O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Curator Guenther Seeks to Bring the Masses to the Media : Newport Harbor museum official says for too long, art has been distancing audiences from itself. He hopes to change that.

Many curators of contemporary art confess--in private, at least--an impatience with the public, with all those folks who would rather be looking at cheerful Impressionist paintings than patiently decoding the mysteries of post-minimalist sculpture.

But Bruce Guenther, the new chief curator at Newport Harbor Art Museum, thinks otherwise. In fact, he views art museums as “a service industry” with the curator as “a facilitator” between the artistic community and the general public.

Now, the model of a museum curator at a distinguished institution is someone who is primarily interested in sustaining a high-level dialogue with the art world. Guenther, on the other hand, has a way of sounding as though he was really hired as director of education.

“Contemporary art is accused of being elitist, quite rightly,” the 43-year-old former chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago remarked during a recent interview in his sun-baked office. “I’m in this business to expand the audience for art, not to narrow it.

”. . . My family were tradesmen. They owned grocery stores in Oregon and Alabama. . . . I was the first person in my family that went to a university. I have a certain affinity for an audience that understands they’re outside of something.

“The art of our times has spent 100 years distancing itself from a mass audience. It made a really concerted effort since 1960. . . . But what you do in a public institution is you provide a series of opportunities for (viewers) to become part of the dialogue, or to understand part of that dialogue better.

“It’s always a dance between the heart and the mind, between the intellect and the emotions, to enter a dialogue with an artist’s work, to extend that dialogue through writing, or exhibition labels or both--to help shape an experience so that the public can have the same kind of intense personal experience that I as a curator have shared in.”

Citing an American Assn. of Museum survey saying that visitors’ “museum fatigue” normally sets in after about 30 to 45 minutes, Guenther remarked that this malady probably hits visitors to a contemporary art museum within the first five minutes:

“The confrontation can be so radical so fast. You know, you barely get in the door and you’re assaulted with something that denies your experience with the definition of an artwork, the appropriate subject matter for an art experience, the material that art should be made of.

“And people can pass (through) numb unless you set up something for them to stumble over. Unfortunately, it’s often a sculpture. But you hope it will be an idea. You hope that they’ll linger for a second over a text panel, and--because of the way you’ve phrased it, because of the example you gave . . . --it wakes them up and then they re-look.

“So when I see people in an exhibition that I know is

tough and their eyes glaze over or hostility comes right up to the surface, I’m always encouraged when they’ll stomp over (to the wall text). You actually see their shoulders physically relax.”

Guenther--who seems to keep his distance from an interviewer by speaking in long paragraphs that permit only grudging interruption--really warms to his topic when he talks about the naive art viewer.

“Wall texts, extended labels. intelligible, readable essays and catalogues--all those things are important to providing an opportunity for someone to come in and have a positive first experience with contemporary art,” he says. “Because we know from visitor surveys that maybe as many as 80% of people who walk into a museum in America are first-time visitors.”

But where does this intensive focus on the first-time visitor leave Newport Harbor’s standing on the national art scene?

From a critical perspective, institutions get brownie points on the basis of exhibits of scholarly distinction and fresh curatorial insight into the thinking that shapes the frankly esoteric world of significant contemporary art. Contemporary art museums’ reputations do not rise and fall on the basis of how well they cater to a general public blithely unaware of critical dialogue in art. (The issue is somewhat similar to the way major universities are generally assessed on the basis of the level of scholarship demonstrated by their faculty, not by their proficiency at teaching introductory courses.)

Doesn’t Guenther worry that so much attention to the “first-time visitor” will result in slippage in the museum’s standards and critical esteem, hard-won over the past decade of exhibitions curated by former chief curator Paul Schimmel, now at MOCA?

“My dear,” Guenther replies. “Critics have never paid the bills. I am concerned that this is an institution that is struggling to make an impact in this community, not to make an impact in the art press in Cologne or New York.

“We are here to serve a public and to bring the contemporary art dialogue into this community and make it available, accessible and understandable. . . . Right now, we are an esoteric small institution on a side street in Fashion Island. That’s a physical reality and, unfortunately, a social reality.”

So eager is the museum to focus on its local outreach that Guenther--who is renting in Newport Beach--says he promised the board he wouldn’t live in Los Angeles. “This is where the museum is,” he explains. “How can I create a program for this place if I don’t know this place? It’s like cities that hire you and require you to live there.”

Guenther says he has worked to create a balance of “accessible” and more challenging exhibition programs in Chicago and at the Seattle Art Museum, his previous curatorial post--a practice he intends to continue at Newport Harbor.

On Feb. 2, the museum will open a retrospective of the work of major American sculptor Jackie Winsor, organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, and “New California Artist XX: Sarah Seager,” an exhibit--organized by assistant curator Marilu Knode--of the young Pasadena artist’s recent paintings on paper, which incorporate a private vocabulary of words and symbols applied with press-on letters.

Five days later, Guenther’s first Newport Harbor exhibit makes its debut: The first solo U.S. museum exhibit of young Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca, who is said to imbue familiar objects--household furnishings, city plans, road maps--with a theatrical sense of melancholy and loss.

“I wanted him here,” Guenther says, “because for (viewers) for whom Sarah Seager would be impossible and Jackie Winsor would be very difficult, the fact that Kuitca makes paintings on canvas will give them a little ease . . . maybe delays them shutting the door on their mind a little bit.

“(Viewers) see things within Kuitca’s world which are recognizable but strange, familiar and yet unknown at the same time. . . . Ideally, after that experience they go on to Jackie Winsor and begin to see someone who has reduced her (options) to a series of geometric shapes and who is really concerned with the labor of making something, and about its surface and how it comes into being . . . and then you go to Sarah Seager . . . who will (pursue) the most esoteric, almost mathematical kind of permutation of an idea.

“My ideal is to construct a program that not only does that in each exhibition, but over time will take the myriad of new visitors this institution got at (last year’s exhibit, ‘Edward Hopper: Selections from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art’) and give them something else that’s perhaps more central to the institution’s goals and ideas.

“You don’t overcome 100 years of distancing (between popular taste and art) in one exhibition, with one wall label. But over the course of an association of five years, 10 years, the 2 1/2 visits that the membership will make individually every year begin to noodle away at it. . . .”

Although some observers in Seattle have labeled Guenther a curator primarily interested in emotionally expressive painting, Guenther says his tastes are catholic. In Chicago, for example, he acquired work by such conceptually oriented artists as John Baldessari, Joseph Kosuth and Adrian Piper.

“Martin Kippenberger, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons,” Guenther rapidly recites the names of some internationally known contemporary artists. “They are all of interest to me.”

But, he adds, “I’m not interested in promoting and profiting on the backs of a certain group of artists. I’m interested in creating a program that has long-term value and depth, that helps an audience in a specific institution grow and to bring them . . . in touch with the diversity and the specific reality of the moment. That is not about one thin sliver of the art world.”

Newport Harbor, Guenther says, wants to serve more “diverse” people. (Significantly, the California Arts Council cut its 1990 grant to the museum by more than two-thirds partly because a council advisory panel said the institution wasn’t reaching out to a multicultural audience.) But Guenther also notes his longstanding personal commitment to show minority artists.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago--where he was chief curator from 1987 until last summer--he showed work by such black artists as Romare Bearden and Betye and Alison Saar, as well as non-mainstream work by artists from Africa and Brazil.

In Seattle during the ‘80s, Guenther “was interested in multiculturalism before that was a phrase,” according to Seattle Post Intelligencer art critic Regina Hackett. He showed the first contemporary American Indian artists ever given an exhibit at the Seattle museum. In 1986, his major exhibit, “Jacob Lawrence, American Painter,” traced five decades of work by the black modernist artist and traveled to museums across the country.

Guenther also says he “doesn’t believe in gender,” yet he refers to Jackie Winsor as “one of the most interesting woman minimalists,” and he included only one woman artist (Susan Rothenberg) in “States of War: New European and American Painting” a survey of Neo-Expressionism he curated in Seattle in 1985.

“How many women Neo-Expressionist artists do you know?” he bristles. “One show doesn’t make a curator.”

Some people who knew Guenther in Seattle say he kept his distance from local artists and preferred to work through galleries rather than make studio visits. Guenther stoutly denies the scuttlebutt. He says he normally reviews artists’ slide portfolios the third week of every month--a practice that will continue at Newport Harbor.

“I got in the business because I really loved looking at art and being involved in the ideas that shape art,” he says. “My life is full, however, of this (gesturing at the paperwork on his desk) and this (pointing to a reporter’s cassette recorder). So of necessity I can’t spend the time most artists think I should. It’s a never-ending need.

“When I go to a studio, my philosophy is to be as encouraging as possible, no matter what I think, because art-making is a lonely and highly vulnerable activity. . . . Much as I may want to tell them to get a job, quit painting, burn this trash, I’ll never do that.”

Guenther’s passion on the subject of an artist’s vulnerability suggests that he was once an artist. Indeed, while earning his bachelor of science degree in applied design (painting and drawing) from Southern Oregon College in Ashland, Ore., he was making work on paper--a medium he preferred to painting and sculpture because it permitted fast-paced execution. But once his curatorial career began, he gave up his own art.

Had he continued making work, he says, he might have been “a solid regional artist on the faculty somewhere, showing every two years. But why do that? There are too many artists in the world and not enough art lookers. What I’m really interested in is . . . the dialogue. And I’m good at it. And I can have far and away more influence as a curator . . . helping make that art experience available.”

The availability of the art experience at Newport Harbor is limited by the exhibit budget (about $500,000 annually, one-quarter of the overall operating budget) and the need to make do with only 9,500 square feet of exhibition space. Normally the whole museum goes dark for several weeks between exhibitions, while the installation process occurs. As a result, visitors sometimes drive to the museum only to discover there’s nothing to see.

Guenther is working out a plan to keep the museum open more days of the year, by staggering the dates of exhibits whenever possible, so some work would remain on view. He expects to gain as much as an extra month of exhibition time--for more small exhibits or to display portions of the permanent collection.

As part of the effort to make the museum building more efficient, the Irvine Gallery--the one behind the admission desk--was slightly reconfigured last week to give it the feel of an actual gallery rather than simply an extension of the lobby.

Strengthening the permanent collection of post-World War II California art--about 2,000 objects, about half of which are photographs and works on paper--will be Guenther’s other major focus. Despite the presence of clusters of historically kindred material (such as a group of Bay Area Figurative paintings and works in the Los Angeles “fetish finish” mode of the ‘60s) the collection has some serious gaps, Guenther says.

For example? “We’re missing a whole thing about collage and assemblage in California art,” he says. Although the museum has “picked up some very interesting work of the ‘80s . . . on a monumental scale,” he adds, it is weak in smaller works by the conceptual artists associated with California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, the hotshot art school of Southern California during the ‘80s.

Acquisitions “have not been a No. 1 priority” at Newport Harbor, Guenther says. “As with any institution this size, the collecting activity is by gift, not purchase. His own networking has already netted the museum a bronze by Bay Area artist Manuel Neri, from a Bay Area collector not otherwise connected with the museum.

The acquisition committee is also talking about establishing an endowment of $100,000 or $200,000 a year just for acquisitions, Guenther says.

His eagerness to discuss administrative matters is apt to recall behavior normally associated with a museum director rather than a curator. (In fact, Guenther was co-acting director in Chicago for a year and served as acting director of the art museum at Washington State University in the mid-’70s.)

“A museum of contemporary art is a specialized museum,” he says. “It’s not unlike a train museum. Only a certain number of people will cross the tracks, so to speak, to look at a train museum. But by the same token, this museum has found a niche, and it’s a niche that marketing surveys tell us will grow with the proper nurturing. . . .

“Somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people visit this museum a year. There are more people than that in Orange County interested in the art of our time.”