Art : Better Safe Than Risk Offending

For some viewers, “Lit from Within: Amish Quilts of Lancaster County,” at the Laguna Art Museum, may just be another exhibition, and a pleasing one at that. And, it is possible to view the stately, unoriginal approach of “The Essential Gesture,” a sculpture exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, as a useful lesson in art history.

And perhaps it really isn’t all that unusual that the essay accompanying “Treading on Hallowed Ground”--a recent show at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery that included art satirizing contemporary religious values--had a preface stating the exhibition was not about “the desecration of the sacred.”

But now that we’ve weathered Election Day, it can’t be denied that the winds of conservativism--which never stopped whistling over Orange County--are now blowing in gale force. Since the art world is part of the real world, it constantly is affected by political and social issues. These days, conservative empowerment has become most visible on the level of threats to National Endowment for the Arts funding, but its ramifications also quietly affect other aspects of programming.

In an era of reduced arts funding and increased attention by politicians and special interest groups to outspoken forms of art, institutions often find it prudent to keep a lower profile. Why rock the boat by presenting work that only a minority of viewers may enjoy or understand? And if you show art likely to raise hackles, why not seek to minimize potential complaints?

Ironically, the quilt show occupies the Laguna time slot formerly allotted to the long-awaited, first-ever retrospective of John McLaughlin’s abstract paintings. (Due to the replacement of original curator Charles Desmarais, the museum’s ousted director, that exhibition will not be shown in Laguna Beach until 1996.) Walls that were to have been hung with the severe, contemplative geometric abstractions of the Southern California master now are filled with austere designs in fabric, passed down by generations of Amish women.

Both bodies of work are visually and culturally interesting in their own right. But “Lit From Within” is a fascinating example of how presentation and timing turn a seemingly apolitical exhibition into one that carries conservative social messages.

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Back in the ‘70s, the impetus for showing the quilts in art galleries was the similarity between Color Field painting, then in its heyday, and Amish traditional patterns. Nowadays, there are few kinships between quilt design and the contemporary art scene.

Now, the selling point is that the quilts are products of a society that values (as one gallery label puts it) “hard work, discipline and craft.” Now, that’s a message even Jesse Helms would love.

To be sure, the quilts bear no images or messages, and the Amish themselves are historically apolitical. But the culture that created the quilts is about as removed as possible from the urban reality of welfare, sexual freedom, Godless youth and all those other vexing signs of unruliness that harden the conservative’s heart.

Photo blowups of smiling Amish girls, buggies in the snow and a large, modestly dressed family walking down a rain-splashed country road have the flavor of a chamber of commerce advertisement for jaded city dwellers: Come to where the innocence is.

Although the quilts in the show date from 1890 to 1940, their virtually unchanging appearance testifies to the tradition-bound society that made them--just the opposite of the contemporary art world, where innovation is paramount and every form of weirdness finds its champion. No wonder catalogue essayist Robert Hughes, who famously disdains most progressive art of the past decade, waxes so lyrically over the quilts as “emissaries from a vanished world.”

“The Essential Gesture”--an exhibition incorporating various versions of the incomplete human figure that artists have used in sculpture during the past 40 years or so--is a different type of response to the prevailing heads-down, don’t-rock-the-boat climate.

The show embodies an extraordinary timidity, an approach that is conservative because it risks absolutely nothing. Instead of giving viewers new ideas about body parts in art--by coming up with unusual juxtapositions in the gallery and theoretical notions in the essay--curator Bruce Guenther takes the safe, risk-free route with obvious groupings and standard explanations of art movements and artists’ styles.

Who is going to complain about such an approach? Surely not the museum’s loyal patrons, who are delighted (as some have told me) to see work by the likes of Giacometti, Rodin and Peter Shelton in Newport Beach. Surely not students, who get a ready-made art history lesson when they step in the gallery.

The complaints come mostly from art-world people who are well acquainted with the artists in the show and had hoped for a new twist on the subject (and also more up-to-the-minute work in non-traditional media).

It used to be that Newport Harbor’s self-curated shows were all about revealing the fruits of fresh scholarship (about Abstract Expressionism, say, or the trajectory of Chris Burden’s career). These shows were first and foremost conversations in the national art community. That’s what made them so exciting, so special. It was the museum education department’s job to explain the art to the general public.

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Yes, it is good to see work by major artists in Newport. But by limiting the curatorial function to bringing in blue chip art--a service local supporters easily can appreciate--Guenther is leaving out a vital part of an art museum’s service to scholarship. Reconfirming viewers’ good taste is a reactive move, not an intellectual challenge.

Certainly, the least worrisome phenomenon of creeping conservatism in our art museums and galleries is the “warning sticker” applied to potentially inflammatory shows. The Guggenheim Gallery continues to show bold work that makes no appeal to majority taste.

If a soothing remark in an essay keeps the closed-minded from wreaking havoc, bringing their children or flooding the phone lines with inflammatory messages, so be it. These are perilous times for the renegade, idiosyncratic world of art, and those of us who value its freedoms must pay attention to the strange ways it gets co-opted by the safe and sane.

* “Lit From Within: Amish Quilts of Lancaster County” continues through Feb. 26 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. (714) 494-8971. “The Essential Gesture” continues through Dec. 31 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. (714) 759-1122.