ART REVIEW : Shortsighted ‘Visions’ : A major presentation at LACMA stumbles while tracking the influence on Modern art of obsessive, visionary pictures made by untutored laymen.

Among the most difficult kinds of exhibitions to pull off are those whose principalaim is to track a category of influence that has shaped the work of a variety of artists. The museum field is littered with their debris.

Two of the more notable fiascoes from just the past decade have been “Primitivism and 20th Century Art” (1984) and “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” (1990), both proffered by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. They lined up extensive groups of masterworks by some of the stellar artists of our century, each paired with the tribal or mass culture artifacts that, in part, had inspired them.

But no work of art is simply “about” the sources from which it might derive. Such exhibitions inevitably close off art’s range of feeling and insight, when their elucidation is in fact a show’s most honorable aim. Whatever else their failings, the academic format of these shows is stultifying: It’s the exhibition as classroom lecture, in which art merely illustrates research printed in the accompanying catalogue. Truly great shows operate the other way around.

Beginning Sunday, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art attempts the latest analysis of influence-peddling with “Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art,” its major presentation of the fall season. Alas, here we go again. “Parallel Visions” is a glorious mess.

Another extensive group of modern paintings (and a few sculptures) by the likes of Salvador Dali, Hans Bellmer, Alfonso Ossorio and Claes Oldenburg has been lined up, this time in tandem with art made by so-called “outsiders.” Therein will be found the show’s glorious part--specifically, a good number of individual works of merit, by certain of the modern artists and certain of the outsiders, too.

Outsiders are laymen. As opposed to the artist-”insiders” who work through the established, uniquely modern system of art museums, galleries and universities, they compulsively create, often in isolation (and often in mental hospitals), in order to record their obsessive visions. Their frequently inventive work is not often seen, so it’s likely to be the most engaging for visitors to the show.

Perhaps the most riveting is the work of Henry Darger, a Chicago hospital custodian and recluse who spent 60 years chronicling a fictional epic of brutal and chaotic warfare, waged by adults over angelic slave-children. Stylistically, his watercolors and collages recall old-fashioned illustrations in children’s books, but the bizarre and often perverse subject matter is unlike anything you’d encounter in the typical elementary reader.

Other familiar outsiders are included: the battered and battering Swiss psychotic Adolf Wolfli, whose elaborately patterned, autobiographical drawings and musical compositions eventually numbered more than 25,000 pages; the Rev. Howard Finster, self-proclaimed “Last Red Light of God,” who created an intricately decorated garden at his Georgia home, before a vision in the 1970s told him to paint sacred art; Martin Ramirez, a Mexican immigrant to California who, during the final 20 years of his confinement in the DeWitt State Mental Hospital, made exquisite pencil drawings and collages on large sheets of paper formed from scraps glued together with mashed potatoes.

As is well known, the drawings, carvings, paintings and environmental constructions of outsiders have been important sources for numerous artists, from Paul Klee early in the century and Jean Dubuffet after World War II to the Chicago Imagists (Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, etc.) and German Neo-Expressionists (Georg Baselitz and A.R. Penck) since the 1960s. These and other American and European artists are among the 40 chosen for the show by LACMA curators Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel, their work joined with that of 34 outsiders.

What’s a mess, though, is the mill through which all this art is being run. Not the least of its problems is its frankly reactionary motive.

A sequel, of sorts, to Tuchman’s 1987 show, “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985,” the present excursion into “Parallel Visions” offers up something of an expressive clone--albeit this time within the realm of figurative rather than abstract art. Not unlike its predecessor, the show is explicitly meant as a corrective to what the curators regard as a serious deficiency supposedly undermining contemporary culture.

“In reaction to the rise of Conceptualism and other strategy-oriented art movements more than two decades ago,” Tuchman declares in the catalogue, “authenticity and emotional sincerity have been increasingly appreciated in art.”

The work of outsiders is claimed to provide a model for the “authenticity and emotional sincerity” ostensibly missing from so much of our cultural life today. Meanwhile, the roster of modern masters who took outsider art to their bosoms does double duty: It provides historical evidence of outsider art’s significance, and the relationship constructs a platform on which contemporary artists might rebuild a less calculating aesthetic.

This characterization of 20th-Century art, recent and distant, is of course a gross distortion. It would be difficult, for instance, to imagine a more strategy-oriented modern artist than good old Salvador Dali, whose notoriety dates from 1929. Yet, three Surrealist pictures by Dali are prominently featured in “Parallel Visions,” because of similarities to hallucinatory images by mental patient August Natterer.

So is a big painting on broken crockery by the notoriously bellicose self-promoter Julian Schnabel, because of the artist’s avowed affection for the crockery-studded Watts Towers of layman Sam Rodia. Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s--whose foremost American practitioner Schnabel might well be--is as strategy-oriented as art movements come.

The reactionary motive for offering outsider art as a corrective to some sort of contemporary corruption of authentic culture is shallow and misinformed. Furthermore, the interpretation of outsider art as capable of actually functioning as such a remedy is startlingly retrograde. The more egregious problem of the two, this latter is the crux of the exhibition’s failure.

From Paul Klee on, numerous modern artists turned to outsider art--as they did to the art of children, of prehistoric societies and of tribal cultures around the globe--for one reason above all others: They were in search of avenues of visual expression that were not innately informed by the mature artistic conventions of modern Western societies.

Those “tainted” Western conventions, to borrow Dubuffet’s term, plainly would not do, since they had ushered in an era marked by the shocking brutalities of two world wars, several unprecedented holocausts and the final threat of nuclear annihilation. So, many artists looked for natural modes of expression, modes that were “outside” culture.

The niggling problem, though, is that no such thing exists. It is a fiction, an idealizing dream constructed on ingrained habits of Western dualism, which has long divided people into mind and body, us and them, the center and the periphery--insiders and outsiders.

Today, the idea that drawings and paintings by outsiders are distinctive because they have arisen from natural, unadulterated, unmediated impulses--as many Modern artists believed, and as this show still wants us to believe--cannot be taken seriously. Outsider art is not an embodiment of natural expression. Instead, “outsiders” simply work from a different set of cultural impulses and imperatives than “insiders” do.

For all its protestations to the contrary, “Parallel Visions” maintains an old-fashioned hierarchy. Outsider art is being valued principally because it attracted the attention of Modern artists, making Modernists the final arbiters of cultural worthiness. They’re on top, the outsiders are on a lower rung.

The subtitle of the show is an unwitting give-away to this hidden sentiment, because it objectifies only one side of the supposed equation: The parallel vision being drawn is between “Modern Artists and Outsider Art ,” not between “Modern Artists and Outsider Artists .”

Maybe that conservative appeal to Old Timey values can explain why so few women are included in this sprawling exhibition (a mere eight of the 74 artists). Or, perhaps another, more hopeful explanation can be advanced.

Women might be expected to be more acutely aware of the false underpinning of this show’s orthodox premise. After all, for quite some time they have themselves been hemmed in by the prevailing institutions of Western culture as nature-bound outsiders toiling on the periphery.

So, perhaps women are by now less likely to make art that might be fitted into a retrograde show such as this. For lest we forget, it was recalcitrant feminism that was instrumental in fostering “the rise of Conceptualism and other strategy-oriented art movements more than two decades ago,” a watershed that this exhibition finds so damnably abhorrent.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, Sunday through Jan. 3, 1993. Closed Mondays.