O.C. ART : Fiskin’s Art Can Be Put in a Box : The photographer, whose work is at Newport museum, is fascinated with arbitrary categorization.

In the early 1980s, photographer Judy Fiskin used to spend her days driving around Los Angeles neighborhoods looking for homely stucco apartment buildings built in the 1950s and ‘60s.

When she spotted one, out came a notebook to record important facts--the street-cleaning schedule, and the position of the house relative to the sun. Then she’d come back with her camera to make a bunch of very tiny, very plain photographs.

Thirty of these images--soberly organized into such categories as “Front Garages,” “Geometric Motif,” “Side Stairs” and “Peaked Roof”--are included in the Newport Harbor Art Museum exhibit “Typologies: Nine American Photographers” (continuing through June 2).

Is Fiskin an architectural historian? No. Was she making a case for the deplorable state of Southern California design? Wrong again. “What’s not interesting to me,” she says, “is going out and making fun of someone’s bad taste.”

What is interesting to her is simply observing the wide, wide world of aesthetic decision-making.

When she photographed the buildings--popularly known as dingbats-- she wasn’t thinking of how she’d organize them into categories. That came later, when she sorted through the images.

“It starts to reflect back on what you’re doing (as an artist),” said Fiskin, a comfortable-looking woman of 45 with a broad, open face framed by frizzy gray hair. “Where are my (aesthetic) decisions coming from?”

The categories in which her photographs are organized may seem to make a lot of sense. “But if you listed the categories,” she said, “you’d see that there’s something very elastic, very random about them--kind of whimsical, actually. . . . This thing that looks rational is irrational underneath--kind of playful.”

Her work is about the arbitrary way we categorize the things in our world. It’s also about the human compulsion to collect objects. Photographs allow Fiskin to collect bits and pieces of the world without, as she says, “being encumbered by the actual thing.”

The photographs are so small--only 2 3/4 inches square--that they reinforce this notion of collecting the world through the process of memory. They re-create the experience of looking through the viewfinder of the camera and seeing a piece of the world disconnected from its environment.

After years of art history classes, Fiskin was used to looking at reproductions of works of art in slides and small book photographs. “There’s a feeling of being in a tiny world. You experience the image more as something that’s going directly into your brain than something that’s outside of you. It’s a disembodied experience.”

The small scale of Fiskin’s photographs also appears to flatten and condense her subjects, drawing the viewer’s attention to surface details of the building, rather than suggesting the spatial experience of entering it.

Architecture, especially unglamorous architecture, has been a major interest of hers for many years. Specializing in medieval art as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, she especially liked Romanesque architecture because it is “squat and sort of clumsy.”

By the time she got her master’s degree in art history from UCLA--having moved back to Los Angeles with her husband and having switched to 20th-Century art--Fiskin realized she wasn’t cut out for the scholarly life. Meanwhile, fate had stepped in and handed her a camera.

It all started as an assigned activity in an art class with a typically anarchic, late-1960s flavor. One day, the instructor took the class to the Santa Monica pier to throw a cheap TV in the water. Another day he told each member of the class to go out and photograph a particular symbol in popular culture. Oddly enough, Fiskin had never taken a photograph.

“After seven years of doing art history and looking at all those images, I looked through the camera--and it was images! It was instant love,” she recalls. “I knew that was what I wanted to do. So I finished my degree and in the meantime I was teaching myself to photograph.”

Distrusting formal photography classes (one teacher kept urging everyone to make bigger prints when Fiskin’s kept getting smaller and smaller), she preferred to make a private study of Eugene Atget, an early 20th-Century French photographer who immortalized the shop fronts, homes and historic monuments of Paris in series of almost preternaturally sharp-focused images. One day it occured to her that if Atget had lived in Los Angeles, he would have photographed the houses in her neighborhood.

Her second biggest influence was Walker Evans, who photographed American buildings--usually humble ones--in the 1930s and ‘40s. Fiskin likes “the deadpan quality” of his work, “the thing speaking for itself, and also the kind of monumentality (his photographs) give the object.”

She made her last architecture series in 1988. But she isn’t sure she is finished with the topic.

“The pattern has been that I do a series of architecture,” she said, “and then I do something else.” In her other series she has explored such subjects as desert landscapes, flower arranging, furniture and decorative arts collections in museums, military architecture, amusement park rides, and--most recently--photographs of objects reproduced in books.

“I think there’s just something that binds those things together,” she said, “something about seeing all those things as products of the imagination. Or documenting the decorative impulse in different ways.”

A friend told Fiskin that a series of photographs taken at flower shows was about “fear of mediocrity.” Fiskin agrees. She thinks the pictures of these inept arrangements have “emotional content” because “somebody has put a great effort into something . . . and yet it sort of doesn’t work out right.

“I always pick stuff that has some humor involved in it, some awkwardness, some failure of aesthetics as defined by ‘good taste.’ For me there’s a kind of autobiographical element in picking that. . . . It’s really something much more about my own relationship to my own fears of mediocrity.”

The first “high art” subjects she photographed were Louis XIV and rococo furniture “because there’s something so silly about it, even though it’s officially identified as high art in some way.”

Her work is “a picture of worlds of taste that don’t coincide. The Louis XIV world of taste doesn’t coincide with the dingbat world of taste, but they each have their own codes. All these worlds (of taste) have their own consensus.”

People may agree that a particular set of standards is the key to beauty, she elaborated, but someone who isn’t aware of those standards isn’t likely to see the point: “It’s an agreement, and without that agreement you’re on shaky ground.

“It’s not that I think it’s a shame these dingbats exist,” she said. “If I think it’s a shame, I think it’s a shame in the sense that people don’t get to live in a spacious environment or that the workmanship is shoddy or something like that. But . . . what I’m picturing is these worlds of aesthetic decisions with their own rules. The flower show (photograph series) was called ‘Some Aesthetic Decisions,’ but I think you could put that title on almost everything (I do).”

* “Typologies: Nine Contemporary Photographers” continues through June 2 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily except Mondays. Admission: $3 general, $2 for students and seniors, $1 for children 6 to 17, free for everyone on Tuesdays. Information: (714) 759-1122.