A Forward- Thinking Look at ‘80s : Art: MOMA curator Robert Storr didn’t set out to record a decade but rather to plot a series of discoveries for viewers.

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 people who have insider knowledge of the field?

“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,” Storr said, “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 . . . a really good (exhibition) 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. 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 got 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 not intended to be a theoretical argument that is absolutely coherent and tight.”

The show is, however, an argument that addresses the ongoing 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,” said Storr, who came to MOMA in 1980 on the strength of a decade’s worth of critical writing on art. His resume lists an extensive bibliography of articles and reviews for Art in America--for which he is a contributing editor--as well as other periodicals. One example of Storr’s juxtapositions is his decision to hang Adrian Piper’s “Ur Mutter No. 10,” a photo-collage with text, in proximity to 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, when all is said and done? 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.”

Not that under-recognized or socially committed art are Storr’s only agendas at MOMA, 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. His next big show at MOMA (in 1993) will be a retrospective of abstract painter Robert Ryman, whose work “Pace,” is included in “Devil on the Stairs.”

Storr called 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.”

“Devil on the Stairs: Looking Back on the Eighties,” through June 21 at Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach. (714) 759-1122.