O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Mystical Tour Not Quite Magical

There is something almost mystical about good abstract art. Like a riveting stage performance, it projects an aura of intense conviction and concentration. While some abstraction makes a purely sensory or intellectual appeal, other works contain a palpable spiritual content.

But the stakes are very high: Claim a spiritual basis for your art, and you will be held up to the standards of the world’s masters, whether they be the anonymous craftsmen of an African village or such Western modernist heroes as Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko or John McLaughlin.

At the Laguna Art Museum, where “Augustus Vincent Tack: Landscape of the Spirit” is the centerpiece through May 8, two smaller shows display other attempts to engage matters of the spirit. While Tack drew on Asian art forms for his abstracted landscapes of the 1920s and ‘30s, a later generation of artists was intrigued with the intersection of nature, Eastern religions and the gestural invention that was the legacy of Abstract Expressionism.

Unfortunately, most of the art in “Vertigo Journey: The Early Assemblage of Seymour Locks, 1949-1959” and “Toward Stillness” (both through May 1) falls far short of the mystical ideal.

Seymour Locks’ nail pieces from the ‘50s seem obsessive, but in a studiously organized way. Hundreds of nails driven into redwood and eucalyptus stumps form undulating patterns that variously resemble cell colonies, wind-blown stretches of beach fence or the shimmering scales of a small reptile.

The artist is quoted in an authoritative catalogue essay by Bruce Nixon, editor of Artweek magazine, as saying that these pieces are “not embroidered surfaces . . . not decoration.” In Locks’ view, the sculptures are landscapes and meditations--”places” containing “energy” that the nails tap into and bring to the surface.

It must have been immensely satisfying to make the repetitive hammering movements and to watch patterns of overlapping or carefully spaced nailheads take shape, sparked here and there with snarls of twisted wire, bits of hammered foil or tufts of scrap metal. But style is a fickle thing: Decades later, the pieces belie Locks’ claims.

Rather than tapping reserves of psychic power, in the manner of a West African fetish, Locks’ sculptures in this show have the earnestly inventive quality of eccentric crafts projects. (In fact, the earliest nail pieces represented the artist’s first, unschooled attempt at making sculpture after years of making Abstract Expressionist paintings.)

The patterns are too predictable, too small-scale and tidily decorative to evoke mysterious or powerful forces. If Locks is a shaman, as Nixon affectionately dubs him, his powers seem awfully limited. As the inheritor of a Dada sensibility, he seems lacking in inventiveness.

Acting director Susan M. Anderson, the show’s curator, perhaps best defines his work in her catalogue essay by comparing it with the abstract paintings of the Los Angeles-based Dynaton group of the 1940s and ‘50s, which turned landscape features into “diagrams of energy patterns--moving whorls of animated dots.”

In other assemblages from the period, Locks incorporated such industrial materials as a mop head, a fire sprinkler or car horns in studied ways that read as consciously “aesthetic” rather than subversively psychological.

In “Excavation,” from 1959, Locks offers something at once funky and expressive: an open box covered only with a layer of resin, through which the viewer can spy what appears to be a tiny black bar stool marooned in a grotto of shimmering silver walls--perhaps a vision of urban hell.

The up-and-coming Funk generation--including Wally Hedrick (one of Locks’ students), Wallace Berman and Jay de Feo--would push Locks’ experiments much further into the realm of the weird and the personal. The spiritual component in their art, however, would be more elusive and subversive, streaked with black humor and an anarchic view of contemporary life.

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A shared love for the rural life knitted together the four artist friends in “Toward Stillness.” Joachim Smith was in his early 30s when he started teaching at Cal State Fullerton in 1962, where Tom Holste, Bob Schmid and Doug Smith were his students a few years later.

It was the heyday of Pop Art in the United States, and “fetish finish” in Los Angeles, but--as Joachim Smith writes in a gracefully impassioned essay--his group “did not want things too slick or too easy, much less too L.A. We did not want our work too urban, street-smart and glib. Above (or below) all, we did not want to be ‘tough-minded’ so much as grounded.”

What they did want, he writes, was to examine such things as “the importance of gesture” and to experience the rhythm of “moving through the canvas space in small, densely layered increments.”

They drew inspiration from many sources, including the Orange County landscape; Eastern religions; nature worship in North and South American cultures; the directness of painter John McLaughlin, their Orange County neighbor; the “white writing” of Northwestern painter Mark Tobey, and the soft grids of painter Agnes Martin, who lived in New Mexico for many years.

Joachim Smith was by far the most successful of the four in setting up a resonance between marks on paper and things of the spirit. Each of the large paintings from the ‘60s features a densely intricate graphite web bordered by crisp vertical lines, on an all-over painted ground that grows paler near the edges of the canvas.

With titles like “Dhuma Marga (Path of Smoke),” these works convey a meditative quality without visual content, an alpha state that one might achieve by staring fixedly at a wisp of smoke. The focused yet obsessive energy of the hand that drew the webs transmits itself to the viewer as a persistent yet non-specific force, the visual equivalent of a continuous low hum.

But the cautious vertical framing lines in the paintings leach away this intensity, reminding the viewer that the paintings are really just arbitrary human designs. Smith, who is a serious student of Zen philosophy, probably had reasons for organizing his works in this manner. But it is possible to confuse zealous interpretation of an idea with the most effective way to convey it visually.

To these eyes, the paintings would be far more powerful without the fussy parentheses, as trails of energy knitting themselves into cosmic patterns.

Holste’s untitled airbrush paintings from the ‘60s envelop the viewer in what appear to be out-of-focus patterns of light and dark. Depending on the colors Holste employed, these giant swaths look rather like hugely magnified views of water or sky or the effect you get when you squeeze your eyes tightly.

The effect is dreamlike in a laid-back way. The paintings conjure neither the stillness of the void nor the roiling eventfulness of a drug trip. There’s no nirvana here, no feeling of discovery, just a warm bath in sense-surround.

Striated with a palette knife and sprinkled with mica chips, Doug Smith’s paintings are totally bound up in surface effects. Although the all-over glitter effect occasionally resembles the paintings of Mary Corse, it lacks the tantalizingly austere radiance of her canvases. Smith’s strategies seem constrained and dull, removed even from convincing evocations of landscape formations.

Schmid’s paintings unfortunately resemble painted gift wrap. Gluey skeins of color are used in a predictable way to represent the seasons (“Indian Summer,” “Fall’s Anticipation”). Each canvas sports a contrasting horizontal color bar in the approximate position of a letter slot in a door. It might have been intended to represent a moment of insight in the continuum of perception, but the overall effect is too glib to evoke a meditative tone.

The show also documents how the four artists’ styles have become more literal, sometimes tediously so, over the years. Bolton Colburn, the museum’s curator of collections, tactfully remarks in a wall statement that “these works may seem less than aesthetically viable, but for these artists, the art world itself had become less than viable.”

Schmid turned to amateurish compositions incorporating dime-store lizards, shells and other objects from the natural world, Holste concentrated on painting rocks, and Doug Smith’s recent work includes a dated-looking painting of eucalyptus leaves silhouetted against the sky.

The best of these recent works in the show are Joachim Smith’s elaborate pen-and-ink studies of falling birds, symbolic of the increasing displacement of the natural world. Passionately and minutely observed, the birds sometimes suffer the additional indignity of a light dusting of gold leaf. (Gold in a Tibetan painting is one thing; in a contemporary art context, however, the immediate reference is glitz, not glory.)

There may be many roads to enlightenment, but few that lead to favorable evaluation by the powers that be in the art world. The geometric paintings of McLaughlin from the 1950s and ‘60s--also based on Zen philosophy--are now considered seminal modernist works, while the art of the four men in this show has never been widely honored.

Joachim Smith, who celebrates the “bodily experience” of making art as primary in his essay, criticizes McLaughlin’s paintings (and the work of the “light and space” artists of the 1970s) as “generally mechanical, even remote,” with “concept and/or dramatic effect” superseding “the intimate personal touch.”

Particularly in the context of work inspired by a global philosophical outlook, this carping seems small-minded. Why is a physical reaction somehow more genuine than a mental reaction? Why is the artist’s visceral experience in making the work somehow more important than the viewer’s mental activity in viewing it?

Being able to trace the movements of the artist’s hand can be deeply satisfying (in fact, brush strokes are visible in the McLaughlin paintings I’ve seen), but surely a Zen follower could make a case for, say, a James Turrell light piece that depends largely on the vagaries of a natural phenomenon rather than fallible human desires.

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It should be noted that both shows are accompanied by publications that add insight and context--an emphasis on education and documentation that has become a hallmark of Laguna Art Museum shows during the past few years. One particularly imaginative format--Joachim Smith’s handwritten essay for “Toward Stillness,” reproduced on sheets of stapled gray paper--serves as proof that elegant and useful guides can also be cheap and casual.

* “Vertigo Journey: The Early Assemblage of Seymour Locks, 1949-1965” and “Toward Stillness: Joachim Smith, Tom Holste, Doug Smith and Bob Schmid” remain through May 1 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: $4 adults, $3 seniors and students, free for children under 12. (714) 494-8971.