ART : A Season of...

There’s really no reason why empty pocketbooks should result in poverty of imagination, but this recession year on the Orange County art scene was a grim one, indeed. I can’t recall another 12 months that offered so few exhibits worth the freeway drive to see them, as well as such an overall lack of excitement on the art scene.

My “best” list is quite short (last year it had 18 entries). To these eyes, most of the noteworthy shows of 1991 came in small packages and many had social themes:

Big Shows

1) “Typologies” at Newport Harbor Art Museum (April-June), guest curated by Mark Freidus for the museum, was a survey of the cerebral work of American and European photographers who study classes of objects, and produce extended series of images. The show and its thoughtful catalogue continued Newport Harbor’s tradition of presenting work that may not be crowd-pleasing but gives the museum a vital national profile on the art scene.

2) “The Cutting Edge: Contemporary American Folk Art from the Rozniak Collection” at the Laguna Art Museum (June-August) was organized by the Museum of American Folk Art in New York. The show mingled the cute and the weird, but the overwhelming impression was of deeply meaningful work by “outsiders” with major obsessions relating to sex and religion.

3) “Mapping Histories: Third Newport Biennial” at Newport Harbor Art Museum (October-Jan. 6, 1992) almost didn’t make this list because it is such a wildly uneven attempt at corralling artists who produce alternative “systems” challenging the status quo. Still, this exhibit’s risk-taking spirit, intelligent catalogue and in-house organization (by assistant curator Marilu Knode and Anne Ayres, who left Newport Harbor a few years ago to become gallery director at Otis/Parsons in Los Angeles) shouldn’t go unrewarded in these perilous times.

Small Shows

1) Two photo installations by Carrie Mae Weems at UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery (October-November) dealt in lyrical, witty and passionate ways with the intersection of public and personal aspects of black culture.

2) Dawn Fryling’s “Toast” installation at the Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite (May-August) was a marvelously sensual installation that made witty reference to the past 20 years of contemporary art styles.

3) “Spiked Tongues,” a video program at Saddleback College Art Gallery (November-December) compressed sharply personal views of racism by seven artists into a manageable hourlong package.

4) “Expedition: Paths to Identity,” work by three artists (Mark Niblock-Smith, Mindy Faber and Daniel Wheeler) at the Cal State Fullerton West Art Gallery (September) dealt thoughtfully with issues of sexuality and decision-making in a pluralistic world.

5) Jean Lowe’s “A Dilettante’s Conversation on the Topics of Anthropocentrism and Western Consumerism” at the Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite (December-March 8, 1992) dresses up a surprising amount of cultural commentary in the guise of two roomfuls of hand-painted furniture and bric-a-brac.

6) “Oracular Orifices,” an exhibit of images taken with pinhole cameras, at Orange Coast College Art Gallery (January-March), proved to be a delightfully oddball exhibit of different ways artists use the world’s simplest photographic device to record their visions of the world.

7) The best-ever juried exhibit at Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (July-August) was due in large part to the selective eye of this year’s juror, Howard Fox, curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Biggest Disappointments

1) A penny-pinching trend toward fewer exhibits that last longer--the kiss of death in a small art community if these shows aren’t interesting enough to warrant a second visit. The winner of this dubious contest is the Laguna Art Museum, which elected to allow “Dream and Perspective: The American Scene in Southern California 1930 to 1945,” (originally set to close in November) to run from Aug. 23 until Feb. 9--more than five months, twice as long as usual.

2) A trio of exhibits drawn from works in the collection: a tried-and-true gambit when money for big projects is scarce. Now, don’t misunderstand; it’s not that there’s something bad about looking at the stuff museums keep in their vaults. After all, the reason they’re in the collection in the first place is that somebody figured they’d be well worth looking at over the long haul.

But problems surface when the shows are either walking advertisements for the weakness of the collection (Laguna Art Museum’s “Beginning the Decade: Recent Acquisitions,” March-June) or are assembled without an eye for quality and or an awareness of how works can be made to “speak” to one another stylistically, by virtue of the way they’re hung (Newport Harbor Art Museum’s “Different Stories: Five Views of the Collection,” June-September).

The third collection exhibit, “Prints: 1970-1990 from the Security Pacific Collection” (at Security Pacific Gallery, January-March), included good work by big-name artists, but lacked a curatorial point of view and a historical context.

3) The decision by the Laguna Art Museum to cancel “The Transparent Thread: Asian Philosophy in Recent American Art”--originally due here in September as a traveling show from the galleries at Bard College and Hofstra University in New York state--because no underwriter could be found to pay for the show. The exhibit, about the influence of Zen and Taoist philosophies of space on New York and California artists, sounded as though it would have been a significant addition to a year with few major exhibits of note.

Best Appointments

The UC Irvine art department’s new chairman, thoughtful innovator Catherine Lord, was formerly dean of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia. In the early ‘70s, UCI’s art department was a hot spot of smart, crazy, vanguard work; since those halcyon days, its profile has slumped. Lord’s commitment to ideas, particularly social issues, has put its most visible stamp on the art gallery schedule (see “bests,” above), but her staff and visiting appointments also demonstrate a commitment to outspoken artists who want to shake things up.

At Laguna Art Museum, education director M.A. Greenstein has replaced art “happy talk” with more challenging programming. Of particular note: the spring series of architecture lectures relating to the exhibit, “Morphosis: Buildings and Projects.”

The Jury Is Still Out

We’re still waiting to see what Newport Harbor Art Museum director Michael Botwinick--on the scene since last February--envisions for his institution. So far, we’ve heard a lot about “community relations”--fine as far as it goes, but what about Newport’s once-bright star on the national and international art scene? He offers not a peep about the status of the museum’s plans for a new building. But recession blues sung by some trustees this fall suggest it’s entirely possible those plans could be tabled indefinitely.

Best Educational Tool for Grown-Ups

Newport Harbor’s series of free noon gallery lectures by exhibiting artists, begun last summer during the exhibit “Different Stories: Five Views of the Collection” and continued in the fall for “Mapping Histories: The Third Newport Biennial,” gives visitors a direct line to the thinking behind works of art that don’t immediately reveal their secrets.

The artists the Newport museum shows tend to be highly articulate (disproving the myth that artists are hopeless explicators of their own work) and the audience tends to ask lots of pointed questions (putting the lie to the idea that viewers are utterly abashed by the outer ranges of contemporary art).

Most-Impassioned Defense

Renzo Piano, the internationally famous architect unceremoniously ousted from Newport Harbor’s building project last year, was in Los Angeles in May to receive an award when he spoke publicly about the incident for the first time after his dismissal.

“I want to be adamant about this,” he said. “If somebody said the scheme was over budget or (allowed for insufficient gallery space), I’m ready to go to war. Because it’s not true.” In a long and earnest conversation, Piano labeled as “ridiculous,” “absolutely fake” and “false” the museum’s stated reasons for his dismissal.

“Architecture is just the mirror of the (community’s) dream,” he said in conclusion. “People should be very careful about throwing away a dream. Is the dream about freedom? Is the dream about expressing the capacity of a community to love art in a free way? Is somebody taking care of this, still?”

Most Wishy-Washy Art Guardians

Would somebody please sit the Laguna Beach arts commissioners down and explain to them that they need to: 1) learn more about what makes good public art tick; 2) establish a clear and creative vision for their city and its future, and then stick to it; and 3) scrutinize with the utmost care the credentials of artists who want to plunk down their sculptures on public land?

Although the City Council voted earlier this month to reject local sculptor Ron Taybi’s offer to place his 23-foot-tall piece on Main Beach (after the arts commissioners gave him the OK), the piece is likely to be placed elsewhere in the city.

How could the commissioners have approved any piece for naturally lovely Main Beach? And why were they so eager to accept a work of no particular distinction by an unknown artist? Why did they let themselves be swayed by the stated theme of the piece--women’s emancipation--but fail to question the altruism of Taybi’s offer? What’s the point of having an arts commission if it doesn’t line up firmly against mediocrity and perceived self-promotion?

Best ‘Bad News’

The so-called Modern Museum of Art, a dubious enterprise in Santa Ana run by a couple who cheerfully admitted to a lack of art expertise and only briefly employed a curator, quietly closed its doors in June, after nearly four years.

Most Absurd Opening Sentence of a 1991 Art Press Release (from a year with lots of contenders):

“If Michelangelo were alive today, he might be considered a corporate artist.”

New Conservatism’s Several Guises

What are we to make of a year that brought us not only boring photographs of UC campuses by the ubiquitous Ansel Adams (UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery), minor work by Edward Hopper (Newport Harbor) and a sprawling show of anecdotal art by vintage Southern Californians (“Dream and Perspective” at the Laguna Art Museum) but also yet another attempted crackdown on nudity in art in the name of morality?

At least Laguna Beach photographer Marilyn Lennon ultimately was not charged in connection with photographs she took of a topless 12-year-old girl at a professional workshop in Santa Fe. The film had been turned over to Irvine police by a photo lab concerned that the images violated a 1989 state law barring possession of child pornography.

But Old-Fashioned Community Spirit Is Always Welcome

Graduating senior and gifted young artist Megan Jones painted a mural of her Laguna Beach High School classmates in 1984; three years later she was dead of a rare form of cancer. This year, her mother, Chadlyn Jones, led a campaign to save the mural--which would have been destroyed in the $10-million school renovation--and transfer it to the school’s theater. Although the school district refused to pay for the project, community members contributed $25,000 for the services of a professional restorer.

The Times Orange County Edition’s coverage of the year in arts continues Tuesday with a look at the year in theater, by Jan Herman; Wednesday with a look at the year in music and dance, by Chris Pasles; Thursday with a look at the year in pop, by Mike Boehm; and Friday with a look at the year in general, by Zan Dubin and Rick VanderKnyff.