O.C. Art Review : A ‘Cool’ Collection of Funk and Fetish

For the next 15 weeks, all the main-floor galleries at the Laguna Art Museum will be occupied by “Lit From Within: Amish Quilts of Lancaster County,” an exhibition drawn from the collection of Esprit, a clothing design firm that has given the standard corporate collection of blue-chip art a touchy-feely twist.

The show postdates by some 20 years the art world’s “discovery” of the Amish predilection for pleasingly austere pattern. During the past two decades, contemporary art has embraced such vernacular techniques as sewing, and art museums routinely have exhibited a wide variety of objects once considered “merely” craft or pop-culture castoffs. Attractive as they are, Amish quilts in an art context no longer are news from a stylistic or ethnographic point of view.

But if you venture downstairs to the Segerstrom Family Gallery, there’s a consolation prize: “Too Cool: Assemblage and Finish Fetish in Los Angeles” (through Feb. 19), a show juxtaposing two distinctive aesthetics that characterized forward-looking Southern California art of the 1960s.

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No other exhibition in memory has specifically isolated the two coexisting styles and offered them up for Jekyll-and-Hyde comparison. It’s too bad that this show, which curator Bolton Colburn drew entirely from the museum’s collection, cannot offer broad inclusiveness or precise documentation of an era (some individuals who came of age artistically in the ‘60s are represented by later work). But the show’s bigger problem is its lack of an accompanying essay discussing the parallel development of two such night-and-day styles.

Assemblage in California was born in the Bay Area in the ‘50s, yet some of its best-known practitioners also lived in Los Angeles at some point in their careers. Constructed from worn-out, often vaguely unpleasant objects and invested with private meanings and socially conscious viewpoints, these pack-rat works (often called Funk Art) are at a raffish remove from their more stylized European forebears.

Yet the California assemblage artists passionately allied themselves to Surrealism and Dada, represented in the postwar era by such European or European art-steeped artists as Marcel Duchamp (whose first retrospective was held at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1963) and Man Ray (an L.A. resident in the ‘40s).

Wallace Berman, who spent nearly all his adult life in Southern California, is represented in this show by editions of “Semina,” a sporadic, hand-printed project incorporating poetry by such leading lights of the Beat generation as Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg and illustrations with sexual, mystical and drug-related themes by Berman, Jess and the ultra-reclusive Cameron.

With the exception of a few years in Northern California in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, George Herms also lived in the southern part of the state. In an untitled piece from 1965, he recasts the floral relief decoration on a weathered headboard with a wizardly combination of deliciously mundane objects: an old webbed belt, metal brackets and trailing wisps of yellowed lace.

The other major figure in Southern California assemblage was the late Edward Kienholz, who lived in Los Angeles during the ‘50s, ‘60s and early ‘70s before decamping to Berlin and Hope, Ida. He is represented by a work from 1979, “Jerry Can Standard,” an oil can painted in Army drab that he and his wife, Nancy Reddin, turned into a jury-rigged TV--thereby suggesting an unsavory linkage of power and propaganda, postindustrial bread and media-age circuses. The show also includes work by junk sculptor Gordon Wagner and by Bruce Connor, the Bay Area’s inimitable purveyor of furtive secrets about sex and death.

In the mythology that has grown up around the ‘60s, the assemblage artists were hippie types attracted to offbeat poetry, trash bins and mystical experiences (with or without drug intervention), while the Finish Fetish contingent was a carousing, clean-cut bunch all fired up about the new acrylic paints and resins developed for customizing automobiles.

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While the assemblage artists delved into the tormented psyche, documented outrage at the social condition or simply reveled in homespun oddity, the Finish Fetish artists concentrated on the ways color and reflected light made things look good. Assemblage art aestheticized castoff everyday objects, while Finish Fetish work turned an aspect of popular culture--technological innovation--into an object of aesthetic contemplation.

The hot yellow and red curves of DeWain Valentine’s “Yellow Roller”--a giant child’s toy with a playfully erotic allure--the sleek black minimalism of John McCracken’s “Nine Planks V” and the mysterious golden orb that glimmers within Peter Alexander’s untitled polyester resin cube are three manifestations of the Southern California fascination with surfaces and light effects.

If the two camps had anything in common, it was a shared sense of obsessiveness. Both knew a peculiar kind of isolation, too, at a time when Southern California was largely indifferent to contemporary art. Both also used real-world materials--as did Pop and Primary Structure sculptors working in New York who turned away from the grip of Abstract Expressionism, albeit in distinctively different ways.

“Too Cool” also includes recent work that incorporates techniques or attitudes associated with assemblage or Finish Fetish. Predictably, the better pieces transform these genres into something different, while the weaker tread the same old paths minus the sense of discovery that informed the originals.

One example of assemblage gone conceptual in a stunningly witty way is Greg Colson’s “Uptown, Downtown, Canal Street” from 1988--a mailbox, a lunch box and a toolbox that form an abbreviated map of Manhattan and also cunningly stand in for perceptions of different parts of the city.

Similarly, an untitled three-way collaboration on a vintage handkerchief--by Bettye Saar, Jeffrey Vallance and Michael Uhlenkott--bridges two artistic generations with throwaway humor, and Doug Edge’s “Chatsworth Series I, Blue” remakes the oh-so-Southern-California side of Finish Fetish into a humorously literal evocation of the Pacific Ocean stuffed into a slumping, transparent envelope.

* “Too Cool: Assemblage and Finish Fetish in Los Angeles” continues through Feb. 19 and “Lit From Within: Amish Quilts of Lancaster County” through Feb. 26 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. $5 for adults; $4 for seniors and students; free for children under 12. (714) 494-6531.