O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : A Leanness of Purse and Creativity

Hoo-boy, we’re in deep . . . recession, all right. Exhibitions during the past year--my ninth as an art reviewer in Orange County--seemed to be fewer than ever. To maximize diminishing resources, museums and galleries left shows up for months rather than turning over every six or eight weeks.

Some problems can’t be laid at recession’s door, however. If big exhibitions frequently lacked substance and smaller ones seemed routine, the blame has to fall lack ambition can result from laziness or lack of a clear overview.

Thankfully, there was one positive trend: a flurry of innovative exhibitions of non-mainstream art at large and small institutions.

Shows ranged from a fresh view of cartoon-inspired imagery to work by local artists working outside the mainstream, from psychedelia to a potent re-examination of the ghettoized status of black contemporary artists in the United States (see below, “Best Exhibitions Organized in Orange County”).

At the Laguna Art Museum, celebrating its 75th year, the highlight was certainly “Kustom Kulture,” the massive and engaging car culture show that kept the galleries humming in summer and fall. But even that silver lining had a cloud: the still-unsolved theft of a mixed-media piece by George Goodrich from the South Coast Plaza Satellite venue.

Other anniversary offerings were less exciting: a collection sampler, curiously limited to painting and sculpture (“75 Works, 75 Years: Collecting the Art of California”), revolving displays of a mixed haul of recent donations, and an unfocused, if exhaustively researched, historical show (“Loners, Mavericks & Dreamers: Art in Los Angeles Before 1900”).

Yet, compared to its sister institutions, the Laguna Beach museum--which has a $1.4-million operating budget (just $100,000 more than Newport Harbor’s after its 1992 cutbacks)--seems to have weathered the recession unusually well. The only cost-cutting move museum officials cite was combining two support positions into one.

Better yet, the museum received its largest grant ever--$1 million from the Harry and Grace Steele Foundation--propelling the anniversary endowment campaign halfway to its ’93 goal. (At press time, the campaign raised more than $1.8 million: $517,242 in cash, the rest in pledges.)

Actually, the museum’s biggest donor may have been Providence--or Aeolus, the wind god. Who knows what might have been had the October fire blazing across Pacific Coast Highway not suddenly changed course?

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Paintings portraying the unspoiled era of Southern California landscape, before massive development carved it up, are the ironic specialty of the Irvine Museum, real-estate heiress Joan Irvine Smith’s tribute to the California Impressionists.

Her museum opened on Jan. 15, on the 12th floor of the McDonnell Douglas Building in Irvine, with works by the usual suspects, displayed with a hushed gravity that puts the Louvre to shame. Maybe someday the museum will see fit to place these provincial works in a historical or aesthetic context--perhaps with reference to tourism and agriculture, or to art produced elsewhere in the United States during the early 20th Century.

Although the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana finally won accreditation from the American Assn. of Museums in November, the institution continued to offer frustratingly insubstantial exhibitions. Whether large or small, elaborately or simply installed, most shows seemed designed to convey as little meaningful anthropological information to the lay viewer as possible. Except for the labels, the galleries sometimes resembled a price tag-free zone of the museum store.

Even though Armand Labbe, the museum’s director of research and collections, was working with an anthropologist on the long-term loan, “Select Works From the Paul and Ruth Tishman Collection of African Art,” the show offers a jumble of arcane facts in place of cultural context. “Colors of the Dawn / Invisible People: Arts of the Amazon” (through Jan. 17), a display of gorgeous and awesome objects organized by Native American art curator Paul Apodaca, fails to convey a clear picture of the people who made them.

The best show at the Bowers this year was probably “Art of the Himalayas: Treasures from Nepal and Tibet,” (May 22-July 31, circulated by the American Federation of Arts, New York). Although this 12-century survey contained too many similar works and a welter of detailed information that obscured the bigger picture, Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Pratapaditya Pal authoritatively led viewers through the various styles that traveled from the Hindu and Buddhist cultures of Nepal to Tibet.

Belt-tightening mode at the Bowers involved cutting staff salaries by 5%, shifting employees to a four-day, 36-hour work week, and reducing public hours (after Jan. 1, the museum will close an hour earlier, at 4 p.m.), in order to trim about $500,000 from the $3.6-million budget.

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Newport Harbor Art Museum announced that it cut its “down time” (periods the galleries were closed for reinstallation) in 1993 by half from 1992 and increased both its exhibition and programming schedules. But the results were less than inspiring.

After two years on the job at Newport Harbor Art Museum, chief curator Bruce Guenther finally unveiled a full-scale show and catalogue of his own (“The Fourth Newport Biennial: Southern California 1993”). They bore out earlier hints of his fondness for painterly work (the best aspect of the show), disinclination to deal with heavyweight conceptual issues and avoidance of work dealing with gay male themes, despite its prominence in contemporary art.

With a paucity of fresh ideas, Guenther served up overexposed ‘80s artists (David Salle, Jean-Michel Basquiat) as if they were today’s news and assembled a meandering collection exhibition of figurative work from the collection (“Beyond the Bay”).

A late, curiously uneven addition to the schedule (“The Seventh Wave,” an import from England) at least brings an array of approaches at the intersection of conceptualism and social relevance.

After two waves of 1992 cuts that diminished full-time staff by more than one-third and sent morale plummeting, the museum laid off education curator Ellen Breitman, an 11-year employee and one of the few remaining senior personnel.

Although she now works part time for the museum as a consultant, the move was surprising in view of the enormous stress the museum is putting on education in lieu of trying to compete with the cutting-edge energies of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Other seasoned staff members who left Newport Harbor this year, all citing personal reasons, included associate director Jane Piasecki and director of development Margie M. Shackelford. (Piasecki’s duties were assumed by former banker Edward E. Prohaska, director of finance and administration; Louise Cummings, formerly with South Coast Repertory, replaced Shackelford with a new title, director of advancement.)

The best news from Newport Harbor was its sensible-sounding plan to expand into the 14,000-square-foot building next door, to be vacated in late ‘94, when the Newport Beach Central Library moves to a new site.

More space in the present museum would be freed up for exhibitions of the permanent collection and temporary shows, while the library would house office space and education galleries. The project, which has no timetable yet, will require raising $3 million to $4 million from museum supporters--vastly less than the $30 million a new building would have cost.

It will be interesting to see whether the smaller sum will be forthcoming in the next year or two.

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Although objective yardsticks of art support in Orange County are hard to come by, a show at the Irvine Fine Arts Center last fall--”Irvine Collects: 10 Years After”--inadvertently suggested that a majority of art collectors (in Irvine, at least) are professionally connected with the art world.

And what about our artists? Some saw their works destroyed in the October fires, many have been pinched by gallery closings and cutbacks, and a few are beginning to feel overly pressured by repeated requests to donate works for auctions that benefit institutions whose worries don’t extend to paying next month’s rent.

But a host of smaller, nonprofit places (among them, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, BC Space, the Caged Chameleon, Gallery 57) remain committed to showing work by artists who are not yet--or may never be--on the wish lists of larger institutions.

For some artists, cafes and restaurants have become the “galleries” of last resort. One thing is for sure: In good times and bad, artists continue to make work and contrive to show it, even under less-than-ideal conditions.

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Best Exhibitions Organized in Orange County (in no particular order):

* “The Elegant, the Irreverent and the Obsessive: Drawing in Southern California” at the Cal State Fullerton Main Art Gallery (April 17-May 16). An encyclopedic survey of work by 75 artists, embracing the full spectrum of vital contemporary activity, from Russell Crotty to Marc Pally.

* “Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, Robert Williams and Others,” at the Laguna Art Museum (July 17-Nov. 7). A pioneering look at an adolescent pop-culture phenomenon that intersects with contemporary art.

* “Outside the Mainstream in Orange County,” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center (through Feb. 27). A bountiful show of work by people whose styles and subjects are shaped mainly by isolation, obsession or mental illness, with numerous wry, amusing and eccentric works.

* “The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism,” at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery (April 8-May 13). Dimmed only slightly by a didactic tone, this show of works by David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Carrie Mae Weems and others dared to say the unsayable: That even well-meaning art writing and curating by whites has rested on assumptions that unfairly ghettoize work by black artists.

* “The Contemporary Psychedelic Experience,” at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University (March 17-April 27). In a show as wild and woolly as this one, exquisitely timed to a dazed and confused segment of the ‘90s, the varying quality of the work was secondary to the energy of the participating artists.

Best Large-Scale Exhibition Organized Elsewhere:

* “Terry Allen: Youth in Asia,” from the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., at Newport Harbor Art Museum (July 10-Sept. 12). The one indisputable high point of the year at Newport Harbor: installations and other works with a haunting blend of deadpan humor, pain, numbness and small-town perspective on the Vietnam War.

Best Historical Survey:

* “Watkins to Weston: 101 Years of California Photography, 1849-1950,” at the Laguna Art Museum (Jan. 22-March 28, organized by the Santa Barbara Art Museum). With key images and a splendidly informative catalogue, this show traced a distinguished history that began with pioneering landscape imagery and segued to the divergent aesthetic outlooks of the Pictorialists and the f/64 group.

Best Public Art:

Nam June Paik’s “Video Arch,” unveiled at the June opening of the Anaheim Arena. It suits the sports-and-entertainment nature of the site, the broad potential audience and the intellectual demands of postmodern art--a triple feat matched by no other public work in Orange County.

Most Disappointing Cross-Cultural Exhibition:

* “The Integrative Art of Modern Thailand,” at the Bowers Museum (Jan. 16-March 15), circulated by the Lowie Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, showcased modern and contemporary works by Thai artists based on more than a century of Western influence on ancient Thai forms. Unlike the fresh hybrids found in other parts of the world--such as Western pop and traditional African music--the blandly derivative works in the show failed to capitalize on the merger of two vastly different cultures.

Biggest Chance Missed to Be the Show of the Year:

* “Realm of the Coin: Money in American Art, 1960-1990,” at the Fullerton Museum Center (April 10-May 23, organized by the Hofstra Museum, Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y.). Despite a boffo theme and work by such key artists as Andy Warhol and Chris Burden, the show had no overall point of view and drastically misstated or oversimplified key issues.

Most Disappointingly Cursory Exhibition:

* “Nam June Paik” at Newport Harbor Art Museum (May 14-June 27). To quote Times art critic Christopher Knight, the show was “merely a quick thumbnail sketch of a few of Paik’s recent works, apparently determined by availability at a nearby commercial gallery.” Knight added that the exhibition “seems to have been more definitively guided by the museum’s well-publicized fiscal woes than by an effort to coherently introduce the significant work of a crucial artist.”

Best Exhibition of Work by a Centenarian:

* “Beatrice Wood: Ceramics, Tiles, Drawings and Paintings” at Severin Wunderman Museum (June 20-Aug. 20). Ribald themes and ravishing glazes, plus old photographs and other memorabilia, by “The momma of Dada.”

Best Exhibition on a Shoestring:

* “An African Legacy” at Orange Coast College (Feb. 18-March 23), a generous exhibition of sculptures and textiles from several African regions, donated by various local collectors and installed with a degree of flair and care unusual at a small community college gallery--particularly one in which the curator (Irini Vallera-Rickerson) donates her time.

Best Use of a Building Undergoing Renovation:

* “Suitably Appointed” at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center (Sept. 21-Nov. 26). Six members of a loose confederacy of Los Angeles artists known as Project X took advantage of repairs to the center’s alarm system to dream up separate installations. They played with the viewer’s experience of walking through an Italian Renaissance house that also is a historical artifact, an exhibition site and a place of stored memories.

Most Tantalizing Glimpse of the Future:

* “Machine Culture: The Virtual Frontier,” a survey of interactive and virtual art at SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques), held at the Anaheim Convention Center in August.

Most Startling Lecturer:

* Artist Bob Flanagan speaking at Art Forum, the weekly lecture series at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana, in May. Discussing the various forms of his art--based on his experiences as a cystic fibrosis survivor and a sadomasochist--he intrigued and appalled his audience in equal measure.

Most Arrogant Lecturer:

* Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, pushing his most recent book, “Making the Monkeys Dance,” about his proficiency at lying to art dealers, rich donors and others. His self-aggrandizing, crass and sexist comments, delivered at a hotel in Newport Beach in January, were received with thunderous applause by the audience mustered by the Newport Harbor Art Museum, sponsors of the talk.

Biggest Tempest in a Teapot:

* Newport Beach Councilman John W. Hedges’ wild-eyed denunciation of “Self-Portrait,” an installation at Newport Harbor Art Museum by Los Angeles artists Lilla LoCurto and William Outcault, was a blast of intolerant, uninformed blather that should have been allowed to die in the wind. (The city’s annual grant to the museum doesn’t even support exhibitions.)

Instead, Newport Harbor director Michael Botwinick installed a direct line in the gallery to the Daily Pilot’s ill-advised public phone poll and supplied stationery for a public letter-writing campaign. It was a P.T. Barnum-style turn that made the museum look foolish for no apparent long-term gain.

Most Notorious Source for Discounted Fine Jewelry:

* Sometime Newport Harbor Art Museum patrons Daniel and Susie Hernandez--convicted this past fall of mail fraud, money laundering and income-tax evasion in connection with the theft of nearly $8 million from PGP Industries in Santa Fe Springs--continued, according to federal prosecutors, to try to sell extravagant pieces of jewelry and other personal effects, rather than surrender their ill-gotten gains as required by the terms of their plea agreement.

Still Waters Run Deep Award:

* To Susan Anderson, curator of exhibitions at the Laguna Art Museum, who has patiently organized a solid series of small shows outlining the history of art-making in Laguna Beach, marking the 75th anniversary of the museum. Let’s hope she will be encouraged and supported in coming years to organize a larger exhibition on a more original theme. And let’s offer the jolliest toast to celebrate her engagement to Bolton Colburn, the museum’s curator of collections!

* In Wednesday’s Calendar: Despite a few premieres, Orange County’s classical music and dance scene remained conservative.