Curator Brings ‘80s to Newport : Contemporary art: New York museum’s Robert Storr says he has lots of confidence in the untutored viewer.

With his boyishly open face, rapid patter and visible enthusiasm, Robert Storr played the Pied Piper at Newport Harbor Art Museum on a recent afternoon, leading a large group of visitors around his exhibition, “The Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties,” the first major exhibit surveying the art of the past decade.

Storr, the highly regarded 42-year-old curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, had finished talking about the varied sources of the superimposed layers of imagery David Salle employs in his painting “Muscular Paper,” but someone still had a question.

“Is this just art about art?” a woman wanted to know. In other words, does Salle--or for that matter, most artists active during the past decade or so--speak only to insiders?

“Art is no longer an elite activity in the same way it once was,” Storr replied. “Now the audience is large. ‘Twenty Questions’ is not really what it’s about. (Viewers) can identify something belonging to an older tradition of art--the sincere picture--put into a context that makes it look shallow and insincere. . . . Anyone can look and think. That’s not just the preserve of people who are (art) professionals.”

In an interview, Storr enlarged on the idea (“The long answers are the interesting ones, right?”). He said he has lots of confidence in the untutored viewer:

“I think most people who are sophisticated (about art) didn’t start out that way. The reason people resent art is that they are sure a trick question is being asked. (But) usually artists don’t think that way.

“People should feel that (the art) is there for them to think about, and that the process of doing that is far more important than the specific conclusions drawn--that having an answer to a show as you leave it is not only not important, it’s in general terms antithetical to the experience of the show.

“It’s OK for people not to know what they’re looking at. The reason they’re there is to spend time with the installation and to let their own imaginations click in. . . . Curators are there to be intermediaries but not to be decisive voices. That robs people of their experience.”

Organizing an exhibition consists of plotting “a series of discoveries, a way in which you can use what you have just seen to think about what you are about to see, and what you saw a while back,” Storr said. “A bad (exhibit) simply lines objects up in a rote order, (and) makes those sequences of discovery hinge on one obvious element . . . like scale or pattern. But a really good (one) means that you carom off one thing to the next to the next.”

An abstract painter himself, Storr views the hands-on aspect of curating as “the thing that’s nearest to painting. . . . You’re essentially moving stuff around and seeing it visually. . . .

“If you’re given the sequence and enough background information to identify the characters and the general idea, then you should trust your reactions. And if you discover something you don’t like, that’s also good. You’re not supposed to like all these things. They’re not all of them likable things by any means. But having understood them for themselves is different from having to like them. . . .

“I think a lot of people find themselves responding to images, to objects, without knowing why, and part of their response has to do with an uncertainty, a sort of involved uncertainty about what their feelings are. Looking at art is a chance to explore that uncertainty. It’s not necessarily true that you will then resolve it.”

And when a work makes you doubt your own feelings, “All the questions you start to ask about that (work) become its content. . . . I think much of the art that interests me has that quality. It gets people past easy answers into murkier territory.”

Storr said he began getting ideas for the quirky titles for the various sections of “Devil on the Stairs” (“Social Studies,” “Women Looking,” “Full-Tilt Painting,” “Things” and so forth) while rummaging through the heaps of photographs of art he had assembled for his critical writing and lecturing.

He wanted to avoid the “clinical language” so often applied to recent art. “At a time when people are talking about the ‘deconstruction of the fetishistic object,’ calling a bunch of sculptures . . . just things at least gets people back to a point where they can treat the object and not the language.”

The exhibition, first shown last fall at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, “is not intended to be a comprehensive history of the time,” Storr said. “It’s too soon for that, and I wouldn’t have been inclined to do that anyway. It’s not intended to be a theoretical argument that is absolutely coherent and tight.”

The show is, however, an argument that addresses the debate about the validity of traditional painting and sculpture by contemporary artists. Certain critics view these forms as invalid because they attempt to perpetuate the myth of the individual creative genius. These critics believe the meaning of the art object is inseparable from its status as a commodity. They tend to champion work based on texts and photographs--usually made by anonymous individuals for non-art purposes.

“In organizing (the different sections of the exhibit) I wanted to . . . put people together who, because of that critical separation, were not shown together,” Storr said.

For example, he decided to hang Adrian Piper’s “Ur Mutter No. 10,” a photo collage with text, near Eric Fischl’s painting “Costa del Sol” and Leon Golub’s painting “Mercenaries IV.”

“The undercurrent of all three has to do with racial tensions in this country and perceptions of race and alienness in this country. The fact is that two are paintings--the Golub and the Fischl--and one is a photograph. . . . Now, this is not a boast, but I can’t think of a show where those . . . artists were seen together, and yet there are obvious ways in which they belong together--at least, to complicate issues rather than simplify them.”

So what is significant about the art of the ‘80s?

Perhaps it is, as Storr writes in his catalogue essay, that the AIDS crisis “has tested the human resources of art and the art community in ways never foreseen, and it has brought to bear a frankness, gravity and measure that render glib abstraction and cheap apocalyptics unbearable.”

Storr said the best letter he received about the exhibit was from a collector in Chicago. “He said, ‘I really appreciated this show because it had the pain of the ‘80s in it.’ And I think that’s true. I didn’t design it into the show. It came with the objects I picked.”

In his early 30s, Storr moved to New York, where he initially worked in construction to support his painting. His first foray into art criticism was the result of his troubled reaction to an article by critic Peter Schjeldahl about Philip Guston, an Abstract Expressionist who became an oddball figurative painter late in his career. Schjeldahl concluded that Guston’s work is ultimately unsuccessful.

“So with the kind of chutzpah you have when you’re in no place in particular, I wrote him a long letter saying, ‘This (essay) is completely interesting and completely wrong,’ ” Storr said.

He and Schjeldahl exchanged letters for a while, and finally the critic sent some of Storr’s lengthy missives to Art in America magazine, which made him a contributing editor in 1981. Never part of any critical clique, he has enjoyed his independence--and remained loyal to Schjeldahl, even writing a stylish letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review earlier this year after a book by his colleague was unfavorably reviewed.

“Writing was always the way that I figured out what I was thinking,” Storr said.

Among the subjects of his articles for the magazine are painters Elizabeth Murray, Robert Ryman, Francesco Clemente, Brice Marden, Leon Golub, David Salle, Susan Rothenberg and Eric Fischl and sculptor Louise Bourgeois--all of whom are included in “Devil on the Stairs.”

When Kirk Varnedoe, head of the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, first approached Storr about becoming a curator in the late ‘80s, he declined, preferring to teach studio art at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and pursue his writing and painting.

Two years ago, while Storr was working on an essay for a museum publication, Varnedoe asked again. This time Storr said yes, convinced that the museum was not just making “a token gesture in the direction of modern art.”

Although the museum rarely had deigned to notice contemporary art in forms other than traditional painting and sculpture during the ‘70s and ‘80s, Storr’s debut show last fall, “ Dis locations,” consisted of variously aggressive, disorienting or slyly insinuating installations (including video environments and large-scale interiors) by seven disparate artists--Louise Bourgeois, David Hammons, Ilya Kabakov, Bruce Nauman and Adrian Piper (who also are represented in “Devil on the Stairs”) and Chris Burden and Sophie Calle.

Cynics remarked that once the museum did a “ Dis locations,” it would feel no need to duplicate the experience for the next couple of decades, but Storr said Varnedoe and Aggie Gund, the museum’s new board of trustees president, are “extremely anxious to see not only contemporary stuff done but also to see contemporary stuff that is socially involved . . . and involves artists who are not mainstream.”

Not that under-recognized or socially committed art are Storr’s only agendas at the Modern, by any means.

His job at the high-profile museum also entails giving “due attention to big accomplishments that are somehow still not in the public mind,” he said. The bulk of Storr’s published articles are about mainstream sculptors and painters, and his own painting remains his primary personal interest. But he is not a champion of any specific art genre or theory--only of artists who work “with a certain complexity and conviction.”

Storr’s next big show (in 1993) will be a retrospective of abstract painter Robert Ryman, whose work “Pace” is included in “Devil on the Stairs.” Storr calls Ryman “a truly great painter . . . who has asked every question I can think of about the object quality of an abstract painting (and) the relation of an abstract painting to sculpture, while still . . . using the elements of traditional painting.”

Although Storr chides the U.S. art Establishment for its “provincial” view--”not area by area or state by state but as a country, in not dealing with contemporary art in all the places it’s made”--there are bigger problems ahead. While “the art world is expanding exponentially in terms of numbers of people . . . in terms of countries that are producing and exporting and importing art . . . budgets everywhere are shrinking.”

And in the United States, what Storr calls “exceedingly perverse political reasons”--including pressure put on the National Endowment for the Arts by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and others--have contributed to the pinch.

“The pity of it is that a lot of people who are probably not so narrow in their thinking get a kind of jolt of panic in response to what he says.

“In Cincinnati, 80,000 people saw the (Robert) Mapplethorpe show (at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center) and a jury of ordinary citizens acquitted (center director) Dennis Barrie (of obscenity and child pornography charges). Once people actually dealt with that material, rough as it was, they used good sense.”

Storr--speaking days before NEA Acting Chairman Anne-Imelda Radice overturned two grants for exhibits that include sexual imagery--pointed out that both “ Dis locations” and “Devil on the Stairs” were funded in part by the NEA.

“The people who are actually administering the NEA below the level of political hubbub are doing a very responsible job and are taking risks still, even though there’s pressure on them not to,” he said.

These days, the amount of paper-shuffling involved in his position at the Museum of Modern Art (“much more than I was led to believe”) leaves Storr little time to visit artists’ studios, a practice he said can be an awkward way of looking at work in any case. Unsolicited correspondence from artists has begun to pile up, too, even though he swore he would not be “one of those curators who didn’t answer mail or telephone calls.”

Meanwhile, he said, his “real” artist friends are so good about not putting pressure on him to be shown that “if anything, they’ve been almost too shy about seeing me. I say, ‘Please call me! I want to talk to somebody real!’ ” Storr said with another laugh.

* “Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties” remains through June 21 at Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday. $4, adults; $2, students and senior citizens, free for children 6 to 17. Free for all visitors on Tuesdays. (714) 759-1122.