O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : On Drawing: Get the Point?

Contemporary art exhibitions that attempt to turn a medium (painting, photography, ceramics and so forth) into a theme (usually with a geographic limitation, such as “Painting in Southern California”) are usually pretty dull.

That’s because the art that counts today is primarily about making an idea visible--with whatever materials the artist finds most appropriate. Whether artists use dime-store toys or toast or pollen or oil paint, their work succeeds or fails depending on how well they combine conceptual rigor with sensory appeal.

Being well-versed in a specific medium is still a fine and useful thing, but it is no longer the litmus test of a good artist. To put it another way, what’s interesting about art today is not whether it fits into some generic category but how it mixes up and confounds our very notion of categories.

So I was initially less than thrilled to hear that the next show at Cal State Fullerton’s Main Gallery was going to be “a drawing show.” But as soon as I stepped into the gallery, my interest revved up. This exhibition--which remains through May 16--has a particularly apt title: “The Elegant, Irreverent & Obsessive: Drawing in Southern California.”

The 75 artists selected by gallery director Mike McGee for his first show include prominent national figures, local heroes and at least one complete unknown (Cornelius O’Leary). The works encompass a huge range of activity: abstract and figurative; academic and lowbrow; big-scale and small; straightforward and intentionally absurd. Most important, there is a gratifying amount of strong and engaging work of a decidedly irreverent stripe.

Most of the cool stuff--by Mike Kelley, Manuel Ocampo, Russel Crotty, Erika Rothenberg, Paul McCarthy, Robert Williams, Jeffrey Vallance, Richard Turner, Gronk, Jose Lozono and others--is bunched together on two walls at the heart of the show. (Although the exhibition as a whole is sensitively installed, some of the small pieces are hung so high that they are hard to see clearly.)

The Kelley is a three-part drawing of a figure whose skull head smokes a cigarette and wears a top hat (“Black Soul”). This giant-sized figure is reduced to the sum of his organs: shriveled black lungs, intestines coiled to resemble a fiendish face, and private parts preserved under a bell jar, above a pile of steaming human waste.

This piece variously suggests a racially biased parody of scientific inquiry, blackface nightclub performers in evening dress, 19th-Century Mexican political caricaturist Jose Guadaloupe Posada’s skeleton figures, and the tarry residues of cigarettes and human consumption. Underlying all these allusions seems to be the impotence and absurdity of typical mainstream “examinations” of minority cultures.

In the untitled Ocampo drawing, the words Nueva Fascista appear alongside swastikas that pop up in peculiar places (the shape of branches on a tree; bent arms radiating from a baby face), implying that nascent fascism can be concealed in the most innocent guises.

Vallance’s suite of drawings of Richard Nixon, “Nixon Now More Than Ever,” was part of a 1991 installation called “Jeffrey Vallance Presents The Richard Nixon Museum,” which parodied the opening of the Nixon library in Yorba Linda by mingling historical facts with the artist’s own adolescent memories of the Nixon presidency.

In the poster-like drawings, Nixon’s face is twisted into a comic book array of amateur caricatures and titled with slogans ranging from the familiar (“Impeach Nixon”) to the personal (“Nixon Bugs Me”). As in most of Vallance’s work, the point is to show how large-scale historical and cultural events are inevitably filtered through a series of personal (or institutional) “fictions.”

Turner’s “Should a Beatnik Drink a Martini?” consists of two drawings made on facing pages from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” The face-off between two generations whose preferred leisure experiences and world views occupy vastly different realms scarcely could been summed up more succinctly.

On one page (“Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!”), there’s a cartoon in ‘50s-advertising style of a balding Everyman in a bow tie, holding a martini glass, who licks his lips in some Gray Flannel Suit’s notion of epicurean ecstasy. Drawn on the facing page (“Holy! Holy! Holy! . . . The bum’s as holy as the seraphim”), a hipster sports a Van Dyck beard, a turtleneck and a cigarette in a holder.

Williams’ “Vanity of the New” is a small drawing on tracing paper for a painting of the same name. A couple dressed in clothes of the ‘40s are shown stepping through a magic ring that transforms them into futuristic creatures in pumped-up footgear, a ballistic bra and a strap-on beverage-dispenser. As in several other works in the show, the full amusement-value of this piece depends on its two wryly sociological and pseudo-hip sub-titles (too long to repeat here).

The most intriguing part of the show’s title is that business about obsession. It doesn’t refer to the habits of artists who keep washing their hands or avoid stepping on cracks. Rather, “obsessive” work is about using the ease and simplicity of applying marks to a piece of paper to pursue an idea or a process to a physical or mental extreme.

Nancy Rubins (“Drawing”) covers two small, irregular pieces of paper with a coating of pencil strokes so thick and glossily impenetrable that the work appears to have been made from metal.

Channa Horwitz’s (“Subliminal Moire Blue”) makes a painstakingly detailed design of black ink markings on a sheet of blue paper that gives the matte surface the optical effect of a wavy, “watered silk” sheen.

Kevin Miller’s untitled piece involved blacking out a telephone book page except for the A’s and 1’s, which wink out at the viewer like so many tiny eyes in a dark forest. The pathos of the piece derives from its implication that the random patterns generated by arbitrary rules are actually meaningful in some way.

Crotty’s “Surf Drawing Blue” is a 5-foot-wide and nearly 7-foot-tall grid of tiny squares, each of which is filled with a different, doodle-like pen drawing of a surfer riding the waves, like so many cartoon cells or time-lapse photographs. Presented in eye-boggling array, the drawings suggest the virtually endless experiential differences between one wave and another that churn up a surfer’s enthusiasm.

A few works in the show are simply unique.

Angie Bray’s “From the Nature of Drawing: Still Life?” wittily plays off the concept of “still life” (a work of art depicting natural objects removed from nature) and the question of whether drawing is relevant in contemporary art, where installations and photo-text pieces have pride of place.

In Bray’s installation, drawing becomes a random “live” action “performed” by the leaves themselves. Graphite-covered ficus leaves attached to the ceiling with varying lengths of almost invisible wire tremble slightly in the air currents, leaving black traces against two walls.

Jacci Den Hartog’s untitled cast rubber relief sculpture of a refinery certainly stretches the definition of drawing. But the wiggly outlines of the grid of pipes look almost “hand-drawn.” The piece recalls earlier 20th-Century paeans to the streamlined beauty of industrial design but in a wryly off-kilter way. It’s as if the refinery’s end product--rubber--has produced its own self-portrait.

George Herms and his young son, Wilder, are represented by dual (dueling?) graphite drawings of a gun, “Gun and Son of a Gun.” The elder Herms has managed to make a gun look like a cross between a sleeping pooch and a flaccid penis. The younger Herms’ contribution has the pale, tentative look of a drawing made by a serious kid who just wants to pass the test and please daddy.

O’Leary, that “unknown” Santa Ana artist mentioned above, has made a promising--if still somewhat hazy--piece that seems to be an inquiry into received ideas about art-making. “Finding a Center Without the Traditional Pedestal and Wondering Why Frames Are So Important” consists of a drawing of a frame surrounding a torn hole, attached to the seat of an old chair.

And yes, Virginia (I’ve heard you muttering at my elbow), I can pick out a few works in the show that demonstrate mastery of media in the traditional sense--though they are overshadowed by their noisier neighbors.

One is Marc Pally’s “Little Clare Lake,” a textured painting of riotous small-scale vegetative life--spores, veins, webs--that is partially executed in graphite. Another is Cedric Adams’ “Young Wrestlers,” a keenly observed and delicately rendered illustration of two sweating, naked men pitting their brute strength against each other in a field of dry grasses.

There are some clunkers in this show, to be sure, but the sheer mass of inventive work is a most encouraging sign--of the healthy state of Southern California art (which we already knew) as well as the new direction of one of Orange County’s key university and college galleries.

“The Elegant, Irreverent & Obsessive: Drawing in Southern California” remains through May 16 at the Main Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd. Hours are noon to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 2-5 p.m. on Sunday. Free. (714) 773-3262.