‘Eye Tattoo’ Only Goes Skin-Deep : Art review: Even though the Laguna show presents a plethora of works, it lacks insight regarding their cultural significance.

It must have sounded like a can’t-miss idea, the perfect pop-culture sequel to “Kustom Kulture,” the custom car and comic book extravaganza the Laguna Art Museum mounted two summers ago. But “Eye Tattooed America,” at the museum through Oct. 8, is a disappointment on several counts.

Curated by tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy for Ann Nathan Gallery in Chicago, the show is as dense and rambling as a full-body tattoo. Included are sheets of colored tattoo designs (“flash”) dating back to the 1930s, historical and modern photos of tattooed people, and a plethora of recent works of art that incorporate tattoo-like designs.

Crowded into the lower level gallery, these items seem to have been assembled on the more-is-more principle. Any sense of the evolution and cultural significance of tattoos--the starting point of a thoughtful show--is buried under an avalanche of repetitive imagery.

Rather than selecting and annotating works in a way that would highlight the longstanding fascination and subtle transformations of tattoo subject matter, Hardy chose to emphasize latter-day interpretations in traditional art media. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, the old tattoo designs--sappy, silly, mock-scary motifs rendered with earnest awkwardness--tend to be much more compelling and culturally revealing than the art.

Although the Laguna Beach version of the show includes a few photographs and implements related to tattooing traditions in indigenous Pacific cultures, the culture of the tattoo in American lowlife--much more to the point of “Eye Tattoo”--remains curiously unexamined in the galleries.

Viewers also are left to piece together the way tattoos incorporated sources as diverse as Hindu and Buddhist art (those ubiquitous decorative flames) and Spanish colonial religious imagery (roses, hearts, skulls) with such stock American objects as flags, eagles and the female figure of liberty.

As a stylized form of visual expression intimately related to popular beliefs and superstitions, tattooing was ripe for cultivation by someone with the eclectic background of “Sailor Jerry” Collins.

A self-taught tattoo artist, former merchant seaman and dabbler in Asian philosophy, he adapted the aloof Hindu god Shiva into a sort of cosmic Lazy Susan, holding an array of familiar Western talismans of pleasure, power and temptation in its many arms.

This design dates from about 1960, when Eastern thought was popular in the West, mostly among hipsters. Did Collins have Beat connections? Was there any link between him and the underground art scene of the day? Too bad we don’t get to know his world--or that of any of the other tattoo specialists sampled in the show.

Recalling sailors’ exotic ports of call and exaggeratedly macho self-image, classic tattoos also reflect the sentimental and stereotyped view of women and other cultures at the heart of the carnival sideshow. Yet only a few of the artists in the exhibition put a clear personal spin on the All-American jumble of lust, fear, piety and xenophobia lurking just under the surface of tattoo designs.

Alexis Smith’s silk-screened and painted tie--a respectable item of apparel at odds with the raffish tattoo world--turns the siren of countless tattoo images into a tough cookie with a ‘40s pageboy surrounded by the emblems of her trade: an anchor, booze and a broken heart.

Ed Pashke’s images of ghostly or coolly affectless heads transform the familiar external markings into curiously psychological emblems. Terry Allen and William T. Wiley collaborate on an appropriately sailor-themed piece (“After the Mast”) that transforms the demons of Hardy’s own flash designs into equivalents of the mythical beasts lurking at the edges of medieval maps of the known world.

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George Klauba’s incorporation of vintage photographs of tattooed people and simple, isolated tattoo images have a faux-innocent, nostalgic appeal, while Tim Woodruff turns the scruffy side of tattoo imagery upside down with meticulous paintings of bejeweled dagger-stabbed hearts and roses bathed in the soft lighting of a Victorian still life.

Flash designs drawn by Thompaul Devita on 142 small pieces of wood offer a postmodern romp through styles old and new, with personal interpretations of traditional themes and simple abstract patterns akin to tribal markings or certain trendy forms of contemporary art.

But on the whole, the major reaction the show induces is eye-strain. While some otherwise worthy works (such as Manuel Ocampo’s “Deux Ex Machina” and Richard Shaw’s collage, “Good-Bye Old Pal”) stretch the tattoo connection to the breaking point, a numbing majority are narrowly focused cult items, hardly of compelling interest in the context of contemporary art.

As we saw in “Kustom Kulture,” the controlling aesthetic vision and lively intellectual rigor vital to any seriously conceived art exhibition suffer when the curator is a die-hard fan unable or unwilling to view the subject from an analytical distance.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a visual form that gains much of its odd allure by being engraved directly on the soft and curving surfaces of the body looks unremarkable on a flat stretch of paper, wood or Masonite. In the end, the lingering fascination of this would-be crowd-pleaser of a show lies in its most carnival-like aspect: the photographs of extensively tattooed individuals, whose bodies are testimony to the impulse of a moment and the ingrained values of generations.

* “Eye Tattooed America,” through Oct. 8 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission: $5 adults, $4 senior citizens and students, children under 12 free. (714) 494-8971.