ART REVIEW : Complexity From Wiley the Punster

William T. Wiley is a rolling stone that gathers moss. The veteran Bay Area artist has been at it since the ‘60s, makin’ art ‘n’ whangin’ his gee-tar. Now he’s represented at the Laguna Art Museum in a traveling exhibition called “William T. Wiley: Struck! Sure? Sound?/Unsound.” Don’t ask me what that means.

If you are the sort who immediately winces and reaches for the dial at the sound of a country song you probably won’t like this show of some 30 drawings, paintings and assemblage. If you are the sort who likes puns, good drawing and cracker-barrel philosophy delivered by a smart guy who claims to be a dunce, you probably will.

I like some of those things so Wiley’s work always exercises a certain magnetism. Once I get to it, howsoever, I feel trapped by an urge to lapse into cornball argot like a fly trying to talk his way out of a web of complexity.

This guy’s got more layers than a flayed golf ball and most of them contradict one another. Out of one eye you see an Anti-Establishment humanist and humorist who was a pioneer of down-and-gritty Bay Area Funk and a clear admirer of the Underground Comix of the hippie era. Out of the other you see a sophisticated art-professor-type whose work has progressively absorbed aspects of every mainstream art movement from Process to Conceptualism. Since he’s always used words in his work, Wiley might be seen as a forerunner of artistic interest in semiotics.

Trying to rectify these wildly opposing aspects of Wiley into a clear stereopticon view is a tough trick. Maybe that’s why the work often literally looks blurry.

At first a big drawing called “Familys Trip” appears as the aforementioned arachnid architecture, a tangle of webby lines where one fleetingly makes out a cartoon moon, a dad and daughter in a cell afraid to admit some friendly simians, amid puns like “Spar for the Coarse.”

His assemblage has the same taste for spindly linear structure. (He’s a kind of skinny fellow himself.) The best piece is a large installation, “What’s Not Dancing in Time?” It’s an intriguing rickety amalgam of branches, twine, lead weights, cardboard cups and tin containers. Somewhere in the mix is the motto, “Pretty lean times,” signaling that Wiley is hip to current artistic involvement with matters social and political.

The piece jells into something that could be saying, “Yeah, things are rough right now but you can get an old branch and make it into a fishing pole or rig it up into an instrument and play a tune.”

In a way Wiley just tosses out an overabundance of coded information that the viewer is expected to fashion into his own Gestalt. That means that whether or not a piece comes off depends on who’s looking at it. A group of functional guitars and cigar-box banjos are whittled and painted with folk motifs including Day of the Dead skulls wearing derbies. They’re almost simplistic for Wiley, but they do evoke that good old feeling of being free, on the road and energized by an edge of danger.

His paintings, like the ecological “Acceptablevels,” have their heart in the right place, but their garbled, mushy surfaces show this is not Wiley’s best medium.

At bottom this art can be seen as part of a longstanding Bay Area aesthetic that holds that the best way to prove artistic integrity and authenticity is to fail in worldly terms. Sometimes it leads to art as original as that of Bruce Conner or Wally Hedrick. Other times it just leads to cranky eccentricity.

Maybe the essential contradiction in Wiley’s work is the same one that’s dogged Bay Area art for decades. There’s a funny tension between the geography’s liberalism and its love of tradition. When those qualities find the right mix you get something as brilliant as Richard Diebenkorn’s early harmonic resolution of abstraction and the figure, or as heavily perfumed and magical as collages by Jess.

When the conservative side holds too great sway you get the defensively jokey art of a Robert Arneson or Mel Ramos. You feel this in Wiley’s work in a line scrawled on the base of one assemblage: “So your sayin’ this ain’t creative n’ modern n’ stuff. Why I oughta . . .”

Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach, (714) 494-8971, through Oct. 11, closed Mondays.