conduct the trial? Should you instruct your hairdresser on the proper way to do razor-cutting? Is it OK to grab a tool and help the repairman fix the air-conditioning?

From the professional’s point of view, “serving the community” ought to mean sharing with the public a personal notion of what’s important and interesting in art, not trying to second-guess the community’s standards.

Just as good art derives from an artist’s private vision--not from a market survey of what people think they want to see--good curating means following your own instincts about what works to show. The public is free to visit, exult, complain or stay away. The job of a board member is to help set overall policy, raise money for the institution and support the staff against misguided criticism from the public.

Only the pros should be making decisions about the focus and content of the shows--and they shouldn’t feel compelled to censor their own ideas in order to keep their jobs. Think of it this way: If an art institution doesn’t annoy some of the people all of the time, it probably isn’t doing its job properly.

For many years, though, the pattern at the county’s art museums--and not just the Muckenthaler--was to hire staff the trustees figured they could boss around. There were no clear-cut guidelines between staff’s business and board’s business. Only when respected people with clout and a no-nonsense attitude came on board did the old order begin to change.

Lloyd began his career at the Muckenthaler a decade ago, working his way up to curator. He’s not the hero of the events of last week, as some commentators have styled him. Rather than confronting trustee Gunter head-on--or refusing in the first place to let trustees veto works of art in the show--Lloyd spent days fretting about what to do until he finally decided to resign.

Aptly enough, his last show as curator is wishy-washy and unfocused. Jumbled together in this show are the seeds of several discrete exhibitions. The works--by famous artists, local artists, a commercial artist and obscure artists from the past--deal with vastly disparate subjects, only some of which seem to have any bearing on heroism or idolatry.

Step right up, folks, and see real people, imaginary people, artists portraying themselves, political commentary, demonstrations of the influence of artistic styles and symbolic imagery through the ages!

So who has been a hero to the American people? Lloyd has lots of suggestions. His lineup, portrayed in paint, pencil, lithography and photo emulsion, includes politicians (Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan), film stars (Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland), an athlete (Willie Mays), cartoon characters (Mickey Mouse, Batman), musicians (singer Ella Fitzgerald, an anonymous trumpet player), workers (the archetypal “Ironing Woman,” an anonymous steelworker), folk heroes (Lennon, abolitionist John Brown), fathers, mothers and--hey, why not?--some astronomers who are going to be on a PBS special.

The viewer hasn’t a clue why the homeless men in Mark Story’s wirephotos should be perceived as heroes. (Although the photographer demanded Friday that his works be removed from the show as his protest against the removal of the Leibovitz photo, they were still on view Saturday.) Why does the show contain images by Leigh Weiner of the media circus surrounding the rescue efforts for a child who fell down an abandoned well? What is Helen Lundeberg’s painting of a woman named Selma doing here? What was the point of including portraits of such an inexplicably random group of artists (Thomas Hart Benton, David Sequieros, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring)?

It also makes no sense whatsoever to combine the idea of heroism and idolatry on a popular level with the phenomenon of artists’ homages to styles and mythologies of ancient civilizations. That’s a rich subject, but it needs its own exhibit.

And how can we believe that Jasper Johns’ orange, green and black American flag lithograph, “Moratorium” from 1964, has “nothing to do with his commentary on the American Flag or patriotism,” as Lloyd writes in a wall label.

Sure, the piece is a visual trick (if you stare at the white dot on the flag and then look at the white wall, you’ll see an image of the flag as its usual red, white and blue self). It’s true that Johns began using the American flag as a subject back in 1955 and that he chose ordinary objects as subjects for his art because he was primarily interested in the phenomenon of perception. And yet by adding his note, Lloyd seems to be protesting too much. Why even bother to bring it up?

Possibly Lloyd’s statement was intended to placate conservative board members. If so, it shows how skewed the Muckenthaler’s little world has become. Keep the folks happy with the Big Lie; show important American art and deny that it might have a political consciousness.

Yet for all its vagueness and wrongheadedness, the show (alas, so typical of Lloyd’s nevertheless well-meaning and enthusiastic curating) does contain some wonderful works.

Lundeberg’s “Selma” and her youthful self-portrait at mid-century are broodingly poetic and exquisitely restrained paintings by a major California painter. Other highlights include a self-portrait lithograph by Mexican master David Alfaro Sequieros, a classic Robert Rauschenberg medley of news makers of the moment (“Signs,” from 1970), Warhol’s blissfully ersatz, exaggerated “Marilyn” silk screen from 1963, and Leibovitz’s antic image of Haring, now dead of AIDS, cavorting in his birthday suit with a protective coating of body paint imitative of his well-known stick-people paintings.

On the local front, Costa Mesa artist Frank Dixon is in top form in “New Dads,” a wall-to-wall lineup of yuppie fathers in jackets and ties, holding ungainly packages of baby flesh. And newcomer David Levy’s “Blue News” Cibachrome photograph series artfully juxtaposes cartoon images and TV news images, both bathed in the same eerie blue light, both eerily echoing each other’s gestures.

Let’s hope the next curator at the Muckenthaler carries on Lloyd’s mission of showing serious contemporary and historical work, but within a more carefully reasoned framework--and with the understanding that the board won’t be free to perform any curatorial sleights-of-hand.

“Heroes, Heroines, Idols & Icons” continues through July 8 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave., Fullerton. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Admission: free. Information: (714) 738-6595.