Putting Zingg in Exhibits : Art: Things have changed at Fullerton’s Muckenthaler center since a new administrator has been aboard.

Can this be the same place that just two years ago banned a photograph showing John Lennon’s nude behind?

Four months ago, the Muckenthaler Cultural Center displayed a graphic illustration of a woman, legs spread wide, giving birth with the aid of surgical forceps.

This month it’s exhibiting the sort of intellectually challenging, up-to-the-minute work one might expect from Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, not from a city-run community gallery known for hosting watercolor and children’s shows.

And on next year’s schedule, there’s the DNA Funart Vactorie performance and visual art quartet, said to be a highly iconoclastic group from Europe that thumbs its nose at artistic and social convention.

What changed? The man in the front office.

After the Lennon photo controversy drew national media attention (coming as it did in the middle of the national debate over federal arts funding and censorship), then-curator Norman Lloyd resigned. The center trustees who banned the photo insisted their action had nothing to do with censorship (the photo didn’t fit in with the theme of the show, they said, and the center had shown nudes before, as well as the occasional contemporary work). Still, Lloyd felt his authority had been usurped.

To avoid similar problems, the board did away with the post of curator and hired Robert Zingg as “exhibitions administrator,” to pick exhibit themes and guest curators to select the art.

Last week, almost two years to the day since he was hired, Zingg recalled that he “didn’t come with a preconceived idea about the Muckenthaler. I guess I just didn’t see any limitations when I got here, and there really haven’t been any.”

He said that not a single board or community member protested the surgical birth image in “World News,” a group show about the Gulf War, or has groused about “Personal Inventory,” the mind-stretching contemporary show now on view.

Trustees have been “nothing but supportive of me,” Zingg said, adding that they have doubled his exhibitions budget to roughly $11,000 per show (the center’s total budget is $291,800.)

However, he added, trustees may have learned a lesson from the past.

They now know, Zingg said, “that they deal with the director, and the director deals with the rest of the staff, and that there is a protocol, and they follow it.”

“Robert is sort of inaugurating a new series of interesting contemporary art,” says Marilu Knode, a former associate curator at the Newport Harbor Art Museum whom Zingg brought in to co-curate “Personal Inventory” with Nick Vaughn.

“It’s really amazing to have another place in Orange County where contemporary, living artists can show their work,” Knode added. “They’re really desperate for venues that don’t have this plodding structural mandate in place.”

Zingg knows he must maintain a balance. Contemporary art has been the focus of his education and prior work but, he points out, the center still hosts the annual National Watercolor Society’s show ever other year and the Florence Arnold Young Artist Festival shows.

“The place is very eclectic, and at least for now, that’s how we want to keep it,” Zingg said. “Our audiences vary--there’s the local community, the support groups--and we’re not a collecting institution, so that frees us up from having to define a focus. We have that freedom, and I like it.”

The 31-year-old Huntington Beach resident, who wears one earring, casual clothes and sandals to work, majored in studio art at Humboldt State in Northern California. Then, after owning a frame business, he earned a master’s degree in exhibition design at Cal State Fullerton, where he learned to install shows from the ground up--building gallery walls, writing labels, supervising staff. It’s how he spends a lot of his time today.

“I like things very clean and orderly, which may be one reason I ended up doing the kind of gallery work I do,” he said. “It’s very minimal. A good exhibition designer’s work doesn’t really show. What shows is the artwork.”

Zingg had been working as “preparator” at the Newport Harbor Art Museum when he applied to the Muckenthaler, knowing full well the reason Lloyd had given for his resignation.

“I have to say I was concerned,” he recalls, “but (during the interview process), it became clear cut what my duties would be and I knew that I wasn’t going to be interfered with.”

Though he has had the chance to curate at Cal State Fullerton (he put together a show about California sculptor Robert Arneson), he said he doesn’t have a strong desire to do so now, particularly as a sole occupation.

“I always liked the idea of doing more than one job,” he said, adding frankly, “I don’t really like the amount of research work it takes to curate.”

He would like the center to display more work by Southern California artists, however, and to increase its educational programming, and to address one of its “biggest problems”: visibility.

“We’re not next to the off-ramp or next door to Disneyland or the library or a shopping center. People don’t know that we’re here and what we’re doing.”

About the only ways he said he can think of to boost attendance (currently about 40,000 annually) are to offer good exhibits, and--though it would cost a good chunk of money and probably would mean a headache getting permission from the city--to turn the eight-acre park-like grounds around the Muckenthaler into a sculpture garden.

“I think it’d be beautiful,” he said with a smile, “and another reason to come here.”

“Personal Inventory,” art by Ellen T. Birrell and Nick Vaughn, remains on view through Oct. 28 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 W. Malvern Ave., Fullerton. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; noon to 5 p.m., Sundays. (714) 738-6595.