THE EXHIBIT OF THE DECADE : Artworks of the Eighties Return in Devilishly Fine Form at Newport Harbor

Well, the art exhibit of the year is here.

Actually it’s the art exhibit of the decade--the 1980s. “Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties,” at Newport Harbor Art Museum through June 21, is the brainchild of Robert Storr, a former art critic who has breathed new life into the stately Museum of Modern Art in New York as its new curator of contemporary art. (Judith Tannenbaum of the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania--the organizing institution--served as co-curator.)

This exhibit has strong work--in both senses. It also represents a refreshingly non-bullying yet thoughtful approach to a staggeringly diverse major league art scene, peopled by artists as different from one another as the history-obsessed painter Anselm Kiefer and the sex-obsessed sculptor Jeff Koons. Obsessions were riding high in the ‘80s, all right, but everyone seemed to be on to something different.

Lest anyone wonder why the devil made Storr do it, by the way, we should explain that the show’s title comes from a French phrase, “l’esprit de l’escalier” (the spirit of the staircase), signifying the nagging doubts--presumably sent by the devil--that can plague you after you’ve shut the door on a part of your life and are walking away, intending to turn your attention to other things.

The world’s attention was riveted by many things in the ‘80s, most of them deeply unsettling. Winding above the art in the exhibit, in the manner of a classical frieze, a red band inscribed with the names of people in the arts who have died from the complications of AIDS--artists, collectors, dealers and museum professionals, collected by the Witness Project in New York--serves as a constant reminder of one of these crises.

Other topical subjects that gnawed at artists during the ‘80s included the impact of consumerism and the growing gap between rich and poor, the toppling of communism in Eastern Europe, the legacy of the Holocaust, police brutality and the disenfranchised, and the shabby treatment of women by men and Third World cultures by virtually everyone else.

There was “fast” art and “slow” art--works you could eyeball in a second, and works replete with complex visual or literary content that involve considerable exertion on the viewer’s part to perceive and comprehend.

But hardly anybody trusted in the hot and heavy look of “protest art” of years gone by. Instead, artists took their cues from such sources as the slick sell of Madison Avenue (as in Barbara Kruger’s drop-dead one-shot images, paired with snappy slogans), the throwaway scrawl of graffiti (Jean Michel Basquiat’s spiky drawings) and the panel format of comic books (Art Spiegelman’s drawings for “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” about his parents’ experience of the Holocaust).

Even Kiefer, Germany’ great moral conscience, not only made huge, trumpeting landscapes of decay (not in the exhibit) but also such relatively small and fragile works as “Kyffhauser,” a book of over-painted photographs mounted on cardboard.

In the ‘80s, photography was possibly the most important single medium of artists engaged with cultural and social issues, because of its paradoxical ability to appear to represent “truth” while actually serving the personal agenda of the artist. (Photographs by two very different artists--Robert Mapplethorpe, not represented in this exhibit, and Andres Serrano--also sparked the sound and fury on the Far Right during the late ‘80s that culminated in severe attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Some artists (such as Cindy Sherman--who dresses up and “stars” in her own work, based largely on works of art by others--and David Levinthal, who recreated scenes from World War II with toy models and a camera) photographed posed tableaux. Others (including John Baldessari and Adrian Piper) juxtaposed “found” photographs originally made by others for news, advertising or instructional purposes.

But intents and purposes varied greatly. Baldessari’s “Running Man/Man Carrying Box,” comes across as a compact espionage fiction about death and pursuit that can be read backward or forward to yield different “stories.”

In “Ur Mutter No. 10” (a play on the street curse, “yo’ momma”), Piper lines up two photographs in which people of color are the lackeys or window dressing for prosperous-looking whites and a third of an emaciated African woman and child--the kind of photograph often used to solicit donations from charitable Americans. “Fight or die” reads the silk-screened text, referring apparently both to the death of pride as well as death that results from starvation.

Still other artists photographed normally overlooked or seemingly uninteresting aspects of the real world in order to point out the gulf between the things middle-class viewers tend to value and pay attention to, and the stuff we conveniently ignore.

Louise Lawler’s image of an industrial vacuum cleaner shown in a virtually empty museum gallery reminds us that somebody (tellingly, the person is invisible in this picture) cleans our temples of art; Nan Goldin’s unemotional color photograph of “Nan After Being Battered” suggests that a viewer’s voyeuristic discomfort may be required to call attention to a smoldering domestic issue that tends to stay out of sight.

Working in yet another mode, Serrano turned color photography into a vehicle that is at once a work of spare, abstract beauty (the huge white and red rectangles of “Milk Blood”) and a symbol of nurture, death and (at a time of increased anxiety about the disease-carrying ability of bodily fluids) the fine line between them.

Words also took on a new importance in art in an era when elaborate European linguistic theories were batted about with abandon in the tonier art magazines.

Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms”--dozens of phrases printed on small sheets of paper that originally were put up like commercial flyers on the streets of New York--are grouped for the exhibition into a huge wall of curiously mesmerizing banalities that range over many topics and world views, however outrageous or stupid: “You must know where you stop and the world begins” (a definition of mental health?); “Starvation is nature’s way”; “Morals are for little people.”

Nancy Spero’s wall piece, “Notes in Time on Women II,” also incorporates numerous written phrases--well-chosen excerpts from the long, long history of men’s baffled or belittling observations of women--along with images of women. Tellingly, Spero’s work has a heroic presence because of its immense, wall-filling size and the scope of its historical overview, and yet it is made of small and humble elements: sheets of paper, bits of collage, typewritten sentences and imagery disarmingly created with a hand stamp and an ink pad.

Some painters (such as Sherrie Levine, represented here by her simulations of stripe paintings, and Ross Bleckner, whose witty “Remember Me” is a ‘60s-style stripe painting with its edges “carved” into the S-curves of a fussily old-fashioned frame) busied themselves with ironic replays of big moments in the history of art.

Other painters (such as Brice Marden, represented by “Frieze”--five waxy-surfaced bars of subtle color--and Elizabeth Murray, who shows two of her rangy, ever-so-slightly cartoonish abstractions) continued to hone their personal styles with the classic painter’s tools of color, shape and texture.

Some sculptors made intricate tableaux simulating imaginary places (the extraordinary reverie, “The Man Who Flew Into His Picture,” by Russian artist Ilya Kabakov), others sent their ideas out to factories to be fabricated (Koons), and still others invested their time in crafting unusual single objects.

Among the unusual objects, two of the best in this exhibit are Richard Artschwager’s “Tower III (Confessional)” and David Hammons’ lyrical assemblage, “High Falutin’.”

The Formica-veneered Artschwager piece, provided with appropriate niches for priest and penitent, mimics the look of a modernistic urban “tower” while embodying the wry suggestion that certain architects might do well to confess their “sins” of neglect of individual comfort and convenience in pursuit of formal purity.

Made from such castaway objects as a basketball hoop mounted on a long pole, burning candles, and fragments from a chandelier, Hammons’ piece is a poignant shrine. From the perspective of a kid on the wrong side of the tracks, basketball is more than an amusement; it is a path to possible big-ticket glory in professional sports. Chandeliers symbolize the “high life,” and the title of the piece also riffs off the 13-foot height of the sculpture and the legendary beanpole stature of basketball players.

In a category of its own, Mike Kelley’s “Eviscerated Corpse”--a bedraggled, sewn-together string of garish but well-worn old stuffed toys curling out of a pouch of crocheted doilies and more toys--achieves a weird poignancy. These dumb-looking, oddly phallic toys (many look like animals’ tails with stick-on cartoon faces) were each the beloved companions of some kid. The notion of viewing them as human entrails becomes shockingly apt if you consider the neglect and abandonment of unwanted children today.

Three of Jonathan Borofsky’s “Chattering Men”--over-lifesize aluminum humanoids with motors and speakers, who emit a steady stream of verbal static--appear to contemplate a huge, dangling figure 8, the same shape as the symbol of infinity. Although Borofsky’s chattering men have become quite familiar to international museum-goers, the figures remain unbeatable reminders of the great stream of blather that washes over all of us who are marooned in the Information Age.

The exhibition’s invisible overseer is an auditory piece by Joseph Beuys, the seminal German artist who died in 1986 and whose eloquent work stands behind so many of the artists in the show. Beuys’ “Ja Ja Ja Ja, Nee Nee Nee Nee” is an audio tape made from the original record (which actually dates from 1970).

This sequence of “yeses” and “nos” ( nee is a German dialect version of nein ) suggests the sheep-like sound of the “opinions” of people who haven’t bothered to think for themselves. It also echoes the way complex issues--such as today’s big social issues of abortion or gun control--are reduced to vastly oversimplified polarities.

Rather than group the 87 works in the exhibit by familiar but uninformative art labels--”Neo-Geo,” “Neo-Expressionist, Neo-Conceptual” and so on--Storr has found fresh ways of juxtaposing the works so that they read as a group of strong individual efforts that transcend narrow boundaries.

He offers an easygoing bunch of categories that includes “Things” (sculpture, in one sense or another), “Full-Tilt Painting,” “Ambiguous Bodies” (images about sexual role-playing and allied themes), “Women Looking” and “Split Personalities” (work by artists who each cultivated an array of different painting styles).

For example, a section called “Social Studies”--which is hung in the museum’s first gallery, just beyond the admission desk--includes not only Leon Golub’s huge “Mercenaries IV,” but also Eric Fischl’s painting of nearly nude or semi-nude men checking each out on the beach (“Costa del Sol”), the Piper piece described above, and John Ahearn’s sympathetic busts of contemporary black men and women, seen--for once--as individuals, not sociological “types.”

There are a few disappointments: The Kiefer is not a major work; the Martin Puryear sculpture is not as memorable as some of his other stuff. A couple of superstars (Mapplethorpe and--not that anybody should care--Julian Schnabel) are missing. Other artists you might have expected to see here include conceptual artist Sophie Calle, sculptors Richard Serra and Tony Cragg (Cragg’s countryman, British sculptor Richard Deacon, was included in the Philadelphia venue of the exhibit), installation artist Christian Boltanski and conceptual painter Steve Prina.

Yet memorable and deeply engaged art is everywhere to be seen in this exhibit. It comes as a pleasant surprise that so many of these works are made by women, despite the familiar lament that the art world still overwhelmingly favors men.

After you’ve walked through the show, which takes at least an hour to do with care, it’s likely you’ll find that a much-maligned era of art production actually has a lot to say for itself and--more importantly--about the state of the world.

Robert Storr, organizing curator of “Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties,” will speak at Newport Harbor Art Museum on May 7 at noon. Tickets are $5 ($3 for students, seniors and museum members) and include museum admission. Information: (714) 759-1122. What: “Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties.”

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, through June 21.

Where: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach.

Whereabouts: Take Jamboree Road to Santa Barbara Drive, just north of the Coast Highway. San Clemente intersects with Santa Barbara.

Wherewithal: Admission is $3.50 for adults; $2.50 for students and seniors, $1 for children ages 6 to 17; discounts for groups of 10 or more. Free for everyone on Tuesdays.

Where to call: (714) 759-1122.