O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Young Artists in Laguna Spotlight

It was inevitable that the Laguna Art Museum’s cheeky new show “I Thought California Would Be Different: New Work in the Permanent Collection” would be compared to “Helter Skelter,” the exhibit of punchy Los Angeles art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, an in-your-face L.A. curatorial debut by former Newport Harbor Art Museum chief curator Paul Schimmel.

But with such a significant pool of young and youngish artists in Los Angeles turning out such energetic and provocative work, there’s certainly room for any number of museum exhibits on the subject. The real news is that the brash contents of the Laguna exhibit actually were acquired by the museum within the last two years. Yup, and there’s not a single Laddie John Dill or Lita Albuquerque in the bunch.

There’s no small amount of going-out-on-a-limb involved in collecting such art. It means putting the museum’s imprimatur on work that has a very short history, draws largely on pop culture, and hasn’t been sanctified by zillions of other museum shows and droves of big-ticket collectors. But that’s what’s so cool about the show. It sends out the signal that the Laguna Art Museum finally has begun to be engaged with the art of the younger generation, the art of the ‘90s.

“I Thought California Would Be Different”--which for the most part eschews the extremely graphic depictions of sexuality and violence in “Helter Skelter”--has only two artists in common with the L.A. exhibit: Raymond Pettibon and Robert Williams.

Working on paper (and sometimes directly on gallery walls), Pettibon has developed a highly personal style of deadpan, throwaway wit, based largely on such sources as comic strips, cheap fiction, TV commercials and popular songs. His sketches with handwritten texts bounce trite phrases and stock scenes back to the viewer with a new, deadly import.

The works in Laguna Beach are prints made from Pettibon’s drawings. In one, an abbreviated sketch of a skyscraper at night with lit windows, is accompanied by the phrases “Where am I? Where are you taking me?” Corporate America’s workplace, secret police tactics and silly caper movies are consolidated into one unsettling image.

The exhibit’s title is taken from another Pettibon piece, which shows a broad-shouldered male figure striding purposefully into the blank distance. The strong-willed hero who turns on his heel and leaves--familiar from comics and films--becomes the symbol of a monumental fit of pique when the California Dream proves to be a myth, like any other.

Williams’ wildly colored, nervously patterned painting of a vomiting bag lady with slipping underpants and a shopping cart holding a stereo receiver, a possibly dead dog and other objects goes by the tongue-in-cheek title of “A Flotsam and Jetsam Kinda Gal; Museum Catalogue Title: Under the Gauntlet of the Tyrant Gender Goes but by the Grace of God One’s Own Mother; Colloquial Title: The Liquid Curtsy.” (The representation of “the tyrant gender”--is shown here, too, in the person of a nude woman chained to the familiar symbol for the female sex.)

Yucky and brashly cartoon-like as this image is--Williams’ work tends to be limited rather than enhanced by its adolescent exaggerations--its subject represents an increasingly inescapable part of everyday urban life, no matter how we may try to rationalize it with academic blather or vulgar witticisms.

The insidious role of the sexual degradation of women in everyday culture is the theme of Kim Abeles’ “Imperial Shoeshine,” a three-dimensional re-creation of a shoeshine stand with rows of polish and (behind a fabric panel) a seat surrounded by X-rated images hung at eye-level. On his temporary “throne,” the male customer gets to pick any of the images to be the “subjects” of his sexual fantasies.

Marcy Watton’s mixed media piece “Bedfellow” is about sex, too, but with a different twist. Her pink, translucent plastic cartoon creature (suspended between two upholstered, headboard-like objects) represents any number of gremlins that plague sexual situations: fear of AIDS and sexual diseases, performance worries, the tug of war between lust and love.

Several works have political themes, generally presented in ironic or morally indeterminate ways.

Gregg Gibbs’ “Unbelievable, Too Good to Be True”--a huge unstretched canvas of Liberty (the old symbol for America)--shows milk pouring from her breasts, rays of light issuing from her mouth, and tiers of fire and smoke where her hair should be. On a ribbon above her head, the word unbelievable is spelled out in the style of an old-fashioned carnival booth. This is in effect a twisted portrait of the American dream, a vision of truth and prosperity for all, coexisting with bellicose behavior.

Sandow Birk’s painting “Official Response” (after American painter John Trumbull’s “The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar”) shows a knot of white and black policemen apparently rescuing a black couple: a man who wears his cap backward in gang member style and a woman who seems to have been raped. The gang member gestures to keep the cops at a distance from the woman. Meanwhile, a ragged crowd of white men flee on the left.

The Trumbull painting, painted a decade after the Revolutionary War, was criticized by Americans for celebrating a noble moment on the part of the British army. Birk borrows heavily from Trumbull’s composition, including the distinctive arrangement of the hands of two remonstrating British officers, and a third who fends them off to attend to a dying enemy officer.

It isn’t clear whether Birk intends some sort of meaningful correspondence between the sympathetic British officer and the gang member. But the notion of painting such a routine contemporary scene in the flamboyantly formal terms of “history painting” gives the viewer pause. It lends a curiously old-fashioned quality of permanence and dignity to a way of life we know mostly from numbingly familiar newspaper stories or fleeting clips on TV news.

But it is, above all, highly ambivalent. Did the police save the woman’s life, or did the gang member save her? In a way not dissimilar from Trumbull’s painting, “Official Response” is about the way life actually doesn’t sort itself into clear rights and wrongs.

Kim Dingle’s “George Washington as Annie Oakley” is a touch-up job in which a few swipes of paint turn the first President into the 19th-Century sure-shot. The point seems to be that both people are elements of American folklore, which has become one big mishmash in our minds, with fact and fiction hopelessly tumbled together.

Some works in the exhibit are on the lighter side. These include Jeffrey Vallance’s objects and images relating to his formal audience with the King of Tonga. The piece is a protracted spoof on the nature of the “exotic” and the time-honored rituals of diplomatic visits. Vallance deftly interlaces American pop culture (surfer decals on the Royal Surfboard) with ethnic craft (some of the artist’s images were printed with local dyes on tapa cloth).

Chris Wilder’s installation “Ultimate Experience, UFO Sighting Malibu” is a jokey insider’s piece that depends on the viewer’s knowledge of Southern California conceptual art (in particular, the paintings of Edward Ruscha) and a series of fake historical photographs published in a surfing magazine by artist Craig Stecyk.

A letter-to-the-editor about this series, written by Ruscha, is reproduced on top of a silk screen image of the fake photo, which is hung between two Ruscha-like paintings of single marbles on large fields of blue.

Suffice to say that Wilder’s linkage of the UFO phenomenon with conceptual art--both involve lots of theory but, often, precious little to look at--is a clever and humorous piece of work that also points out how chummy the worlds of art and pop culture are in Southern California.

“I Thought California . . . “ also includes work by Corey Stein (donated by artist John Baldessari), Ilene Segalove, Richard Ralph Roehl, Dani Tull, Russell Crotty, Diane Gamboa, Mark Heresy, Mike Parker, Anthony Ausgang, Chaz Bojorquez, Keith Boadwee and Lynn Coleman.

The one great failing of the exhibition is that it has no catalogue, no outlet where Bolton Colburn, the museum’s curator of collections (whose show this is), could have discussed the sometimes frustratingly arcane background of individual pieces, or located the works in the history of Southern California art.

The official reason for the lack of a catalogue is very simple: There was no money to produce one. Not to be churlish--the exhibit was funded in the first place through the generosity of two donors, Charlie Miller and actor Nicolas Cage--but next time, someone has got to impress upon potential donors the importance of giving such exhibits the documentary value, educational “outreach” and art historical credibility of some written material, no matter how modestly produced.

“I Thought California Would Be Different: New Work in the Permanent Collection” continues through May 17 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Admission: $3 for adults, $1.50 for seniors and students, free for children under 12. Information: (714) 494-6531.