Art Is in Eye of Beholder at O.C. Center : Culture: Avant-garde shows are raising hackles along with applause.

Just up the road from Rockin Figs Surf Headquarters and Jax Bicycle Center, a former Southern California Edison building has become an unlikely oasis of cutting-edge culture. With avant-garde music, experimental films and outspoken works of art, it’s a community art center that is boldly revising standard notions of what such a place can be.

Not quite 3 months old, the Huntington Beach Art Center at 538 Main St. already has its detractors.

“I never thought they would gather together so much dark and negative-side art all at one time as representing the core of Huntington Beach,” says Don MacAllister, a former mayor whose name is engraved on the center’s list of founding contributors, but who now says he expected its shows to be like the upbeat local painting exhibitions at the city library.

“If it keeps going off into the cutting-edge thing and trying to shock the public, I will not be a supporter of that.”

Controversy over non-traditional arts programming is not unusual in conservative Orange County, long a participant in the national debate over the value of contemporary art and the appropriateness of government support, especially for works that decidedly do not please all the people all the time.

But in these days of tight budgets and county bankruptcy, local leaders could find new reasons to question their support of what observers consider one of Orange County’s most distinctive art venues.

Tonight, the center is expected to be a focus of debate before the City Council. Peter Green, a councilman widely known to oppose taxpayer support of the arts, has asked for a review of the city’s role in funding the center, which operates through a public/private partnership. Green says his concerns are strictly monetary and have nothing to do with programming. Still, his request could begin to crystallize the center’s support and opposition.

Community response to the center has been mixed: negative, puzzled, enthusiastic. Jennie Kihnley, a 24-year-old graduate student from UC Irvine who attended a recent Friday night music program, said she liked the “innovation” and “the grass-roots” quality of the place. Comments in the visitors book at the front desk include: “Very intense and interesting. I really enjoyed it.” “I think this is a noble effort to bring today’s concerns to the Huntington Beach community.” “I didn’t like it all, but I didn’t like all the old masters either.” Some people complained about a lack of “beauty” or “too much depression.” A few begged for paintings of sunsets and surfers.

The city contributes $81,000 of the center’s $400,000 operating budget for 1994-95 (the arts program at the library cited by MacAllister is run by volunteers and costs the city nothing). Most of the center’s money is to come from fund-raisers, grants, ticket sales, class fees, memberships and store sales. Still, MacAllister complains that “money is tight right now” and argues that city funds being spent on the center could be used to “put policemen on the street.”

On the other hand, Councilman Ralph Bauer likes the center just fine. “We gave them a charge to present contemporary art and they did that,” Bauer says. “Contemporary art is always a little bothersome to conventional people. If you’re not happy with the art, maybe you’re not happy with society. Artists are just portraying what they see in the world.”

Naida Osline, the center’s director, takes the controversy in stride.

“When people say they want to broaden the programming, they actually mean I should make it more narrow,” she said in her airy but Spartan office. “People like the word ‘controversial’ because it sounds really sexy. But they need to understand what that means. To create dialogue does not mean two people standing next to each other saying, ‘Isn’t that pretty?’ ”

The center’s first exhibition, “Community Properties,” dealt with such issues as lesbian families, racism, homelessness and the impact of development. However, Osline noted, “the kind of work we’re showing is diverse. For that reason, people shouldn’t focus on any particular work. The next show [‘Veered Science,’ about the impact of science on contemporary life] won’t have so much social content.

“As I used to tell community groups, the center will be everything you always wanted it to be, at least once.”

Indeed, the center already has presented a classic of modern Spanish cinema, an evening of personal stories about Huntington Beach and a talk by crime novelist James Ellroy. Among events scheduled for the summer are a family workshop on circus performance and a jam session for aspiring artists, actors and musicians.

“It’s nice that we can show local talented artists,” says curator Marilu Knode, former assistant curator at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. “But we have to be a springboard for the people in this community to get someplace else. . . . We’re not just about having somebody’s first one-person show when they get out of Golden West College and their second one when they retire. One of my goals is to bring outside people in and local people out.”

The product of a grass-roots effort that began 15 years ago, the center is a partnership between the city--which bought the property in 1988 for $365,000--and the private HBAC Foundation, which raised nearly $800,000 of the $1.1 million needed to renovate the 11,000-square-foot building, now equipped with three galleries, a theater and a shop. (A city loan covered the balance.)

Osline said she modeled the center on aspects of various art institutions. Its “more experimental, artist-driven energy” comes from artist-run alternative spaces like Highways in Santa Monica and Artists Space in New York, she said, while art museums provided the example of curator-driven exhibitions and private-sector support groups.

Her staff of six includes two well-connected artists, a community activist and an art historian. Education director Tyler Stallings combines a stellar art background--he holds a master of arts degree from the prestigious California School of the Arts--with community arts experience. As a former public arts assistant for the city of Los Angeles, working with private developers obliged to donate 1% of new construction costs for artworks, he has firsthand experience in dispelling lay people’s distrust of contemporary art.

Special-events coordinator and store manager Pat Gomez is a Cal State Fullerton master of arts graduate who says she has experienced “both extremes” of the art world, from chairing a massive exhibition of alternative work in Los Angeles to toiling at commercial galleries in Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach, where “people would come in with pillows to see what matched [the art].”

Programs coordinator Randy Pesqueira says that while working as an AIDS community activist, he discovered that Orange County can boast “a very rich community of people who aren’t white conservatives.” Along with Osline, he spent six years explaining the yet-unopened center’s focus to community groups, showing up at regularly at Kiwanis Club meetings and pancake breakfasts.

“Huntington Beach is not a backwater town,” says Philip Mosbo, vice chairman of the Allied Arts Board, the center’s advisory committee. “People are prepared to support the facility whether or not they agree with everything it does. . . . To suggest that art [must] be pretty is to put one’s head in the sand and ignore that a lot of the value of art is its ability to communicate strong feeling.”

“When people don’t understand something,” said Allied Arts Board chair Anna Friesen, “their first response is fear and anger. People who aren’t regularly exposed to the arts--all their fears are brought forth.

“It’s up to the art center to have a broader view. . . . [Seeing more adventurous work] may help a seascape painter use a brighter shade of blue. It can only lead to better art. Just relax and enjoy and participate, and it will prove a good thing for the city.”

Foundation member Diana Casey emphasizes the need to maintain the city’s role in the center because “the big corporations will support such a partnership more than completely private [entities]. They feel more security” when the city is involved.

Staff at other community arts centers in the county sounded happy to hear of the Huntington Beach center’s efforts, despite differences in the scope and nature of their own programming.

Although the mission of the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton includes historical and craft shows as well as contemporary art, “there’s certainly nothing keeping us from doing a real challenging, cutting-edge-type show here,” said exhibitions coordinator John Karwin. “There’s plenty of room for everybody. Marilu and Naida can only push everyone else to try a little harder.”