ART / CATHY CURTIS : A Fun East-West Show With No Sacred Cows

Ever intrepid, this column ventures far and wide to bring you the best in art, so long as it has something to do with Orange County. Today we get as far as Long Beach, to a new alternative space that grandly calls itself the South Bay Contemporary Museum of Art II (No. 1 is in Torrance).

The Orange County connection is Richard Turner, a Chapman University art professor who has curated “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!” (through Saturday).

This is a show about intersections of Eastern and Western cultures in which points are usually made through humorous indirection. Although the symbolism borrows from both cultures, the prevailing point of view is unapologetically Western.

Most of the artists express a blithe disregard for the original context of the imagery--an entirely appropriate attitude for an age when bits and pieces of the world’s diverse cultural influences are whipped together in the media blender.

The result is a set of wryly self-conscious cultural appropriations--some more accomplished than others, to be sure--that are oceans more fun than the righteous platitudes of multiculturalism. (Turner says the show’s title--an admonition to disregard even the highest outside authority in favor of a personal feeling of rightness--is a Zen koan .)

Laura Whipple is the unacknowledged star of this show. Her “Homage to Tung Ch’i Ch’ang”--the austere 17th-Century Chinese landscape master--is a tiny, yellowed hand scroll in which rock formations, distant mountains, a river and a scholar’s hut are all made out of artfully placed wisps of dried grasses and rice kernels.

Imitation was the highest form of flattery in ancient Chinese art, yet Tung himself wrote that “those who study the old masters and do not introduce some changes are as if closed in by a fence.” Whipple’s painstaking replication of a landscape made out of the staff of life doubles back on Tung’s daringly conceptual view of nature as grist for the dry brilliance of his brush strokes.

Whipple’s other piece is an untitled assemblage. A reproduction of a Winslow Homer painting (a fisherman in a rowboat with his catch) is juxtaposed with a pair of chopsticks and two chopstick rests shaped like leaping fish. The parallels between image and objects are intriguing: The angled chopsticks become surrogates for the boat’s oars, while the vivaciously poised mass-produced ceramic fish are improbably lifelike surrogates for the gleaming dead fish in the painting.

Religious devotion plays a central role in several works on view, but in unorthodox ways. Some images suggest the wisdom of combining outlooks of Eastern and Western religions; others re-imagine Eastern deities or rites in Western guises.

With a bow to New-Age globalism, Sherie Scheer floats a scene of the Last Supper--with Buddha as a surprise guest--above a photograph of a scrubby Western hillside (“Coral Canyon Last Supper”). Tony Cockrell shows the Buddha thoughtfully contemplating the bony torso of Jesus on the cross in a perspectively altered triptych that plays with “god-sized” scale and the all-seeing viewer’s multiple vantage points (“Buddha Meets Jesus Giving . . . “).

Anthony Ausgang altered an elaborate thrift-store painting of worshiping Hindu fisherman in order to have some fun with the phrase cargo cult (the belief among some South Sea Islanders that that their ancestors’ spirits will bring them modern consumer goods to free them from white dominance).

Each worshiper now bears a blue “car-go” engine block logo on his back, a purple go-cart is parked outside a nearby hut, and an engine part lies reverently at the feet of a Buddha surrounded by flames that now suggest cool “car culture” hood ornaments.

William Anthony’s eager little stick figures dance, make music, throw posies and offer food to a herd of smiling, chatting cows in “Veneration of the Cows,” a beguilingly childlike drawing of Hindu devotion.

Contrasting Buddha with the proverbially naughty little boy god, Krishna, Pamela Wilson envisions the serene god holding the crayon with which he has drawn a fey image of a mustachioed Krishna in sunglasses (“Buddha Never Had Any Fun”).

Pierre Picot’s untitled paintings of the Buddha, shown with various numbers of teacups, may be a spoof of the intricate numerology of Buddhism. Turner’s own assemblage, “Dish Wallah,” humorously suggests that the elephant god, Ganesha--whose resplendently enthroned image appears on a large Indian hanging--may be connected with the heavenly blessing of a satellite dish, humbly cobbled together with wood and a furled luffa cloth.

*

Lewis deSoto turns the concept of the sacredness of living things into a literal image by painting a gold lily pad on a photograph of the sky and a gold arch on a photo of a honeycomb. In an untitled mixed-media piece, Gail Tomura uses (Indian?) decorated paper, sequin “rubies” and Chinese brass brackets to section off a little corner of heaven in a gold-washed sky.

Qathryn Brehm’s enigmatic paintings with flat patches of color apparently were taken from Chinese cartoon panels. Severed from their contexts, the expressionless, often uniformed figures and their curiously agitated or empty environments might as well have dropped from the moon.

The deadpan effect of these images is happily remote from the didacticism of “Monasteries / Money Stories,” in which Arnie Charnick contrasts a serene Eastern vision of worshipful unity with a cacophonous scene of Western greed. The beauty of the better works in the show is their refusal to tout any one world view, preferring the unexpected thrills of cultural corruption.

* “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!” through Saturday at the South Bay Contemporary Museum of Arts, 1969 Obispo Ave., Long Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Free. (310) 985-0242. *

OVERDONE: When exhibitions are organized around narrowly conceived programmatic themes, the results tend to resemble “Baking Cookies,” an embarrassingly mediocre feminist art show at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana (through Feb. 4).

Dated and dull, this work hardly serves as much of an advertisement for the 7-month-old Orange County chapter of the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art, of which all 26 artists are members.

The biggest problems with the works are their unoriginal use of tired old imagery and formats (masks, underwear, fragmentary torsos, dancing figures, shrines) and their lack of specificity (like most other things, “oppression” is boring as a generality.)

Just about the only work in the show of any freshness is Joyce Presseau’s woodcut, “Spinsters Abroad (Lady Victorian Explorers),” a compendium of genteelly venturesome tourist gambits, executed in a beguilingly cluttered, quasi-Victorian style.

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of painter Elaine Kennedy, who died Jan. 2 at 54. Unfortunately, her two small monotypes pale beside the free-flowing landscape paintings--vibrantly “feminist” in a broader sense--for which she is best remembered.

* “Baking Cookies,” through Feb. 4 at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd., Space 111, Santa Ana. Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Free. (714) 549-4989.