O.C. ART REVIEW : Irvine Fine Arts Center: Then, and Now

In popular fiction, one fine day, artist Joe Nobody gets a brilliant idea, whips up a batch of work, has a sellout show and vaults into the glittering pantheon of the greats.

In reality, of course, things are a lot more confused and bumpy. Sometimes, an artist’s new ideas are less interesting than his old ideas. Sometimes an artist doesn’t stretch enough, or grasps too desperately for a fashionable “look.”

“Top of the Crop: 10 Year Pick,” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, presents work by 20 artists who have been in shows at the center during the past decade. Curator Dorrit Fitzgerald writes in the brochure that she chose one old and one new piece by each artist, to give viewers “a better understanding of the stretch undertaken by the artists to get from ‘there to here.’ ”

In this context, of course, old is a relative term. While former UC Irvine printmaking instructor John Paul Jones’ pieces span nearly three decades, the works of some younger artists are only a few years apart. So there’s little point in looking for major breakthroughs. Still--with a handful of exceptions--the “new” work is generally less than riveting.

In some cases, thin work has failed to emerge from its rut. In other examples, the promise of several years ago now seems strangely misdirected, or is sagging into banality.

Five years after her untitled arrangement of “rocks” made of clay, Marsha Judd still holds out for somnolent pseudo-Asian tableaux. In “Personal Harmony Series No. 4,” a polished “rock” held in place by wires sits on a bed of gray and red clay shards.

Painter Donald Karwelis has switched from the vapidly colorful terrain of “Jakugo” (1981) to a gloomy, vaguely industrial theme in an untitled work from last year. But Karwelis has been swinging from stylistic branch to stylistic branch for years, rarely convincing the viewer that he has deep convictions of his own.

Duncan Simcoe, a fine draftsman with an eye for odd human encounters, has hopped on the assemblage bandwagon. “Behind Glass” could be the work of any number of young artists who juxtapose disparate materials and subjects; it doesn’t speak with a clear personal voice.

Gary Martin, who was making craftsmanlike wooden conundrums like “False Reflection”--a TV still life with its own three-dimensional reflection--early in the ‘80s, has embraced a new motif. A couple of hole-riddled objects, looking somewhat like engine parts, meet up with two stylized, microphonelike devices suspended from the ceiling. Is this a metaphor for industrial decay? Industrial espionage? The imagery just isn’t gripping enough for us to care all that much.

Doug Moran’s “Object at Window” from 1989--a painted red disk garnished with a tilted wood-and-paper house--looks like little more than a lazy reduction of the arid architecture- cum -nostalgia pieces Moran has been turning out for the past few years.

Some positive changes in work on view are relatively modest. Roberta Eisenberg has loosened up a formerly primly organized style in her recent abstract, mixed-media work. Angie Bray conceived her new perceptually disorienting project for the center’s courtyard on a much grander scale than her tender little woven-mohair-and-steel-wire sculpture from 1984. Although the project remains unrealized, Bray’s willingness to think big and risk possible loss of control is a welcome sign.

On the other hand, Barbara Dorris’ painted ceramic figure “Blind Bargain,” previously reviewed in this column, marks a major departure from the work she was doing earlier in the ‘80s, like the untitled hemispherical piece in the show. Blandly perky designs have given way to a metaphor for the uncertainties of human conception. After repeated viewings, however, the slim, graceful perfection of Dorris’ female figures does have a certain cloying side, offering perhaps too much irrelevant window dressing for a passionate cast of mind.

Jeff Gates, who now lives in Baltimore, has come a long way since the frantic artiness of his solarized photographs from 1979. In Gates’ new series, “From a Series of One-Acts . . ., “ words and text concoct fanciful situations and wry musings. A view of two neighboring fields accompanies a story about a disconcerting local shift in the time zone. (“I was the first to notice the change when my friends had to be home for dinner an hour later than me. . . .”)

John Paul Jones, who moved to Oregon a couple of months ago, has always been an elusive figure on the Orange County art scene. No matter what the scale or medium of his work, his works teeter between a raw vulnerability and a defensive walling up of private feelings.

His tiny bronze heads from 1962 reduce human physiognomy to a dense, anxious pucker. A recent work, “The Cassandra Triptych,” is a trio of tall, skinny alder-wood constructions. Each one is arranged in a slightly different manner, with a different configuration of small black triangles, holes, pegs and penciled lines. Cassandra was endowed with the gift of prophecy by her lover, Apollo, who subsequently cursed her with the fate of never being believed. But what the Greek goddess has to do with this piece is anyone’s guess.

Video artist Bill Viola, the only exhibitor with a national reputation, is represented by several of his tapes, including “The Reflecting Pool” of 1977-79--in which the image of a man leaping into a pool is frozen in time, as if merging with the ebb and flow of the natural world. None of the tapes are recent, however, which is disappointing in the context of this show.

Annoyingly, the video monitor is placed directly in front of the glass wall fronting the center’s own bucolic back yard--which puts unfair demands on the video image, not to mention flooding the screen with excess light. A video screening room definitely ought to be part of the center’s wish list for a new exhibition facility.

In any case, the star of the show is Suvan Geer’s installation “Sounding Chambers.” It contains the authoritative yet idiosyncratic personal voice of an artist who has come into her own. The piece resists decoding; its allure is almost entirely perceptual. In fact, as Geer says in a statement, it is about “listening as a creative act.”

A room is filled with a ringing, reverberating sound. Overhead, a broom constantly sweeps back and forth in a container of water, sending waves of light and shadow--imitative of auditory vibration patterns--across the floor.

On one wall, a row of ears made of molded white rice stretch across a vaguely ear-shaped gray area filled with a spiraling pattern of shiny black snail shells. If you lean close to some of the ears, you can catch snippets of what seems to be a poem about nature, whispered by the artist.

On the opposite wall, a coat made of molded rice folds itself around an unseen body. Lean intimately into the coat, and you can hear male and female voices whispering together--a dense auditory weave that permits only the occasional stray word to be understood.

Geer’s “old” piece, from 1980, presented as a photo-and-text documentation, is called “Art Work.” The piece was exactly that: physical labor viewed as art. Geer spent five hours gathering and tying sheaves of dry grass over a 1,200-square-foot area of land.

The piece has a militant, doctrinaire edge. There is a single-minded willfulness involved in working until one is physically exhausted and then destroying the physical evidence so that viewers won’t be able to view the bundles of sheaves as the actual piece. Part of the accompanying text reads “in doing what will be undone question all action.”

To be sure, “Art Work” is a type of “process” art, and the new piece is an installation: apples and oranges in the world of conceptual art. But “Sounding Chambers” is also a more open-ended, evocative and fully realized work. It marks the evolution of a way of thinking and working, a decade-long tussle with ideas and materials. And that’s what artistic growth is really all about.

“Top of the Crop: 10 Year Pick” remains through July 22 at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, 14321 Yale Ave., Irvine. The gallery is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 552-1018.