The Year in Review: The county’s visual arts scene accelerated its slide into safetly and dullness : 1994: The Year in Review : The Upstarts Outnumbered by the Downturns

Looking for the silver lining department? Sorry, better skip this space. With a few brave exceptions, the Orange County art scene accelerated its slide into safety, dullness and sparser offerings in 1994.

For more than a decade--up until this past spring--strong artistic leadership from either the Newport Harbor Art Museum or the Laguna Art Museum could be counted on to invigorate the scene. Not only were the quality of the shows and the creative direction of top staff exciting, but they also served as benchmarks for smaller art institutions battling conservative boards or city managements.

The firing of Laguna Art Museum director Charles Desmarais in March--four years and four months after groundbreaking director Kevin Consey left Newport Harbor--suddenly changed that picture. Now the unwritten rules at both museums seem to be: Don’t make waves, worry more about the bottom line than fostering creativity (as if the two were mutually exclusive), and try to make the public happy by anticipating what you think it wants.

In the time Desmarais spent at the Laguna Beach museum, he turned a provincial institution into one increasingly respected by artists, curators, critics and others looking for sophisticated fare. He accomplished this primarily by curating such fresh and stimulating exhibitions as “Proof” and “Why I Got Into TV and Other Stories: The Art of Ilene Segalove,” and by importing traveling shows highlighting major contemporary trends or offering a historical context for art of other periods.

Some of these traveling shows--such as “Commodity Image: Photography, Sculpture, Installation” and “Augustus Vincent Tack: Landscape of the Spirit”--enlivened the museum’s schedule months after he left. But his departure did postpone the one show that was to have been the museum’s--and perhaps Orange County’s--leading art experience of the year: a pioneering retrospective of abstract painter John McLaughlin, now scheduled for 1996.

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Meanwhile, Laguna’s trustees seem to have been curiously blind to the importance of art-inspired leadership at this juncture of the museum’s history. One trustee even has remarked that the next director should be a “businessman,” as if fiscal prudence--in which Desmarais was not deficient--was the primary marker of a successful educational and cultural institution. Considering how many intriguing shows are circulated nationally by exhibition services and museums, it is doubtful that Desmarais would have scheduled “Lit From Within,” a feel-good space filler that has nothing new to say about a type of artifact--Amish quilts--widely shown for two decades.

The Laguna board, which has remained secretive about its reasons for dismissing Desmarais, expects to appoint a successor by the end of January. Meanwhile, the former director has moved on to other things: teaching art history at Cal State Fullerton and serving as consulting director of the Robert Gumbiner Foundation for the Arts in Long Beach.

At Newport Harbor, the year was quiet--too much so, alas. On the exhibition front, the most promising offering also was the most disappointing. “The Essential Gesture,” chief curator Bruce Guenther’s second full-scale show in the three years he has been at the museum (after last year’s “Fourth Newport Biennial: Southern California”), was chockablock with representative sculptures by widely known artists but entirely lacked a fresh perspective.

Strangely, the most rewarding show at Newport Harbor in 1994 may have been a small group of large paintings by lyrical Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell, sparked by the need to offer something “French” (the American artist lived in France for many years) to complement the theme of a museum fund-raiser.

Administratively speaking, other than a rearrangement of staff duties and hours--and the departure of two staff members for other jobs barely a year after they arrived--there was little news. Ed Prohaska, assistant director of finance and chief financial officer, moved on to the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena; Louise Cummings, director of advancement, joined AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County. (Prohaska has been replaced with Kimberly Ann Chafin, a CPA; the museum is looking for a development director.)

Announced last year, Newport Harbor’s plan of reconfiguring and moving into the vacated library building next door, to expand usable floor space in the existing museum, remains just that: a plan. There is no target date for the project, estimated to cost $6 million to $7 million, including a $3-million endowment. About $1 million has been raised, all from museum board members.

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The big show at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana this year was “Ancient Nubia: Egypt’s Rival in Africa,” imported from the University of Pennsylvania. As a scholarly investigation into a little-known ancient culture, it offered a much-needed boost to the Bowers’ credibility as an educational institution.

Unfortunately, the show was quite dry, giving little sense of the ancient Nubians as people. But at least it somewhat redeemed the unfortunate decision to mount “Seven Decades: Modern Mexican Art from the Bernard Lewin Collection,” an exhibition driven more by an art dealer’s interest in exhibiting the contents of his shop than by a museum’s concerted attempt to analyze a field of modern art little known outside its homeland.

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Even the visually appealing “Buddhist Images in Gilt Metal from the Chang Foundation” was marred by the Bowers’ habit of showcasing objects as ineffable treasures, rather than as items made and valued in different ways by their own cultures.

Perhaps the best move the Bowers made all year was to open the Kidseum earlier this month. The new adjunct, in a formerly vacant nearby bank building on Main Street, offers interactive exhibitions for grade schoolchildren.

Continuing last year’s money-saving trend, exhibitions at the museums have been edging past the two-month mark, and a few seemed to go on forever. (“Lit From Within,” the Amish quilt show at the Laguna, has settled in for 17 weeks; “Contemporary Crafts From the Saxe Collection” was up for 16 weeks at Newport Harbor; “Buddhist Images in Gilt Metal” lingered 15 weeks at the Bowers.)

Longer shows mean fewer opportunities for viewers to be exposed to different points of view, curatorial and artistic alike. That space for the permanent collection is at a premium in all three museums limits viewers’ options all the more.

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Another troubling point: This year, most of the best exhibitions were curated elsewhere. While intriguing projects from other institutions always are welcome (after all, few of us have the time or money to jet around the country in search of good shows), it is equally important for a museum staff to put its intelligence and creativity to work developing projects of its own.

Is this problem due entirely to recessionary budget juggling? If so, how does one account for the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, directed by Richard Turner? If there were an award this year for “the little institution that could,” it would go to the Guggenheim for the consistent level of intelligence, innovation and thematic daring demonstrated by its exhibitions.

Other continuing bright spots include:

* The UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery, an oasis of social responsibility, which held the best faculty art show in memory this year and opened its walls to a moving group of AIDS-related works by largely anonymous community artists earlier this month.

* The energy and taste--especially in painting--of the Griffin Gallery in Costa Mesa, new on the scene this year.

* The Orange Coast College Art Gallery, cash-poor but ingenuity-rich, where visually effective installations are the rule.

* And the Fullerton Museum Center, home of shows with a warm (but never smarmy) community appeal.

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One more thought: As artists have discovered in Los Angeles and elsewhere, in bad times you have to come up with untraditional solutions for getting your work out. So far, little of this activity has come to Orange County.

Showing in coffeehouses or restaurants seems to suit some people, but it isn’t the only answer. Maybe artists will start holding open meetings to brainstorm ideas for alternative spaces and events.

It is time to clearly formulate curatorial ideas rather than just to display objects, to set off sparks by unexpected cross-cultural juxtapositions (the secret of so many contemporary Los Angeles artists’ appeal), and to combine social beliefs and global consciousness with an eye for purely visual qualities. Happily, next year’s lineup (see next week’s column for details) suggests that some of these priorities are beginning to be met.

Best Home-Grown Exhibitions

This year, the locally curated shows that most fully met the challenges of their own programs were modest affairs, small in scope or theme, or focused on the local scene:

* “Tony DeLap--The House of the Magician: An Installation of Reconstructed Works, 1967-1975” in the Main Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton (Feb. 5-March 13): a respectful survey of large-scale, three-dimensional work and sprightly, lesser-known prints by the celebrated artist from Corona del Mar.

* “Tim Hawkinson” at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University (March 21-April 29): stunningly inventive work by a leading light of the Los Angeles art scene.

* “Faculty/Staff: New Work” at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery (April 5-30): An unusually inclusive approach yielded stimulating work by Young Soon Min, Steve Criqui, Jacci den Hartog, Judie Mamber, Renee Petropoulos and Mara Lonner and made this show a standout.

* “Kate T. Steinitz: Art Into Life Into Art” at the Severin Wunderman Museum (Aug. 1-Oct. 28): a low-key tribute to a gentle wit, who moved in some exalted art circles and made small-scale work offering observations of the passing scene.

* “Lunah Menoh’s Boutique Mystique” at the Laguna Art Museum’s satellite gallery in the South Coast Plaza mall (Sept. 2-Dec. 5): The artist’s sculptural couture flirts with the tradition of shock-apparel in beguiling ways, with unexpected cultural juxtapositions.

* “Urban Artists and the Natural World” at the Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University (Sept. 6-Oct. 7): A congenial group of 17 lesser-known East and West Coast artists approached the theme with wit and fresh visual solutions.

* “Gotta Have It” at the Fullerton Museum Center (through Feb. 19): a wide-ranging, up-close-and-personal view of the stuff some people amass and why they bother to seek it out.

Best Exhibitions

Curated Elsewhere

* “Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans” at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery (Jan. 11-Feb. 12), organized by the Tyler Galleries of the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia: striking examples of how photography can alter and hide the real history of a minority group.

* “Augustus Vincent Tack: Landscape of the Spirit” at the Laguna Art Museum (Feb. 25-May 8), from the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.: thorough documentation of the life and work of an early 20th-Century idealist whose near-abstractions were a means of expressing religious belief.

* “Erika Rothenberg: House of Cards” at the Laguna Art Museum’s satellite gallery in the South Coast Plaza mall (April 1-July 10), organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York: briskly satirical “greeting cards” that say what we often really mean when we send Hallmark’s very best.

* “Commodity Image: Photography, Sculpture, Installation” at the Laguna Art Museum (May 13-July 24), organized by the International Center for Photography, New York: a sharp and spicy look at the ways advertising values have co-opted the way we view the world.

* “August Gay” at the Laguna Art Museum (May 13-July 24), organized by the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art: The kind of solidly researched, decidedly non-blockbuster show we don’t see often enough, about an appealing, little-known regional artist.

* “Celebrating the Life Cycle: Rites of Passage in America” at the Fullerton Museum Center (June 24-Aug. 14), organized by the Balch Institute for Ethnographic Studies in Philadelphia: a simple show with a big heart and an acute awareness of the evolving, cross-cultural ways in which certain Americans mark big moments in their lives.

Most Effective Public Art

With a Message

On July 25, artists Mark Chamberlain and Jerry Burchfield spent the entire day lying in two flower-strewn “graves” alongside Laguna Canyon Road, at the site of the proposed San Joaquin Hills Toll Road, attended by silent, unmoving, black-clad mourners. In “Vigil at the Crossroads,” the atmosphere of utter desolation--a grim tableau like the dark alter ego of the Pageant of the Masters show--served as an eloquent last-minute appeal on behalf of the natural world.

Least Effective Public

Art With a Message

Poster provocateur Robbie Conal’s poster of Sen. Robert Dole and Richard Nixon and his dog, plastered in a few locations in Yorba Linda in May. Hardly anyone seemed to see the posters, and those who did registered bafflement about Conal’s message--or even the identities of the people depicted.

Best Art Hoax

Artist Greg Gibbs impersonated Rory Devine, founder of the TRI gallery in Los Angeles, at a Rancho Santiago College “Art Forum” talk on March 21. Although it was pretty strange that “Devine” couldn’t remember his gallery’s new address, he put on a convincing show--with help from the real Devine, a near look-alike, sitting safely in the audience.

Most Creativity in

a Collection Show

“Too Cool: Assemblage and Finish Fetish in Los Angeles” at the Laguna Art Museum (through Feb. 19): Using only works from the museum’s collection, curator Bolton Colburn freshly juxtaposed two distinctive aesthetics that characterized forward-looking Southern California art of the 1960s.

Ugliest Installation

of a Major Show

“Contemporary Crafts and the Saxe Collection” at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (March 12-June 5), organized by the Toledo Museum of Art from the collection of glass, clay, fiber, metal and wood objects owned by Dorothy and George Saxe of Menlo Park: Marooning 3-D objects--some quite small--on vast, two-tiered platforms made of ugly fiberboard made details hard to see, a strange way to showcase work that is all about sensory appeal.

Most Highly

Specialized New Gallery

Dark’s Art Parlor in Santa Ana, dedicated to “ . . . art of the fantastic, oddities and grotesqueries.”

Biggest Chance Missed

“In the Black,” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center (through Feb. 26), represents a serious effort to represent both widely known and obscure artists making vital work about racial differences. Too bad guest curator Myrella Moses didn’t find a catalogue essayist who could have given the broad subject of “blackness” the discursive treatment it deserves.

Artists We’ve Lost

* Elaine Kennedy, a landscape painter whose warm and caring personality was legion, died in January after a stroke, at 54.

* Florence Arnold, initiator of the annual A Night in Fullerton celebration, died in March at 93, 43 years after she took up hard-edge painting.

* Vic Joachim Smith, Zen-inspired abstract painter, draftsman extraordinaire , passionate conservationist and Cal State Fullerton art professor emeritus, died of cancer in November, at 65.