ART REVIEW : A Study in Plastic in ‘Finish Fetish’ : The well-intentioned exhibition at USC’s Fisher Gallery harkens back to L.A.’s ‘feel good’ period but appears superficial.

USC’s exhibition, “Finish Fetish” is, sad to say, of greater symbolic than artistic significance. It harks back to those thrilling days of ‘60s yesteryear when the world was a go-go and L.A. art made it sit up and goggle for the first time. It was the dawning of the age of Lotusland’s Cool School whose art remains in some ways the town’s trademark.

It was art that reflected an era when L.A. felt good about itself arriving as a cultural force. Today the town wants to feel good about itself again as reflected by a burgeoning art scene and a number of recent books about the town.

Unfortunately the particular anatomy of the exhibition in USC’s Fisher Gallery tends to confirm all the worst things critics have said about the fruits of the Finish Fetish, an art preoccupied with creating surfaces as glossy as a hot rod or suave as sacrosanct blue suede shoes.

Briefly stated, what critics hated about it is embedded in the very stuff of which most of it is made:

Plastic.

In the ‘60s the word became a pejorative as in, “plastic hippie” which designated someone who pretended to be a free-spirited member of the counterculture while holding secret Establishment views. By extension, anybody who found L.A. flaky and superficial would dismiss the town as, “plastic.” If inclined to sarcasm they could point out we even made art that proved the point. By the ‘70s the material was proven seriously toxic. Artists stopped using it but not before it provided a mordant metaphor of a pretty environment that is pure poison.

At a scan the exhibition looks like something concocted in a farcical conspiracy between Hollywood and the aerospace industry. One gallery is dominated by two large fiberglass sculptures by DeWain Valentine, “Pink Top” and “Yellow Roller.” Toy-like in conception but aggressive in bulk, they look like humorous UFOs. They broadcast their vibes onto neighboring art, casting an unwonted mantle of James Bond sci-fi entertainment over the lot.

Two paintings by Billy Al Bengston suddenly appear as designer sergeant stripes for members of the Starship Enterprise crew. Peter Alexander’s plastic slabs look like the elevator doors in Captain Kirk’s command module. Ken Price’s ceramics take on the demeanor of egg and ooze for some alien attacker Scotty beamed up by accident.

Robert Irwin’s spot-lit discs are arguably the great masterpieces of the movement and the work that moved the Finish Fetish to the threshold of Light and Space. When one of them appears as a pretentious metaphysical planet cluster out of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” something’s got to be badly awry.

Exhibition curator Frances Kolpitt and assistants from the gallery’s museum studies program were unmistakably well-intentioned in organizing this show. But gremlins can creep into the works when selecting and installing art that appears as superficially similar as the work of the Cool School.

Almost every characteristic people dislike about this art--just as everything people hate about L.A.--is actually present in some measure. If people are symbolically repelled by plastic because of its associations with artificiality, that’s their business. These artists were purposely running against the grain when they used it. Artists like to do that. This bunch was out to bring L.A. street culture into the sanctified precincts of the art gallery because hot rods, surfboards and motorcycles represented authentic experience to them.

Craig Kauffman’s “Green-Red” still looks like an erotic thermometer designed in a wind tunnel. If people find this kind of amoral hedonism immoral, they’ve got a right but even they have to acknowledge that it’s an achievement to get the feeling of a cute chick in a Day-Glo bikini across in a pure abstract form.

The Cool School has been accused of certain airheaded lack of seriousness but they were doing the same thing for plastics and car culture that Picasso and Braque had done for discarded newspapers and booze bottle labels when they invented collage. They were finding beauty in materials considered vulgar by the truly vulgar.

They saw the potential for plastics and lacquer to create undiscovered basic effects of light and color. In his “Dento” series Bengston found new ways of creating surface and spatial effects. John McCracken’s solid-color slabs used pure hue to invite contemplation of what color can do to form. Larry Bell used tinted glass to create trapped, perfumed atmospheres and Alexander added various densities of transparency that dissolve soldity.

If all of this fails to jell in this exhibition it’s probably because not enough attention was paid to those qualities that make the best of this work transcend its temporal associations to mere glamour and virtuoso craftsmanship. The 13-artist show probably would have profited from including fewer artists in greater depth. People like Judy Chicago, Tony DeLap and Fred Eversley either fail to come up to the mark or find their strength outside the aesthetic of the Cool School.

The show might have profited from taking the broader definition of “Finish Fetish” when it is transposed to “Fetish Finish.” In that incarnation it can include the cool artists’ opposite, the grungy, angry art of Ed Kienholz, Wally Berman and half-forgotten talents like Ron Miyashiro and Ed Berreal. That would have at least reminded us that L.A. art has always also had a social conscience.

All the same it is a show that reflects L.A., asking itself questions about why it has managed to produce an institutional cultural flowering since the ‘60s but very, very few hometown artists to equal the original cast.

USC’s Fisher Gallery to April 20. The Gallery is open noon to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays; (213) 740-4561.