O.C. ART REVIEW : Black-and-White Exhibit Has an Ugly Green Tint

Talk about putting the cart before the horse. How about a museum that bases the theme of an art exhibit on the title of a fund-raising event?

In order to publicize its upcoming Black and White Bash, the Newport Harbor Art Museum recently opened a temporary outpost in a vacant Newport Center Fashion Island storefront, across from Neiman Marcus. The gimmick is that all the art installed inside is in shades of black and/or white.

It’s a gimmick that frankly is unworthy of Newport Harbor because it sets up a false hierarchy in which the fund-raiser is the main event and the art collection is pressed into service as a marketing tool. The fact that the works are on view at a shopping center rather than the museum’s main site makes no difference. No matter how far afield the museum may extend its reach, fund-raising social events--however vital for the balance sheet--remain secondary to the institution’s main role of stewardship over the art in its care.

That role extends beyond physical protection from damage or theft. It means protection from misuse in improper contexts that trivialize or misrepresent the work, obliging it to “stand for” something totally unrelated to the purpose for which it was made.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The Black and White Bash, which made its debut last summer, is lots of fun, and the tickets are reasonably priced ($50) for a benefit. The problem is not the event, but the crass way it employs the museum’s art collection.

Assembling a grab-bag of works in different styles and media simply on the basis of their lack of color is not a useful way of illuminating the significance and depth of individual works of contemporary art. “Why would an artist choose to work in black and white?” asks a wall text. Gee, why do artists work in green and yellow?The text that answers this burning ad hoc question is not terribly helpful. Black and white add “a specific feeling,” we learn. They are also “evocative” and suggest “timelessness.” Aha, now we get it.

The amusing thing is that the museum hasn’t even figured out how to showcase its collection properly to catch the eye of mall shoppers. I was at the Fashion Island outpost for about an hour the other day, and the few people who ventured in quickly turned around and left. A couple of men inquired about the Bash at the museum’s gift boutique just inside the door, but no one evinced any interest in the work on the walls.

Little did these tentative visitors know that the “popular” stuff--Garry Winogrand’s photographs of buxom women and vintage shots of movie stars by Sidney Avery and Philippe Halsman--hangs at the far end of the shop, apparently because they need to be shielded from daylight beaming in from the front door. (Couldn’t that problem have been solved with light baffles of some kind?)

Alas, the meditative serigraph of a man’s head by British artist Frank Auerbach--which hangs near the entrance along with one of Wallace Berman’s hard-to-decipher “Verifax” collages--hardly invites the casual browser.

The most entertaining pieces in the show--sneakily amusing videotapes William Wegman made between 1970 and 1972-- are playing on a monitor near the door, as it happens. (Horrors! Some are in color rather than black and white.) But it takes awhile to tap into Wegman’s deadpan sensibility. Since Wegman typically just sits on a chair and talks into a mike, impatient viewers might think they are being subjected to a lecture. Actually, the guy is more like an unholy Mr. Rogers.

In one tape, Wegman spoofs TV “Learn to Draw” programs, rigorous attention to rules and realistic images, and the popular notion of art as involving personal suffering on the artist’s part. Illustrating “the basic forms--sphere, cylinder and cone” with pieces of fruit, Wegman segues into a demonstration of how to draw a “fish” with triangles and lozenge shapes that look suspiciously as though they were borrowed from Paul Klee.

He remarks that a traffic accident had a greater impact on his work than 12 years of art school did, and that after the accident it was “hard to return to the drawing board and draw an apple or a pear.” Invoking the names of such art greats as Cezanne and Renoir, he shows a routine illustration of a suburban house and proceeds to draw a stick-figure homeowner pushing a lawn mower in the rain. The tape ends with a cheerful burble of ‘50s music.

A couple of wistful tapes zero in on the lower part of Wegman’s face as he assumes the personae of two mentally impaired characters. One has a toothy smile and wide nostrils; the other has a tiny mouth that barely opens and slit-like, tensed nostrils. “Do you remember me from a long time ago?” the toothy person asks hopefully. “Do you like to see bad movies?” inquires Tiny Mouth, illogically. “That’s a funny thing to do,” says Toothy. “I know,” says Tiny Mouth, and his mouth freezes in a look of utter desperation.

Man Ray, the canine subject of most of Wegman’s photographs, makes several appearances in the tapes. In one vignette, Wegman attempts to make Man Ray smoke a cigarette. “Just inhale--kinda swallow the smoke,” he urges. “How do you know if you don’t try it?” The dog keeps turning his head away or brushing away the smoke with his paw but humors his master with doggy kisses on command.

One of the funniest tapes deliberately mixes up incidents from the real Man Ray’s life as a Surrealist artist with the dog’s life (“His closest friends were . . . Marcel Duchamp, Gary, Teddy,” a stuffed bear. Dumb visual jokes abound, including the substitution of high school yearbook photos for images of Man Ray’s Surrealist pals.

Maybe some chairs or cushions (weary shoppers always want to sit down, after all) might have encouraged visitors to linger awhile and watch the tapes, which haven’t been shown at the museum in recent years. But the show as a whole is such a disparate group of stuff, and so ponderously presented in the accompanying wall texts, that it doesn’t seem to serve any particular purpose.

The presentation of Winogrand’s images of women, from his portfolio “Women Are Beautiful,” is an example of the cautious, pedestrian curatorial approach that makes the show so dull even as it strives to be a go-go marketing tool.

Winogrand’s photos are largely of nubile young women who tend to be bursting out of ‘60s skimpy fashions or swimsuits. While some of these women are “flaunting it,” others seem simply to be minding their own business. In most of these images, men are looking on hungrily, or at least appraisingly. (The one feminist-themed image shows women marching in an anti-abortion rally.)

From a ‘90s vantage point, the subtext here seems to be not only admiration of the female form but also an unacknowledged view of women as little more than sex objects and curious specimens. (One photograph, “Cape Kennedy,” shows a group of men training their binoculars on an unseen takeoff or splashdown while an older woman turns her back to them to peer at some private vision. She is the weirdo, of course; everybody else knows what the main event is.) For all his ability to capture street and party life on film, Winogrand seems to be on dangerous ground here.

So what does the wall text say? It suggests that Winogrand’s “wide-angle views and eccentric compositions parallel the quirks of his female subjects and reveal the social and personal attitudes of the decade in which he was shooting.”

Well, what about Winogrand’s own “quirks”? And what about the relevance of this work to today’s smorgasbord of attitudes about appropriate public behavior between the sexes? What about those “personal attitudes” anyway? Have they really changed so much? The museum missed a big chance to redeem its crassness in organizing the show in the first place by asking some harder questions, the kind that suggest that part of the lure of art is the way it is endlessly open to reinterpretation, and involved with issues that are a vital part of our lives.

* The “Black and White Exhibition” organized by Newport Harbor Art Museum remains on view through July 18 at a Fashion Island storefront across the courtyard from Neiman Marcus, in Newport Beach. Hours are 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 6 p.m. Sundays. The Black and White Bash, a benefit for the museum, will be at Fashion Island on July 18 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $50. Information: (714) 759-1122.