PAINTING PICTURES : Newport Harbor’s Fourth Biennial Draws on Style, Sense, Tastes of Its Chief Curator

Whether the focus is international, national or local, an atmosphere of contentious excitement swirls around art biennials, those every-other-year exhibitions of the “best” of contemporary work that most famously take place in New York (at the Whitney Museum of American Art) and Venice, Italy.

Why were these artists chosen instead of those artists? What do the works say about the social, political and emotional state of the world? Are they inventive? Stimulating? Have all the artists already received widespread recognition, or has the curator made some real “discoveries”?

At Newport Harbor Art Museum, the “Fourth Newport Biennial: Southern California 1993” also marks the long-awaited major-exhibition debut of chief curator Bruce Guenther, who has been on the job nearly two years without giving viewers more than brief glimpses of his taste.

This show (which has 51 works by 18 Southern California artists ranging in age from late 20s to late 50s) confirms Guenther’s longstanding appreciation of painterly craftsmanship while also providing a platform for outspoken social agendas central to much significant contemporary art.

While the selections are mostly unsurprising, they are generally informed with intelligence, style and presence. Guenther doesn’t risk much--he avoids the extremely flamboyant, “pathetic,” raw and sexually outre works some younger artists are doing, for example--yet by and large his selections make sense and reflect a fairly coherent personal taste.

Among the good, if predictable, choices are Kim Dingle, Adam Ross, Paul Tzanetopoulos, John Millei, Russell Crotty and Millie Wilson. On the debit side, the most disappointing pieces are by Rachel Lachowicz, a young artist whom Guenther gave a mini-exhibition last year, and Eric Magnuson (much better represented by his work in the concurrent “Suitably Appointed” show at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center).

The curious thing about the show, however, is the gulf between Guenther’s selections and his rather ponderous remarks about them in his catalogue essay.

He writes that the exhibition celebrates artists who deal with the relationship between art and life, rather than the relationship between art and art. He even bothers to point out that, “unlike color field or minimalist painting”--movements whose heydays are long since past--abstraction today is involved with “a variety of natural and vernacular references” rather than purely formal concerns.

But he fails to discuss the all-important cultural attitudes that govern these approaches. Instead, he keeps reverting to formal issues (such as two-dimensionality versus three-dimensionality) that have become largely irrelevant in postmodernist art.

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Even in the (more-or-less) abstract pieces, formal devices tend to exist within a conceptual framework involving a broadly dispassionate view of contemporary culture.

Adam Ross’s paintings are tours de force of a brand new kind of painterliness, suggestive of both cell tissue and circuitry. Although these works look as though they might have been generated by a computer, in fact Ross painstakingly builds up layers of different types of paint, sanding them down and adding more paint until--as he writes in a catalogue statement--”the image asserts an identity that is too compelling to destroy.”

Formed by an accumulation of accidents and determined as little as possible by the artist’s conscious will, the complexities of these paintings seem as radiantly inscrutable as a wonder of the natural world. They’re also as tantalizingly unreal as a hallucination and as coldly complex as high technology.

In contrast, Tzanetopoulos’ work is specifically related to the structures imposed by the human mind that distill real-world experience into sophisticated systems (such as computer imagery). His huge, multipanel painting, “Rotoplaid,” is an image of plaid fabric twisted into a rotor-like maelstrom of activity. The piece embodies a tug-of-war between disparate visual devices and states of being--a grid and a spiral, stasis and implied action, flatness and whirling depths, the implied three-dimensionality of a piece of weaving and the flatness of a painting.

Visually, “Rotoplaid” combines a mechanical look--the plaid design is represented by what seems to be zillions of identical flat strokes of paint--with the improbable illusion of a rigid pattern spinning out of control into a fuzzily defined blur. Conceptual wit and formal tension combine to make an irresistible piece.

Millei also does a number on traditional notions of abstraction, but in a different way. In both his paintings with golf-derived titles (“Par 7” and “Par 4, No. 2”), thick, vaguely egg-shaped swatches of paint drift and collide in a deadpan way. Without replicating the appearance of the game, the imagery vaguely suggests the mysteriously listless energy of a golf ball rolling over a field.

This is abstraction that deals with mundane aspects of the world without emotion; there is no aura of celebration or discovery here but rather a cool translation of an idea into the sometimes deliberately awkward physicality of paint.

David Lloyd’s abstract paintings usually incorporate various paint materials, strategies (stenciling, collage, staining, spraying) and separate strata of imagery. The combination of geometric restraint and willed accident with stylistic languages borrowed from popular and high-art realms of past decades gives these works a substantial intrigue.

Crotty became a cult favorite a few years ago with drawings of tiny surfers figures and waves repeated on vast grids and subject to “cycles” of lightness or darkness that were defined by the degree of ink loss in his pens. His obsessive behaviors remain visible and vital in newer works--grids with images of beach shacks, galaxies, smoke stacks and other objects, reduced to a minimal bundle of lines and a microscopic scale.

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Although there are no overtly gay-themed works in this show--despite their ubiquity and the number of strong artists working in this vein--several pieces deal in some way with the position of women in the world. They range far afield, in impact and quality.

Dingle’s paintings of violent little girls in white party dresses or underpants are among the best pieces in the show. The images juxtapose sweet stereotypes of girlishness with a vein of rage and violence women of all ages traditionally are taught to suppress.

The transgressive behaviors suggested by these paintings range from the level of disobeying parental orders not to dirty your nice clothes to fierce jealousies with racial and possibly sexual undertones. Painterly restraint, figurative clarity and the deeply ambiguous nature of the childhood world portrayed in these images gives them enormous power.

Wilson’s “Ponies (Light)” and “Ponies (Dark)”--separate rows of blond- and dark-haired ponytails inserted, as if they were horse’s tails, into wooden holders--embody a conflict between societal norms of feminine appearance, self-control and conformity, and the sexual lure and tease (at once demure and provocative) of bobbing body hair.

Anne Walsh’s images of lithe, semi-nude “huntresses” printed on flannel cloths, with dangling key chains sporting female beefcake photos are bids for the acceptance of lesbian imagery in an art context long devoted to demonstrations--overt or veiled--of he-man lust and macho artistic vigor. Pumped full of cheeky, cheesy provocation, the pieces are at once freakish cultural artifacts and meditations on sexual politics.

In contrast, Lachowicz’s attempts at feminist “statements”--particularly “Anita Hill,” a time-line that makes the jurist’s celebrated testimony against Supreme Court appointee Clarence Thomas appear as though it was the epochal moment in Western history--are brazen without in a literal and bullying way. Geared toward single, inflexible meanings, her work shuts down the process of thoughtful analysis.

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Another group of works seems to be mostly about the status of imagery in such far-flung contexts as reproductive processes, memory, measurement, language and social norms of mechanical and artistic skill.

Young’s pieced-together bath towel pieces are really one-liners, but they represent a fresh and amusing use of materials. With their terry cloth nap re-cut to create silhouetted texts (“tomwaits”) or images (a dinosaur under a night sky in “T-Rex”), these works refer to the lust for texture in vernacular art (think of paintings on velvet), and to pop culture merchandising techniques.

Martin Mull’s wispy, linear, oddly literary paintings are awash in nostalgia--for childhood treats, fears, friends, pets, projects, glimpses of the adult world (like the swirl of a woman’s skirt as she turns) and perhaps also for the comfortable certainties of life in the ‘50s. But the tentative, disconnected structure of these works--small, incomplete objects float far from each other, as if in the pale expanse of memory--give them an unsettling, contemporary feel.

Magnuson’s body-part pieces in lard, lint or silicone look like tired variations on the self-referencing body art of the ‘60s. In fact, Magnuson revives the form for a linguistic purpose. As he explains in his statement, “My main ambition has been to make visible the already-there.” But after you’ve seen Magnuson’s “Lard Ass,” sculpted as if it were marble, what epiphany about the literal sense of a crude metaphoric phrase--however small or tongue-in-cheek--can you claim?

Sabina Ott’s “sub-rosa” paintings are abstracted, hole-riddled images of roses built up with waxy encaustic on wood panels. Freighted with heavy-duty quotations (“It is a symbol both sublime and degraded”) in Ott’s catalogue statement, the pieces don’t seem equal to this burden of meaning. Roses are age-old symbols of beauty, decayed flowers in general are memento mori symbols of the fragility of human life, but Ott does not convincingly supply fresh interpretations or contexts.

Durant’s constellation of pieces--”Carpenter’s Ten Commandments,” “A 3-D Look at Carpentry,” “Mindless Work” and “Beers, Bongs, Leaf, House, Shrooms”--is about the strange place where self-image, professional competence, ingrained habit and cultural standards collide.

Engagingly artless and deliberately amateurish in their disparate parts, the pieces incorporate Polaroid photographs of a carpenter working in awkward positions, inept plywood jigsaw cutouts (one of which contains a wildly anarchistic handwritten “code of ethics”) and a printed text of prickly reminiscences. The work-a-day aspect of carpentry is deliberately conflated with the “creative” aspect of art, suggesting how much of one is contained in the other.

Durant suggests the difficulty of rendering judgments about a life, a personality, or even a body of work. Loaded with provocative psychological clues, his piece remains steadfastly open-ended, a litmus test for the viewer’s own preconceptions.

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What

“Fourth Newport Biennial: Southern California 1993.”

When

10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday; through Jan. 30.

Where

Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach.

Whereabouts

Take Jamboree Road to Santa Barbara Drive, just north of the Coast Highway, and turn left on San Clemente Drive.

Wherewithal

General admission $4, students and seniors $2, free on Tuesdays.

Where to call

(714) 759-1122.