Curator Is Keeping ‘Off-Balance’ : Art: Bruce Guenther, who’s leaving Chicago for the Newport Harbor museum, says he’s ready to see the world ‘in a new way.’

When Bruce Guenther, Newport Harbor Art Museum’s new chief curator, took the same post at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1987, he was agog at that city’s “important art community.”

Every year during the Chicago International Art Exposition, the nation’s largest contemporary art sale, “the world turns to Chicago,” Guenther told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1987.

Orange County’s visual art community has certainly come a long way since the Newport Harbor museum was housed in a quaint pavilion in the Balboa Fun Zone. But even though its standing in the art world has grown dramatically in recent years, it can hardly claim the global attention that Chicago gets. So, why did Guenther leave all that behind?

“When you’re involved in contemporary art . . . there is a certain life expectancy with any institution for a curator,” he said Thursday at the museum. “It’s important that you move, that you keep yourself off-balance. I give the example of (artist) Francesco Clemente, who moves every year between studios in Naples, India and New York. He does that to keep himself culturally off-balance, to keep his responses fresh, to always see (the world) in a new way.”

Guenther, 43, starts his new job Dec. 1, replacing Paul Schimmel, who left 17 months ago to become chief curator of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. He spent the last four years at the Chicago museum, now headed by former Newport Harbor director Kevin E. Consey--a coincidence Guenther called “the height of irony.”

From 1979 to 1987, he was contemporary art curator and in charge of the modern art department at the Seattle Art Museum. He has held curatorial and administrative posts at Washington State University’s Museum of Art and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, and has a bachelor’s degree in painting and drawing from Southern Oregon College, in Ashland, Ore.

Here for the weekend to meet Newport Harbor’s trustees, Guenther, congenial, carefully spoken and dressed in a crisp navy suit, gave other reasons for the move and talked enthusiastically about his new venture.

Shortly after he started in Chicago, that museum’s director, Michael Danoff left, leaving Guenther to share duties as one of two acting directors. Then, after about a year, Consey came on, and he had to readjust to another museum leadership.

“I found myself frustrated by never having a real, clear opportunity to push forward the (exhibition) program,” he said without bitterness.

Looking ahead, he said that Newport Harbor “has a wonderful identity” for showcasing post-World War II regional, national and international art. But he’d like to heighten that profile, saying he suspects that the institution has “more recognition and visibility nationally than they do locally.”

“I see that as one of the challenges coming here, to get a sense of the community that exists around the museum--its supporters, the people interested in it--and then help it move toward a more prominent position in the community and define a larger community for the museum.”

Part of that new definition could include a more ethnically diverse community, a subject that’s something of a sore spot for the museum. Last year, its annual California Arts Council grant was cut by more than two-thirds, to $19,000, partly because a council advisory panel said it seemed to be reaching out mostly to whites.

In Seattle, Guenther organized a 10-year retrospective of English conceptual artist Mark Boyle, a show that traveled to Newport Harbor and two other museums. In Chicago, he was responsible for major exhibitions of European art, including separate shows featuring Italy’s Clemente and three emerging German sculptors.

But he also organized a 50-year retrospective of African-American artist Jacob Lawrence that traveled from Seattle to five other museums. He brought to Chicago Brazilian and African artists as well as such African-Americans as Betye and Alison Saar and Romare Bearden, and scheduled an exhibit of Cuban artists living in the United States, he said.

Along these lines, Guenther already has an idea for a show of new art from Latin America, although he noted that Newport Harbor’s exhibition schedule is planned through next September and that he’s just begun getting ideas for shows.

Besides his history of work on the West Coast, he comes to the museum with “a wide range of connections and involvements” with artists, collectors and museum professionals he has met while organizing exhibits and lecturing in Europe, Latin America and Japan, he said.

Generally, he said he is committed to “art that engages life and steps into the issues of life in a very direct and as powerful way as possible, while still maintaining a certain kind of formal rigor.” His interests range from a Viennese movement synthesizing performance art and action painting, to work by young Japanese artists, he said.

“I would hope, as part of our focus here, we would be able to incorporate the Pacific Rim and extend our understanding of the Japanese beyond automobiles and computers.”

Turning to less glamorous plans, the museum “desperately needs” revamping in certain areas, from the way didactic labels are hung to “how you’re greeted at the door,” Guenther said.

He’ll be closely involved with devising an architectural plan for its new, multimillion-dollar building--a project that has long been delayed while the board worked to replace Consey and Schimmel. (Guenther said he also helped with the Seattle museum’s $60-million new home designed by architect Robert Venturi.) He’ll also select a new associate curator to replace Lucinda Barnes, who left last year.

As for acquisitions, he hasn’t seen the museum’s entire permanent collection but said there are gaps, which will be especially challenging to fill in view of sky-high art prices and shrinking public and private funding sources.

“Chicago has the advantage of having a vociferous collecting community and one that includes a dozen internationally important collectors of contemporary art, which Orange County does not enjoy,” Guenther said.

Still, he added, outside of possibly the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, which has a billion-dollar endowment, “there’s no museum in this county that’s able to purchase (everything) they need or want.”

Guenther said he has never worked with Newport Harbor director Michael Botwinick, who came here in January from Chicago, where he was handling investments in the art field. He said he knows, however, of Botwinick’s reputation as an aggressive, hands-on, sometimes hard-to-work-with director while he was head of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

“I am aware of rumors, but I don’t believe they are necessarily true,” Guenther said. “I’ve known people who have worked with Botwinick over the years, and it’s one of those things where you end up thinking he was really trying to get the Corcoran to stretch, and some places and people are more elastic than others.”

He isn’t worried about the county’s reputation for being a conservative stronghold, either.

“Orange County is a place that’s evolving as rapidly as anywhere else in the country,” he said. “Almost everyone I’ve met here is a transplant, and they’ve come from wildly divergent places and backgrounds, and that creates a community that can’t be categorized as archconservative (or) flaming liberal but is, in fact, all of those things. I think that a museum of contemporary art somehow engages and challenges all of those communities.

“I’m very excited about coming here,” he said. “You hear it said that California leads the nation in a lot of things, like Hula-Hoops and yogurt, which I find very amusing. It is also on the edge of defining our relationship to whatever the future holds--environmentally, politically, culturally--and it felt like a very good time to come out and become a part of that.”

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