O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : ‘Short Course’ at Mall Scores a Hole in One

OK, OK, I’m a duffer. So much so that I abandoned my serious pursuit of “A Short Course in Art” a miniature-golf game organized by the Laguna Art Museum--at Hole No. 3, abashed at my inability to whack a small ball anywhere near a small hole.

But I loved the idea of getting Southern California artists to design the course, set up at South Coast Plaza (through Feb. 28) as part of the mall’s 25th anniversary birthday celebration.

Eight artists (or artist-duos) and one architect were paid $1,500 each to develop new site-specific work in a context that cleverly combines contemporary art concerns with a game broadly appealing to mall visitors.

If an art museum has to ally itself with events honoring commercial entities--and the Laguna Beach museum has more than the usual number of reasons, in that the mall has provided free storefront space for 8 1/2 years--then this is a wonderfully creative and appropriate way to go.

The golf game idea is not new; it has been employed by such art institutions as the San Francisco Art Institute, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and Artists Space in New York.

The beauty of the project is that it serves simply as an organizational matrix to which artists can bring any number of fresh approaches. Giving pride of place to artists’ work has everything to do with what an art museum is all about.

In contrast, Newport Harbor Art Museum officials decided to display a few works from its collection in the glitzy windows of Chanel Boutique, where the art is demoted to the status of accessories.

On the Friday before Valentine’s Day, one of the store’s large room-like window displays with mirrored walls contained a mannequin in full Chanel regalia, a heart-shaped display of perfume bottles and white rosettes. On the rear wall, the labels almost unreadable, were two color etchings by Sonia Delaunay. Now that’s putting art in its place.

The motley assortment of non-figurative art playing walk-on roles in the World of Chanel includes work by Chuck Arnoldi, Frederick Eversley, Ed Moses, Peter Shire and John McCracken.

According to a museum press release, these abstract pieces are supposed to relate to an upcoming exhibition, “American Abstraction from the Addison Gallery of American Art,” opening Feb. 27.

But “abstraction” is such a huge category of art that isolating these diverse pieces doesn’t make any particular point, and none of the artists whose works are in the Chanel window are represented in the exhibit.

Newport Harbor’s other mall projects can be viewed--with some effort--on and in the mall’s “speed shuttle” buses, which make a continuous circuit from Crystal Court to South Coast Plaza.

The rear portions of both sides of the shuttles display small photomurals by Irvine artist Jerry Burchfield. The two I saw incorporate the word want, with images (praying hands and the soles of bare feet; a glassy-looking explosion seen against the sky) that suggest global issues (poverty, war, environmental fallout) in pat, formulaic terms.

The buses, each outfitted with a small TV, are also supposed to screen an “infomercial” about the museum and--for reasons that elude me--a short video by Laguna Beach artist Fred Stodder about blobs of clay that come to life in the museum’s sculpture garden.

After boarding one bus recently, however, I discovered that the bus driver only plays the tapes when requested, since he’s tired of listening to them.

Hunting through various nooks and crannies of the bus, the driver finally located the tape, which offers a fast-paced, professionally packaged introduction to an institution “conveniently located in Newport Center near the Four Seasons Hotel.” (Hmm, sounds like this museum may be only for folks who can afford the posh life).

Coaxed along with images of wide-eyed kids, well-dressed gallery-goers and a few pieces of art, viewers learn about the museum’s mad whirl of educational and social activities (“nonstop opportunities for learning about the art of today”) and discover that contemporary art provides “joy, sadness, humor, confusion, clarity, beauty, wonder, challenge and hope.”

Well, it’s one thing to describe the presumed benefits of art, but it’s quite another to demonstrate in person the sort of thing artists do, which is a prime attraction of “A Short Course.” The “holes” are variously wry, silly, insightful, deeply metaphorical and meditative.

To be sure, the Laguna Art Museum couldn’t have mounted this art exhibit masquerading as a golf game without the help of individual and corporate “hole sponsors.”

Nominal “greens fees”--$3 for adults, $1.50 for children--also go to support the exhibit. (Each of the cultural organizations involved in the 25th anniversary celebrations--including South Coast Repertory and the Orange County Performing Arts Center--received only $4,000 from South Coast Plaza to underwrite their projects.)

It just goes to show the value of genuine creativity, wedded to a healthy dose of hustle and elbow grease.

Video artists Ellen and Lynda Kahn--who work under the generic name TWIN ART--gently ridicule the insatiable appeal of TV with “See Yourself Hole.” It features a hokey plaid-and-plastic-trimmed TV that “broadcasts” the putter’s own legs (sideways, the better to see them as you swing).

Former golf pro John White, who teaches performance art at UC Irvine, has some fun with “unplayable lies,” a golf term denoting a ball that has landed in a location where it cannot be hit.

Golfers have to hit the ball up a steep ramp and then over a table-like field inscribed with names of prominent truth-benders, both benign and suspicious, from Jack Benny to Clarence Thomas.

The piece also includes a melodramatically splintered rendering of the first words of the Declaration of Independence--inappropriately heavy-handed for this context, however--and space for players to record their own lies. As of last week, it was filled with scribbles on the order of “What cigarettes?” and “Honey, I was asleep in my room at 10 p.m.”

The whimsy prize goes to Los Angeles artist Anthony Ausgang for “Cat and Mouse,” a garishly decorated living room booby-trapped with 10 stuffed cats (plus a lion and a tiger watching a cartoon cat on TV) ready to pounce on the unsuspecting mouse (the golf ball) running to its hole.

Ausgang writes in a posted statement that the piece also relates to “the myth of the seemingly harried executive” who turns an office or room into a putting range.

UCI sculpture professor John O’Brien’s “Perturbations in the Field” wins the intellectual-distinction prize for addressing, as he writes, “the confluence of golf and rapid (or not-so-rapid) transit and the persistence of memory.”

In his design, narrow chutes resembling elevated freeways pass among three empty library-card catalogues with their drawers pulled out.

In our electronic age--when databank knowledge remains invisible until it is accessed in lightning speed on a computer screen--the familiar bulk and slow, hands-on usage of card catalogues retains a nostalgic, humanistic appeal. Pulled open and stripped of their contents, these wooden containers seem victimized.

A perturbation is a disturbance (in astronomy, it refers to a planet’s irregular orbit, caused by the attraction of another heavenly body). In metaphorical terms, the piece seems to call into question the effects of the rapid transit of knowledge on our ability to remember the past.

Only one player at a time is supposed to enter Larissa Wilson’s spacious dome-shaped enclosure, made of white fabric.

The piece offers a refuge from the busy crowd scene at the carousel, although the doggedly cheerful music and hyperactive kids are still audible. (A “white noise” component of some kind might have solved the problem.)

Wilson’s untitled piece gets a bit too precious, with its three rusted pans of liquid, small stones and a metal bar arrayed--as if they were sacrificial offerings rather than obstacles--next to the hole. But the unusual environment offers a contemplative ambience that calls into question the hectic, competitive edge of recreational sports.

Jeffrey Miller’s “A Maze of Architectural Elements” interposes a white “forest of columns,” a narrow, wavy bridge and an austere, black square-windowed facade between putter and hole.

Miller, an architect with LPA in Irvine, explains in his statement that golfers with perfect alignment will prove the theorem: “The angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.”

Those of us who skipped Geometry 101 will have to take his word on that, but the piece also seems to represent the difficulty of balancing the rigors of contemporary architectural theory with the fact that buildings inevitably must work for the people who actually use them.

Two other holes--George Herms’ “Tunnel of Love” and Gilbert (Magu) Lugan’s “Magulandia”--serve mostly as reminders of the artists’ familiar styles rather than as particularly arresting, high-concept projects in their own right.

But the ninth hole--sequestered in the museum’s satellite gallery--is the most unexpectedly delightful of the lot, a paean to the goofball glories of a vanishing Middle America.

Aided by the high- and low-tech wizardry of her husband, Stephen DeWitt, sculptor Angie Bray devised a patch of green plastic grass lighted to look weirdly like the reddish lawns that appear in vintage color snapshots--or the garish nighttime glow at roadside miniature golf games.

Bray writes coyly that she hasn’t yet found “two plastic flamingos to go in two corners,” but she has dreamed up a wonderfully dopey sound system activated by errant balls hitting the sides of the playing field.

Shank it, and you get a few bars of “Happy Trails,” the perky novelty number, “Pico and Sepulveda,” or the artist’s oh-so-sorry voice cooing: “Oh, no , you missed it! Too bad.”

“A Short Course in Art” can be played through Feb. 28 at South Coast Plaza, at the Carousel Court, 3333 Bristol St., Costa Mesa. $3 for adults, $1.50 for children under 12. The speed shuttle bus photomurals by Jerry Burchfield and the videos--both projects of Newport Harbor Art Museum--also remain through Feb. 28. Buses run from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Sunday. Art from Newport Harbor at the Chanel Boutique remains through March 6. Viewers who fill out a “Play & Win” questionnaire about cultural groups’ exhibits at the mall are eligible for various prizes; the drawing will be held March 1.